The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region

by Marcie Cohen Ferris

Overview

In The Edible South, Marcie Cohen Ferris presents food as a new way to chronicle the American South's larger history. Ferris tells a richly illustrated story of southern food and the struggles of whites, blacks, Native Americans, and other people of the region to control the nourishment of their bodies and minds, livelihoods, lands, and citizenship. The experience of food serves as an evocative lens onto colonial settlements and antebellum plantations, New South cities and civil rights-era lunch counters, chronic hunger and agricultural reform, counterculture communes and iconic restaurants as Ferris reveals how food—as cuisine and as commodity—has expressed and shaped southern identity to the present day.

The region in which European settlers were greeted with unimaginable natural abundance was simultaneously the place where enslaved Africans vigilantly preserved cultural memory in cuisine and Native Americans held tight to kinship and food traditions despite mass expulsions. Southern food, Ferris argues, is intimately connected to the politics of power. The contradiction between the realities of fulsomeness and deprivation, privilege and poverty, in southern history resonates in the region's food traditions, both beloved and maligned.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469629957
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	08/01/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	496
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Marcie Cohen Ferris, professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is author of Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South.

Table of Contents

Preface: I Look for Food in Everything vii

Introduction 1

Part I Early South-Plantation South 7

1 Outsiders: Travelers and Newcomers Encounter the Early South 9

2 Insiders: Culinary Codes of the Plantation Household 23

3 I Will Eat Some for You: Food Voices of Northern-Born Governesses in the Plantation South 34

4 An Embattled Table: The Language of Food in the Civil War South 48

5 Culinary Testimony: African Americans and the Collective Memory of a Nineteenth-Century South 71

6 The Reconstructed Table 85

Part II New South 95

7 The Shifting Soil of Southern Agriculture and the Undermining of the Southern Diet 97

8 Home Economics and Domestic Science Come to the Southern Table 109

9 The Southern "Dietaries": Food Field Studies in Alabama and Eastern Virginia 124

10 Reforming the Southern Diet One Student at a Time: The Mountain South and the Lowcountry 137

11 Agricultural Reform Comes Home 151

12 The Deepest Reality of Life: Southern Sociology, the WPA, and Food in the New South 166

13 Branding the Edible New South 188

14 A Journey Back in Time: Food and Tourism in the New South 213

Part III Modern South 243

15 I'm Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table: Southern Food and the Civil Rights Movement 245

16 Culinary Landmarks of "The Struggle" 266

17 A Hungry South 285

18 A Food Counterculture, Southern-Style 301

19 New Southern Cuisine 315

Conclusion 333

Notes 335

Bibliography 401

Index 445

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

In this intimate and highly engaging book, Marcie Cohen Ferris invites the reader both to celebrate the particularly distinctive and deeply felt food practices of the American South and to look beneath the moonlight and molasses myths. She demonstrates that southern foodways have straddled a tangle of contradictions—particularly the harsh dynamics of racism, sexism, class struggle, and ecological exploitation that have produced a history that is both pastoral and pathological. But unlike most gothic tales, Ferris sees a progressive synthesis emerging out of the complexity of southern food culture.—Warren Belasco, University of Maryland, Baltimore County



The Edible South will garner readers who want to understand class and power through food in a culture. The need for this comprehensive and ambitious account of southern food—including the lesser known stories of the countercultural sixties and seventies in the South—has grown only more pressing. Ferris listens carefully to the whole southern food story.—Elizabeth S. Engelhardt, University of Texas at Austin



The best scholarship bridges gaps between academic and popular writing, amplifying primary source research with insightful commentary and approachable analysis. In this genre-defining work of history told through foodways, Marcie Cohen Ferris meets that charge, escorting readers from Virginia, where bread riots erupted in the 1860s, to Arkansas, where agricultural communes emerged in the 1970s. To understand how and why the South defines itself in the kitchen and at table, start here.—John T. Edge, series editor, Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People, and Place

Editorial Reviews

Extensively researched, The Edible South takes a new perspective on the American region and its rich, tumultuous history.—A Saveur September 2014 Best Food and Drink Release



Not only does Ferris pinpoint and chronicle evocative moments throughout the South's larger history, but she manages to eloquently express how this history shaped southern cuisine and, to a greater extent, southern identity." —Oxford American



For anyone wishing to pursue a study of the South through comestibles, [The Edible South] is probably the best place to start. . . . I implore you: Dig in!" —Southern Register



This is a landmark study, thoroughly researched, clearly conveyed, and packed with illustrations. Ferris provides scholars and general readers much to savor."—American Historical Review



In this colorful and well-researched history, [Ferris] shows persuasively how food has shaped and nourished Southern identity.—Kirkus



Ferris has exhaustively traced the origins of southern cooking. . . . [She] delves into the South's most significant foods. . . [and] performs a particularly important job by painstakingly explaining just how slave culture and subsequent Jim Crow laws and segregation made southern cooking unique.—Booklist



A weighty, well-researched study of what are nowadays called 'foodways.'" —Colman Andrews, The Wall Street Journal



Impressive." —Daily Beast



A monumental book, which examines the relationship between Southern culture and cuisine at watershed moments in the region's history." —Charleston Post and Courier



Everything you need to know about a cherished but endangered foodway." — The Pilot

From the Publisher

2014-06-23
Food serves as a useful lens for examining race, economics, gender and class in the South, from plantation days to the present.In this authoritative social history, Ferris (American Studies/Univ. of North Carolina;Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South, 2005) draws on a rich trove of material, including oral histories, journals, sketchbooks, letters and diaries, as well as cookbooks and published scholarship. In the 19th century, New England–born women, working in the South as governesses, described in detail new culinary experiences: breakfasts featuring several kinds of breads, succotash, hominy and ham; desserts of stewed cherries; peaches finely sliced and served with cream. In letters home, they became “ethnographers of a sort, documenting and critiquing southern society, manners, food, and institutions, including slavery.” One governess, seeing slaves eating their owners’ leftovers, admitted uncomfortably, “I haven’t learned yet how to give my leavings with a good grace.” After the Civil War, plantation owners, unable to farm without slaves, rented land to tenant farmers and sharecroppers, insisting, though, that they grow only cotton or tobacco, profitable cash crops. Forbidden to raise vegetables, the farmers and their families subsisted on a diet of cornmeal, salt pork, beans and molasses, which caused severe malnutrition. Federal relief programs, home economics classes in schools and the advent of industrial farming slowly revived agriculture. By the 1940s, fashioning itself as a tourist destination, the South looked back nostalgically to its “rich culinary heritage,” luring visitors with the attractions of “southern hospitality, culinary artistry, authenticity, and antiquity.” Food was also central to civil rights protests in the 1960s, with sit-ins often staged at restaurants and lunch counters. Ferris sees a true transformation today: Southern cooking, influenced by cosmopolitan chefs with strong ties to the region, revives the use of fresh, local produce from small-scale farms.In this colorful and well-researched history, the author shows persuasively how food has shaped and nourished Southern identity.

Kirkus Reviews