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FOREWORD Sam Bowers Milliard and I grew up ten miles and seventeen years apart in Hart County, Georgia. Sam actually hailed from Bowersville , a once-thriving settlement named for his ancestors and still big enough when Sam was born in 1930 to sustain a railroad junction, post office, and cotton gin. His ancestry was more prominent locally than mine, but our forebears had crossed paths way back in 1853 when some of his folks unsuccessfully challenged the planned location of Hart County's first courthouse, which, it just so happened, was slated for construction on land belonging to my great-great-great-grandfather. Happily, this dispute left no enduring residue of ill will, at least none that Sam and I ever knew of. Despite our historical and geographic ties, Sam and I did not encounter each other until 1975 when I was teaching at the University of Maryland, College Park, and got word that a wellknown geographer was coming to campus to talk about his recent book on diet and food consumption in the Old South. Somehow, I had learned that Sam was a Georgia native, and since I knew that part of Hart County was thick with both Bowerses and Hilliards, I asked the question that any true southerner would feel he must, and lo and behold, I learned that the delightful speaker whose incredibly rich and original talk I had just enjoyed immensely actually hailed from my own little neck of the northeast Georgia woods. Although I would learn a great deal more about this boy from Bowersville, especially after my own work began to attract the attention of some of his fellow geographers (all of whom brightened at the mere mention of his name), it would be another twenty years before Sam and I came face to face again, this time on our own native turf as we both set out, almost simultaneously, to prove that going home was not so difficult as Thomas Wolfe had warned. XI Xii F O R E W O R D In the end, Sam did a much better job of showing up Wolfe than I did, immersing himself in the county's history and culture and pulling a lot of other people in with him as well. Sam may not have founded the Hart County Historical Society, but he "made" it in a real sense, transforming it into a much more dynamic and relevant enterprise simply by infusing it with his own infectious enthusiasm and sincere affection for the county and its people. Constantly exploring, collecting, and disseminating local history and lore, he contributed enormously to an enhanced sense ofcommunity identity and pride by showing his fellow Hart Countians that their heritage was worth knowing and preserving. Sam's genuinely warm and democratic manner and downhome charm sometimes made it easy to overlook his prowess as a scholar. After four years of Naval service during the Korean Conflict , followed by a stint with the Atomic Energy Commission, in 1957 he enrolled at the Universityof Georgia, where he earned his A.B. and M.A. degrees before heading to the University of Wisconsin for his Ph.D. in historical geography. After teaching at the University of Southern Illinois for several years, he moved to LSU where he quickly established a reputation for dedicated and effective teaching and sound and prolific scholarship. His formal bibliography ultimately included dozens of articles and six books, including this one, his best known monograph. It is no exaggeration whatsoever to say that Hog Meat and Hoecake was well ahead of its time in 1972. Sam made a strong revisionist case against the prevailing wisdom that the South entered the Civil War woefully lacking in food self-sufficiency. At the same time that Sam was arguing that the South's overall capacity to feed itself in 1861 was comparable to that of New England, he made it clear that the primary constituents of its diet were so regionally specific as to represent a defining component of a distinctive southern identity. The young bride who left New York to join her new husband in North Carolina in 1833 might as well have been speaking for Sam when she cited the tastes and smells of a backwoods barbecue as an indication of "how entirely different is their mode of living here from the North." Like most truly prescient books, Hog Meat and Hoecake received far less notice than it was due when it appeared more than forty years ago...

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