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.