Southern Cultures: The Special Issue on Food: Volume 18: Number 2 – Summer 2012 Issue

By Harry L. Watson

In the Spring 2012 issue of Southern Cultures…

Guest editor Marcie Cohen Ferris brings together some of the best new writing on Southern food for the Summer 2012 issue of Southern Cultures , which features an interview with TREME writer Lolis Elie and Ferris's own retrospective on Southern sociology, the WPA, and Food in the New South. The Food issue includes Rebecca Sharpless on Southern women and rural food supplies, Bernard Herman on Theodore Peed's Turtle Party, Will Sexton's "Boomtown Rabbits: The Rabbit Market in Chatham County, North Carolina," Courtney Lewis on how the "Case of the Wild Onions" paved the way for Cherokee rights, poetry by Michael Chitwood, and much more.

Southern Cultures is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, winter) by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Release date: May 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780807837634

Book preview

front porch

Will Sexton’s Boomtown Rabbits reveals a World War I–era call for Chatham County, famous for its juicy rabbits, to open its own rabbit canning factory as a splendid war measure in the conservation of food. U.S. Food Administration World War I poster, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

Southern food is big news these days. In the past year or so, the New York Times has printed major features lauding recovered southern food traditions based on heritage seeds and breeds, celebrity chefs, and the national rage for locally grown food, artfully prepared. Every neighborhood you visit now boasts its own farmer’s market and community garden, each specializing in the freshest organic produce, straight from the nearest earth. In Atlanta, the New South’s famously practical capital, Your Dekalb Farmers Market calls itself A World Market and dedicates itself to a well-fed planet with infinite food variety and sustainable international agriculture. The webpage of the South Carolina Department of Agriculture features a list of 347 state eateries purveying locally grown foods, from Charleston’s finest to the lunchrooms of the Anderson School District Number 5. Far beyond the famous shrines of Charleston and New Orleans, moreover, cities like Nashville and Birmingham boast about the local ingredients that appear in the updated versions of southern classics offered by their best restaurants. The American food revolution launched by trailblazers like Julia Child has shifted from imported tastes to updated American classics or to new combinations of traditional offerings. Nowhere is this plainer than the modern South, where the locavore movement is in full swing, evolving as it gathers speed and promising succulent benefits to every table, from the simple to the sumptuous.

But there’s another side to the story that doesn’t always make it to the glossy pages. As I write, a research newsletter has arrived with a cute-looking, green-eyed pig on the cover. The headline reads, North Carolina’s hog farming industry is one of the largest in the nation. Is it also making people sick? This is a longstanding concern. In the early twentieth century, when all those tasty old-fashioned recipes reigned supreme, the traditional South was at least as infamous for nutritional diseases like rickets and pellagra as for segregation and poverty. Those ailments are mostly gone by now, but others have taken their places. As long ago as 1962, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta placed most of the old Confederacy in America’s stroke belt, and it’s still there. In 2011, the CDC identified a diabetes belt that largely overlapped with the older stroke belt. And you get three guesses about the location of America’s obesity and heart disease belts. Small wonder that southern food celebrity Paula Deen, who likes to substitute a glazed doughnut for a hamburger bun, recently announced that she too had developed type 2 diabetes, and would advertise medications for it on television. Or that southern icons from Colonel Sanders to Aunt Jemima have never been known for hawking carrot sticks.

The scientists who labeled these belts did not have to point out (but they did anyway) that the South’s signature diseases are still tied to enduring regional scourges like poverty, ignorance, and a history of racial discrimination. Paradoxically, however, the South’s dietary problems no longer stem from scarcity per se, but from an abundance of unhealthy food. And though southerners are the most overweight Americans, they also dominate a food insecurity belt that overlaps with all the belts based on overconsumption.

It’s sometimes said that southerners’ nutritional problems come from old-fashioned eating habits and fatal components like fatback and lard, blended into everything from greens to hot biscuits. More careful observers know that modern poverty, which leaves many families juggling multiple jobs at odd hours and low wages, steers southerners to foods that are cheap, easy, and quick, and away from painstaking homemade recipes like Mama’s lemon meringue pie. Certainly a revived southern passion for the newest and the freshest is long overdue, but most of us know that much of it depends on an uneven wave of affluence that has transformed certain favored cities and neighborhoods while leaving others only slightly affected. There’s a big house side to the foodie South, but fortunately for the rest of us, there is also a populist side anchored in small truck farms, farmer’s markets, and traditional foodways that gets less attention in the New York Times. The question is, can a populist food revolution ever be strong enough to wipe out those belts? Only time will tell.

This issue of Southern Cultures is once again devoted to southern food, and we are deeply grateful to guest editor Marcie Cohen Ferris for assembling the choicest authors and essays for our repast. They explore multiple sides of the southern food world, mostly from that populist perspective. Ferris herself brings us a historical survey that explores how New Deal reformers mobilized traditional regional foodways to fight the subsistence crisis of the Great Depression. Rebecca Sharpless expands on this theme to show how rural southern women have long supplied urban cooks with homegrown or home-cooked food, ranging from collards to chickens to pies. An element of class tension inevitably emerged, she finds, when the hard work of a rural housewife could go unrewarded by a fickle urban hostess. In a similar historical vein, Will Sexton tells us that there was once a thriving market for the rabbits of Chatham County, North Carolina, that stretched from nearby Raleigh to the high-style tables of New York restaurants. Chatham was just remote enough that its old fields spawned thousands of cottontails in the late nineteenth century, but just close enough to urban markets and railheads to send thousands of bunnies to plates all up the eastern seaboard, most of them caught by boys with simple traps or even by hand. But tastes changed along with regulations and the times, and the great Chatham rabbit boom petered out after World War I. Today, where rabbits once crowded trains by the carload, it is probably impossible to find a stewpot rabbit for sale anywhere in Chatham County.

