The edible South : the power of food and the making of an American region / Marcie Cohen Ferris.

In The Edible South, Marcie Cohen Ferris presents food as a new way to chronicle the American South's larger history. Ferris tells a richly illustrated story of southern food and the struggles of whites, blacks, Native Americans, and other people of the region to control the nourishment of their bodies and minds, livelihoods, lands, and citizenship. The experience of food serves as an evocative lens onto colonial settlements and antebellum plantations, New South cities and Civil Rights-era lunch counters, chronic hunger and agricultural reform, counterculture communes and iconic restaurants as Ferris reveals how food--as cuisine and as commodity--has expressed and shaped southern identity to the present day. The region in which European settlers were greeted with unimaginable natural abundance was simultaneously the place where enslaved Africans vigilantly preserved cultural memory in cuisine and Native Americans held tight to kinship and food traditions despite mass expulsions. Southern food, Ferris argues, is intimately connected to the politics of power. The contradiction between the realities of fulsomeness and deprivation, privilege and poverty, in southern history resonates in the region's food traditions, both beloved and maligned.

Includes bibliographies and index.

I Look for food in everything -- Outsiders : travelers and newcomers encounter the early South -- Insiders : culinary codes of the plantation household -- I will eat some for you : food voices of northern-born governesses in the plantation South -- An embattled table : the language of food in the Civil War South -- Culinary testimony : African Americans and the collective memory of a nineteenth-century South -- The reconstructed table -- The shifting soil of southern agriculture and the undermining of the southern diet -- Home economics and domestic science come to the southern table -- The southern "dietaries" : food field studies in Alabama and Eastern Virginia -- Reforming the southern diet one student at a time : the mountain South and the lowcountry -- Agricultural reform comes home -- The deepest reality of life : southern sociology, the WPA and food in the New South -- Branding the edible New South -- A journey back in time : food and tourism in the New South -- I'm gonna sit at the welcome table : southern food and the Civil Rights Movement -- Culinary landmarks of "the Struggle" -- A hungry South -- A food counterculture, southern-style -- New Southern cuisine.

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