Serving Up the American South: Foodways and Southern History

Abstract

Serving Up the American South:Foodways and Southern History Anthony J. Stanonis (bio) Angela Jill Cooley. To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015. ix + 207 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95. Edward H. Davis and John T. Morgan. Collards: A Southern Tradition from Seed to Table. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015. xiv + 193 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $34.95. Marcie Cohen Ferris. The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xiv + 477 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. A fallow field until the last decade, the study of Southern foodways has now come to bear impressive yields. Scholars have applied a range of interdisciplinary approaches to reveal the ways that foods have influenced Southern culture since the colonial period. More than just sustenance, foods form a dynamic component of Southern society. The meanings applied to foods have determined the very structure of that society. Southerners incorporated racial, class, gender, ethnic, and regional tensions into their foodways. From economics to race relations and from leisure to religion, foods and the practices associated with eating have been central to the formation and evolution of Southern identity. One approach to the study of foodways is to explore the history of a particular item. Edward Davis and John Morgan reap hefty rewards from such an analysis in their Collards: A Southern Tradition from Seed to Table. Davis and Morgan, both trained geographers, craft a surprising potboiler. They weave their scientific inquiry into the biological origins of the plant with a wide-reaching analysis of collard greens’ cultural importance throughout Southern history. Readers thereby discover a “living organism that evolved over centuries of cultural development, lifetimes of cultivation and care, and periodic moments of culinary genius” (p. ix). The authors’ meticulous research adds [End Page 312] beef to their claim that a “forkful of collards contains more Southern history than any other bite” (p. xi). Davis and Morgan draw on a cornucopia of sources. They demonstrate the importance of collard greens within Southern literature, especially for African American writers. They trace the long history of the plant in the South from colonial times to the present, using diaries, magazines, and other print sources. Davis and Morgan gather scientific data as well. The quick-growing greens provided exceptionally high levels of nutrients unsurpassed by other leafy cousins. Davis and Morgan emphasize the point via neatly compiled charts comparing collard greens to plants such as spinach, turnip greens, mustard greens, and kale, among others. This nutritiousness made collards ideal in a region otherwise tied to corn and pork. Often considered a “black” cultural icon—legendary jazz artist Thelonious Monk even donned a collard leaf on his lapel—collards are more properly understood as a symbol of poverty and “southern rurality” (p. 20). Photographs and eye-catching, colorful maps track the popularity of collard greens, mustard greens, and turnip greens—the region’s three favored leafy greens—across the South. The production values invested by the University of Alabama Press are as remarkable as the thoroughness of the scholarship. Most impressively, however, Davis and Morgan employ intensive surveys of university students, grocery store managers, and seed marketers to discover the heartland of collard greens. The authors conduct interviews with gardeners and others, relating how Southerners since the 1950s have turned away from home gardening and gardening for profit. Furthermore, Hispanics have largely replaced African Americans as fieldworkers since the 1980s. Commercial collard seed production died out in the South in the two decades after the Second World War, with Washington State now dominating seed production. Local or small seed cultivators are now rarities, with only ten companies in the United States selling commercial collard seeds. Davis and Morgan systematically drive the back roads of the U.S. South to find rare varieties of collards cultivated by seed-savers over generations. These are “landraces,” plants that have “adapted in one area over a long period without formal breeding methods” (p. 109). The authors interview approximately eighty seed-savers and identify many others...