Three shorter pieces highlight local eating traditions. Folklorist Bernie Herman takes us to Theodore Peed’s great annual feast on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, a showcase for the bounty of local fields, waters, and marshes. Mr. Peed’s groaning board features everything from mac and cheese to fried marsh hens, but the pièce de résistance is always his fried, hand-caught snapping turtle. Bernie reports no missing fingers, but what is he hiding? Courtney Lewis takes us from there to the Smoky Mountain fastness still held by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, where Cherokee citizens sustainably harvested ramps for centuries until the National Park Service suddenly decided that the prized wild onion was an endangered species. The resulting trial not only struck a blow for traditional foodways, but has implications for enlarging the recognized boundaries of the Qualla Boundary. Sara B. Franklin favors us with an interview of New Orleans food writer Lolis Eric Elie, who has bragged on Louisiana cooking forever and now serves as a story editor on Treme, the HBO television series on the aftermath of Katrina.

We have two desserts. The first is Shannon Harvey’s photo essay on the community kitchen of Vimala Rajendran, a perfect representative of the Newest South, who fed Indian food to all comers from her home in Chapel Hill for thirteen years before trading it all for her own restaurant in 2010. Anyone can see in the faces of Vimala and her guests that cooking is her life and soul, second only to the joy of assembling a happy crowd of friends. Vimala and Theodore Peed have never met, but the same spirit moves them both. And we top the issue off with a paean to chocolate pie and a cook who made it, sung in the loving words of our poetry editor, Michael Chitwood. All in all, it’s a rich repast. Wash your hands, tuck in your napkin, and read your fill.

But speaking of flavors, I need to close with a bittersweet message to all the friends of Southern Cultures’s institutional host, the Center for the Study of the American South. It has been my great honor to direct the Center for the past thirteen years. I’m grateful for every one of them, and for the indispensable efforts of magnificent staff members, administrators, and supporters. Part of me wants to stay forever, but I also have obligations in the world of southern and American history that I’ve neglected for years and can’t put off any longer. And it’s also time to give the Center a fresh dose of energy and imagination. With much reluctance then, I have decided to step down as Center Director, effective July 1, 2012, and return to fulltime teaching and writing in the UNC History Department.

But I will continue to serve as editor of Southern Cultures with my friend and colleague Jocelyn Neal, and our incomparable editors, Dave Shaw and Ayse Erginer. Readers of the journal should not notice any difference. The selection of a new Director will happen very soon, and we will bring you that news as soon as we can.

HARRY L. WATSON, Editor

ESSAY

The Deepest Reality of Life

Southern Sociology, the WPA, and Food in the New South

by Marcie Cohen Ferris

Thus, the way of the South, as the way of culture, has also been the way of history and the way of America.—Howard W. Odum¹

Roy Stryker oversaw the Farm Security Administration photo-documentary project in Washington, D.C., in 1939, and when serendipity brought Dorothea Lange to D.C. for a couple of weeks, he was eager to convince her to work with sociologists Margaret Jarman Hagood and Harriet Herring in North Carolina. Within the month, Lange was on a train bound for North Carolina. Gordonton, 1939, photographed by Dorothea Lange, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

A vast network of reform spread across the South in the first decades of the twentieth century as an army of progressive southerners, white and black, struggled to bring social justice, public health programs, improved diet, Prohibition, scientific agriculture, and education to the South. Private and public battles were waged between the southern way of life and a vision of a more ordered, cohesive, and humanitarian South. New domestic science departments, agriculture experiment stations, home and farm extension programs, industrial colleges, settlement schools, and university departments symbolized a cautiously changing South, but one still struggling under the chokehold that race and class had on the region. High rates of tenancy and sharecropping, unhealthy work environments in textile mills, and relentless poverty made the South a virtual laboratory to examine illiteracy, public health issues, and substandard living conditions in rural America. Food provides a window on to this transitional time as southerners struggled to embrace modernity. The following essay explores one moment in this historical sweep: the 1920s to 1940s New South era of social science research and New Deal programs that identified southern diet and southern cookery—two distinctly different views of the region’s food—as both the South’s greatest problem and most beloved treasure.²

SOUTHERN SOCIOLOGISTS AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF NUTRITION

In late February 1920, Columbia-trained sociologist Howard Odum, a native of Georgia, arrived at the University of North Carolina, where he founded the university’s and the South’s first Department of Sociology and School of Public Welfare. As North Carolina’s extension service and home demonstration agents traveled county to county to preach the gospel of vegetable gardens and diversified, small-scale agriculture in the 1920s and ’30s, Odum and his colleagues introduced the discipline of regional sociology, which brought the tools of social science to address contemporary problems. He joined documentarians, government officials, public health physicians, revenuers, reformers, scholars, and statisticians, who turned their attention to the Depression-era South and responded to President Franklin Roosevelt’s infamous designation of the region as the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem.³

Odum’s new Institute for Research in Social Science (IRSS), founded in 1924, assembled a diverse group of scholars, including UNC-trained sociologists Rupert Vance and Arthur Raper, and Guy B. Johnson, who studied black folk culture in the South. In his massive ethnography of the South, Southern Regions of the United States (1936), Odum identified diet and folkways as important aspects of regional culture. He described two contrasting pictures of the culinary South, a world of plenty and a world of deprivation: One portrays the excellence of southern cooking with its contributions to the art of living; the other the subsistence diet of the masses of marginal folk, commonly ascribed as a major factor in deficiencies of vitality and health. Odum connected the substandard diet of the masses to the South’s problems in health, politics, race relations, and leadership and argued that knowledge of regional folk culture was essential to charting a progressive future for the South. These issues, and more, were at