The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South

PART 2 PEOPLE AND COMMUNITIES

in this section, we bring individual and community voices into the conversation. Beth Latshaw, Justin Nystrom, Rayna Green, and Tom Hanchett employ quantitative and qualitative social science survey methods, rigorous oral history project design, labor analyses, demographic observations ,and close readings of festivals and celebrations to rethink food studies as community studies. Read together, they make a case that new understandings emerge from a careful analysis of food communities in local and regional settings. Most recent southern studies anthologies begin with explorations of how the South used to be viewed with a sense of stability and certainty. Next, they point out all the people and places that had to be excluded in order for that certainty to hold.A discussion of the construction of the South, the idea of the South, and the resulting turn away from geography or politics or war as definitional categories often follows. Increasingly, such collections explore the global South. They fully acknowledge and incorporate the global,transnational citizens and commodity chains of today’s communities and cultures. Often such collections muster a cautious pessimism that any discussion of a South or Souths will cohere. Food studies offers insights on this global and transnational South conversation . Southern food studies provides data that confirms networks of global and transnational people, capital, and cultures. One of the early book-length treatments of American foodways, Donna Gabaccia’s We Are What We Eat,used the colonial South to argue that southern foodways were Creolized, hybridized, and immigrant inflected. Part 2 People and Communities 96 Part 2 Southern food studies also dispenses with strict borders between the U.S. South and other global communities.A number of recent books, including Frederick Douglass Opie’s Hog and Hominy, set the invention of southern food traditions in the diasporas and migrations that challenged the boundaries between such communities, framing soul food as an invented tradition , useful to diverse communities in different ways at different times. Amplifying that argument, commodity chain and transnational scholars have carefully documented configurations of labor, capital, goods, and cultures in the Caribbean and elsewhere, grounding the U.S. South in global communities. Contributors in this section add sociological data and individual stories through which such configurations can be clearly seen. In “The Soul of the South: Race, Food, and Identity in the American South,” Beth A. Latshaw takes on slippery conceptions of identity, ethnicity, and region. Through food and responses to food, she makes sense of the simultaneity and flexibility of tradition, taste, and belonging.Analyzing the results of a telephone survey, Latshaw shows the changing valences of identity in terms of race, length of residence in a place, political affiliation, and class. She cross-analyzes those identities with fondness for specific foods, food practices, and foodways rituals. Latshaw challenges us to see a new definition of “southern” emerge, as diverse citizens reject older, no longer useful identities and build newer, more flexible, more expansive regional selves. Identification with southern food holds, but in the process, whiteblack hierarchies fall away. A story of Italian grocers proves crucial to understanding New Orleans foodways as a complementary mix of European, African, and Caribbean cooking practices. In Justin Nystrom’s essay,“Italian New Orleans and the Business of Food in the Immigrant City: There’s More to the Muffuletta Than Meets the Eye,” Italian merchants tell their family stories in an oral history project. Nystrom substantiates the origin story of the quintessential New Orleans working-class sandwich, the muffuletta, and demonstrates how Italian grocers provided basic ingredients to chefs and home cooks of varied races and ethnicities.As he documents family stories in oral histories, Nystrom discovers a dockworker-run port city, now largely erased by railand truck-driven corporate supply chains and grocery store consolidations. Even as scholarly and popular attention has turned in recent years to People and Communities 97 hybrid foods, overlapping cultures, and the interactions of cooking styles across the southern states, the influence of Native American foodways has remained largely undertheorized.Rayna Green puts Native foods and cooking practices at the center in “Mother Corn and the Dixie Pig: Native Food in the Native South.” Studying crops, oral recipes, menus from community festivals,and formal cookbooks,Green examines Native foods of our historical past and Native foods of our present. She discards the evidentially false assertion that all Native...