Originally published in the May 14, 2014, issue
By Dallas Duncan
John T. Edge, founder and director of
Southern Foodways Alliance, has a passion for preserving Southern food – but
not as jams or pickles.
Instead, his organization preserves
Southern food through oral histories, books and documentaries that tell stories
not just about food, but the culture that surrounds and inspires it.
“At our core we study Southern food
culture and we do oral history work, so we go out in the field and interview
‘old guard’ row crop farmers or oystermen still tonging the Apalachicola Bay,”
Edge said. “Along the way, by way of those interviews, by way of films we make,
we’re creating this crazy quilt portrait of the South through food.”
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| John T. Edge, founder and director of Southern Foodways Alliance, addresses the audience at a book release event on May 2, 2014, at the Atlanta History Center. SFA partners with the University of Georgia Press to publish two book series on food and the best of Southern foodwriting. Photo by Dallas Duncan |
Now a Mississippi resident, where SFA is
based, Edge visited his home state on May 2 to promote the group’s two book
series published through the University of Georgia Press.
A more scholarly series, Southern
Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People and Place, is designed to teach
students how to think and study about the South through food.
“People are not intimidated by a
scholarly book on food. I know food; I eat it all the time,” said Pat Allen,
acquisitions editor for UGA Press. “It’s a much more approachable kind of
scholarship.”
The second series, Cornbread Nation, looks
not just at important historic figures, but at their cultures and how those
influenced history, he said.
“Cornbread Nation … is kind of a reader
that’s done every two years,” Allen said. “Every volume has a guest editor who
goes through the previous two years and finds the best writing about Southern
foodways. It might be a book about oyster farmers in Apalachicola to
African-American funeral food, etc. It’s a really lively thing.”
Like studying cultural implications of
music or literature, Edge believes food can help explain “complex, multifaceted
stories” to understand the South.
Take the story of the Allman Brothers
and the H&H Café, for instance.
“The H&H was run by a woman named
Mama Louise Hudson. Mama Louise had been there since the 1950s. … She’s
African-American, mostly African-American clientele,” Edge said. “[The Allman
Brothers] are country boys from Florida whose mama cooked them fried chicken
and collard greens, sweet potatoes and creamed corn and they still craved that
food.”
The band showed up at Hudson’s back door
asking to buy a plate to share. She told them she was going to feed all four of
them, Edge said, and a lasting relationship ensued. On the album Idlewild South, the band includes her in
the credits: “Vittles: Louise.”
“They became fast friends, devoted to
one another. … She traveled with them. They got a jumbo jet, they’re flying
across the country and Mama Louise is there not only cooking for them, but part
of their family,” Edge said.
He tells the story not just to talk
about Macon icons, but to share an example of how a story based on food says a
lot more than how good Hudson’s fried chicken was.
“That story is a way to talk about
black-white relations, it’s a way to talk about black women as proxy mothers to
working class white kids, it’s a way to talk about common diet between black
and white,” he said. “It’s really to say if you think about what farmers raise
and what Southerners take pride in eating, that’s our great common bond.”
And whether they realize it or not,
everyone comes from a food culture, Allen said.
“It’s an unfamiliar area for most
people,” Allen said. “We think of food as such a part of our environment, we
don’t really think about it representing part of our culture and our history
and why Southerners eat the way they do.”
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