Authenticity and Appropriation

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With the curious exception of anything from Louisiana, things southern have scaled the pinnacle of fashion in the world of food. Coastal Carolina dishes, bogs and burgoos, barbecue whether slow smoked or simmered in sauce, its cousin pulled pork, collards and beans, artisanal grits, and dense country hams from the Upper South all have enthusiastic adherents. Most of the southern dishes celebrated today have venerable origins or antecedents, their survival or revival a corollary perhaps of Faulkner’s most famous dictum: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ Southerners share a fraught history, not least on the subject of race, but also in terms of regional identity, class and economic culture. That is why, as Carrie Helms Tippen observes, the contemporary south is ‘a region whose identity is still in the making – or perhaps, more accurately, always in the remaking.’ (Tippen 7) The process of remaking, or more accurately reinvention, in­volves historical redefinition and revision, so the process is bound to entail controversy, even if only as an unintended consequence of good intent and, in these contentious times, nothing is more contentious than attempts to interpret and represent the southern past. The conflict extends far beyond obvious flashpoints like the statuary of the Lost Cause, much of it in reality not legitimate artefacts honouring sacrifice but rather racist markers of subjugation that first appeared on plinths not so long ago.The conflict extends even to the subject of food, and in particular to questions of authenticity and race. The question of what is southern, of what belongs to African Americans, and to a lesser extent to ethnic whites or to particular regions of the south, provokes widespread conflict and anger. This article looks at the 2016 "Collard Green controversy" in the United States drawing an analogy to an episode of British history concerning haggis and the role of food in the creation of Scottish national identity.