Southern Foodways in the Classroom and Beyond

Since 2014, I have taught a seminar at the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture on the topic of Southern Foodways and Culture. I construct the course on the premise that "the food was there"—or its absence was painfully felt—in every monumental or mundane moment in Southern history, and it still is (or isn't). That is, the food is a way in to those moments, an opportunity to interrogate the viscerality of hunger and of gluttony, of want and excess, of the profound and the profane. Increasingly, students come to a class "about food" (more accurately, with food as its organizing framework) not because they like to eat or assume the class will be a piece of cake/easy as pie (pardon the pun), but because they understand that such a class can challenge and complicate entrenched readings of the food and its attendant people, processes, and places. In the context of the US South, we can critique persistent attachments to "tradition" and "authenticity" by considering how (some) Southerners mobilize (some) foodways to reinforce their ideas of those things. We can consider what, if anything, is "new" about the contemporary US South, and whether and how and to what degree that newness is indicated in the foods people do or don't eat/grow/cook/sell/waste, or how and where and when they do or do not eat/grow/cook/sell/waste them.

Thus, it is my intention with this essay to explore how teaching and studying Southern foodways can effectively challenge outdated myths and "feel-good celebrations" of the South and its past and present foodways, farmers, cooks, and eaters. I argue a deeply engaged and critical approach to Southern foodways can serve to teach students and the broader public to connect seemingly banal acts of growing, preparing, and consuming food with more trenchant social processes and problems. As I and other scholars of food have argued, food studies in general, and Southern foodways scholarship in particular, need not be about the food itself, but rather about what food and its related processes can teach us about what people care about, what they fear, and how they construct meanings about places, people, and events (Passidomo, "Going 'Beyond Food'" 90). This understanding is fundamental to the pedagogical approach taken by many of us who teach and conduct research about Southern foodways.

What follows is a demonstration of one pedagogical approach and its outcomes. This demonstration is, in part, a response to ongoing and fairly specific critiques that question the value of Southern foodways scholarship (and whether it is even scholarship). In the summer of 2016, the literary and Southern Studies scholars Scott Romine and Jon Smith circulated a call for papers for a potential edited volume: Against Cornbread Nationalism: How Foodways Partisans Misrepresent the South. The CFP sought original scholarly contributions that would critically engage with the notion and practice of Southern "foodways scholarship" (scare quotes in original). The call credits (and critiques) that "scholarship" with becoming the "public face of Southern Studies" through its production of a "seemingly endless stream of celebratory barbecue documentaries, popular books like the Cornbread Nation series, cookbooks, and regular essays in such venues as Garden&Gun, the Oxford American, and Bitter Southerner." The call also notes the increasing prominence of foodways in "the curricula and day-today operations of university-based 'southern studies' centers."

The naming and framing of the call, Against Cornbread Nationalism, resonated among those of us who work, teach, and learn at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture (CSSC) at the University of Mississippi as a direct reaction to the work of the Center and its affiliation with the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA), a nonprofit organization housed within the CSSC. The SFA documents, studies, and explores the diverse food cultures of the changing American South through oral history, film, photography, and other documentary and storytelling work; through staging symposia; and through academic partnerships facilitated through its relationship with the CSSC. Smith and Romine's proposed title, Against Cornbread Nationalism, is a clear reference to the seven-volume...