The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South

INTRODUCTION: Redrawing the Grocery: Practices and Methods for Studying Southern Food

As scholars of the U.S. South and southern food, my coeditors and I frequently engage popular and academic audiences. Recently I taught a class on southern food studies for adult learners in Austin, Texas. Attended by eight adults and one ten-year-old, the class was part of a program designed to encourage older and low-income men and women to apply for college admission. The adults’ ages ranged from the thirties to the seventies. They were single parents, retirees on fixed incomes, immigrants starting over at the bottom of their chosen fields, everyday men and women who recently pulled themselves out of health or life crises. Natalia, the ten-year-old, came with her mother. Her body language and facial expressions telegraphed that she was not, at first, interested in participating . For the first fifteen minutes the adults brainstormed possible questions . I presented John Egerton’s observation that “To learn what has gone on in the kitchen and the dining room—and what still goes on there—is to discover much about a society’s physical health, its economic condition, its race relations, its class structure, and the status of its women.” I also supplied a straightforward definition of foodways: the study of why we eat, what we eat, and what it means. The class added its own definitions: how we eat, how we prepare what we eat, who gathered the goods we cook, who cooks our food, what we do not eat, the rituals we create around food, who taught us to cook, what they were talking about when they taught us to cook, who is welcome at the table and who is not, where people sit when they eat, what people think and feel when they eat, what we remember about the dishes we eat, and, most importantly, why we care. INTRODUCTION ▶ Redrawing the Grocery Practices and Methods for Studying Southern Food elizabeth engelhardt 2 Elizabeth Engelhardt The class talked about who can afford food, where we get it, where we cannot, and how and why access can be conscribed. We added questions about what chemicals farmers spray on crops, who harvests crops, who profits from the harvest, how quickly and easily foods can be prepared, and whether a sustainable diet is a civil right. The class grasped quickly that the word“foodways”is useful because it is shorthand for cultural processes.They understood that the term “foodways” may be used to describe the social interactions and cultural exchanges that define food, drink, and nutrition. Soon the seminar table was stacked with cookbooks, and the room was full of questions. Why does this book from North Carolina boast a Native American on the cover if there are no indigenous recipes in it? (And why is he wearing a headdress, associated with Western Plains tribes?) Why does the author of a Louisiana book from the 1930s wax poetic about whitegloved male servants? What is the story behind the Watergate salad in the South Carolina Junior League cookbook from the 1980s? And why does another recipe in that same book specify fat-free mayonnaise to go with the full-fat sour cream and cream cheese? Later, to connect the community gardens of today with the curb markets ,canning clubs,and household economies of one hundred years ago,we studied photographs and diary pages published in the 2009 food issue of the journal Southern Cultures. We ended with mock oral history interviews. The class compared food traditions based in Ecuadorian,Pacific Northwest, Texan, Mexican, and southern homes. Conversations swung wildly. We talked interview practices. (How do I record birthdates and family relations without stopping the flow of the conversation ?) We compared bread practices and techniques. (Biscuits-versuscornbread battles sound a lot like flour-versus-corn tortilla debates.) That night, everything was on the table and on topic. As the class came to a close, I learned that Natalia had been paying attention after all. After carefully paging through the issue of Southern Cultures, Natalia had moved to a quiet corner and drawn a pen-and-ink version of the cover illustration, a 1936 Walker Evans photograph of a country grocery store. Attracted by photographs of girls who enrolled in early twentieth-century canning clubs, Natalia had been drawn into the journal and had, in turn, Introduction 3 drawn her own rendition of the cover. Her artwork kept the basics of the...