Contemporary Food Studies of the American South: A Guide to the Literature (July 2019)

This essay first appeared in the July 2019 issue of Choice (volume 56 | issue 11).

Introduction:

John T. Edge, director of the southern Foodways Alliance, writes in his introduction to the Foodways volume in the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture that in the last twenty years “America in general, the South in particular, has awakened to the cultural impact of regional foodways. Writers and researchers have applied rigor to the study of what we eat and why we eat it” and that “an appreciation of southern foodways has always depended on more than an examination of food on the table … [we] see food as a marker of class, gender, race, and ethnicity” (p. xix-xx). Southern food studies, o…

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About the author:

Skye Hardesty is the head of collection development at Georgia State University in Atlanta and an avid reader and collector of cookbooks.