The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region by Marcie Cohen Ferris (review)

In The Edible South, Marcie Cohen Ferris uses food as a historical lens into the politics and culture of the South. By looking at the cultural and social meaning and influence of food, she sets out to deepen our understanding of Southern history. In a broad sweep from the early plantation South to contemporary Southern cuisine, Ferris tells stories of foodstuffs and cuisines, of food reformers, slaves and planters, sharecroppers and landowners, civil rights activists, restaurant owners and patrons, as well as cooks. Her central argument is that the diets of Southerners, over the centuries influenced by race, gender, and class, shaped Southern life and power relations as well as a distinct understanding of the South.

Ferris’s book is divided in three parts: Part I explores the food history of the plantation South, looking at personal papers, cookbooks, and slave narratives of planters, slaves, and Northerners traveling through the South. Here, Ferris takes up contradictions that have characterized the South in the eyes of historical actors as well as historians: the sharp contrast and coexistence of abundance and scarcity, of the excesses of planters’ diets and the brutal poverty of slaves as well as Civil War deprivations.

Part II examines the New South by discussing the lives and diets of sharecroppers, interventions of Progressive home economists, Works Progress Administration portraits of Southern foodways, and the dynamics of branding Southern food that fueled (culinary) tourism and deepened an understanding of the South as a distinct region. Malnutrition and hunger, as Ferris shows, were the results of racism as well as an industrialized agriculture that shaped black and poor white people’s access to food.

Part III highlights the role food played in the civil rights movement and traces the distinct shape of the Southern food counterculture. Exploring the “culinary landmarks” of the civil rights struggle as well as the early history of food cooperatives, this part discusses the importance of food in claiming emancipation and citizenship. Moreover, it continues the story of Southern cuisine into the present, showing how the rich historical roots and traditions of Southern foodways merged with food reform movements to create a Southern version of New Cuisine.

Throughout the book, Ferris convincingly demonstrates the territoriality of food politics. That is, she shows how food shaped the South, Southern identity, and the minds and bodies of Southerners. The book is well researched and integrates a wide array of food scholarship. Ferris uses an incredible range of sources and introduces her readers to Southern foodstuffs, historical actors, and institutions. While the historical narratives that she deploys might be familiar to her readers, these sources and stories form the core strength of the book, vividly illustrating the importance of food to practices of identity and exclusion. However, because of the sheer amount of sources, they are oftentimes used rather descriptively and sometimes are included without comment. At times, the reader wishes for a closer and longer look at the sources to make visible the complexity and contradictions that characterize history. Then again, this smoothly written overview of the rich and diverse topics of Southern food history makes The Edible South more easily accessible to a broader audience than other scholarly books. Thus, this book is excellent in convincing its readers of the importance of food in writing and understanding history.