Cookbooks, according to John T. Edge of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi, don't have much to say about history. And history doesn't have much to say about food.
Marcie Cohen Ferris is dedicated to exploring the richly detailed connection between them.
"Not infrequently, Southern food now unlocks the rusty gates of race and class, age and sex," wrote Southern Foodways Alliance founder John Egerton in his 1987 book Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History. "On such occasions, a place at the table is like a ringside seat at the historical and ongoing drama of life in the region."
A Blytheville native (and admirer of Egerton, who died in 2013), Ferris is a professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research and teaching interests include the foodways and material culture of the American South.
Toting a copy of her 2014 book The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region, she took the stage at Little Rock's Ron Robinson Theater on Wednesday to discuss how food is a way to chronicle the American South's history and identity.
A packed house at the event, co-hosted by the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies and the Clinton School of Public Service, came away with an understanding of the connection between Southern food and the politics of power from the colonial period to the present.
"We eat this history every day," Ferris said, indicating a slide displaying a scrumptious-looking plate filled with roasted sweet potatoes, butter beans, cornbread, and ham.
But huge helpings, deep frying, sugary tea and high calorie content have caused Southern food to become untethered from the history and culture of the region, she says. "Thanks to the romanticizing of Southern cooking, our iconic food is almost unrecognizable." She calls it "branding Dixie."
The South's real food is rooted in regions and seasons, she explains. "Greens, ramps, butterbeans, oysters, shrimp, cured ham, stone-ground grits, peanuts, rice, sweet potatoes--these are the foods that form a distinctive, innovative cuisine that is grounded in the world of local agrarian traditions of soil, waters, region, season, flora and fauna and the influence of global cultures."
Southern culture, she adds, is derived from many cultures in the crucible of race. Along with beauty and richness, Southern food embodies the memory of racial and class trauma, land loss, poverty, and disease.
"The contradiction between the realities of plenty and deprivation, of privilege and poverty in Southern history resonates in the region's food traditions," says the author on the UNC Press Blog.
Much of what is known about the antebellum South, at least as far as food is concerned, has been gleaned from letters sent home by outsiders such as young Northern white women hired as governesses by plantation owners in the 1850s, Ferris says. The letters often referred to the pageantry and abundance of food on the tables of the wealthy. A Swedish travel writer named Fredrika Bremer, who visited Georgia in May of 1850, referred to an elaborate meal as "one incessant bustle of serving."
Contrast this image with the fare of slaves on those plantations, which centered on cornmeal, fatback, molasses and sweet potatoes. This diet changed little throughout the next century, when "meat, meal and molasses" were the staples of tenant farmers and sharecroppers of the 1930s. This is a cycle of food insecurity, Ferris says, exemplified now by fast, cheap, low-nutrition food that is among the causes of obesity among the poor.
But she's heartened by the emergence of New South cooking exemplified in the 1980s in Northwest Arkansas by Crescent Dragonwagon and by South Carolina's Nathalie Dupree with an emphasis on good-tasting, affordable food made from traditional ingredients. And she lauds the work of newcomers such as Jack and Corri Sundell at Little Rock's Root Cafe, which focuses on locally grown food.
"Americans are starting to eat better," Ferris says. "Progress and resistance to change do constant battle. But there's a strong interest in how we understand our culture through food, and in rebuilding local sustainable food systems."
Editorial on 08/09/2015