To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in The Jim Crow South AngelaJillCooley. University of Georgia Press, 2015.

Abstract

To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in The Jim Crow South Angela Jill Cooley. University of Georgia Press, 2015.Scholars of US Civil Rights Movement might profitably consider its direct action as focused on two spatial structures: public accommodations of buses and streetcars and faux publics of businesses. It is latter that still comes under contestation. In 2010, then Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul argued that Civil Rights Act's regulation of discrimination by private business owners constituted radical government overreach. These putatively free market critiques of civil rights are rendered spectral in signs one still sometimes sees in restaurants: we reserve right to refuse service to anyone. That hotels and restaurant constitute inadequate public spheres, wherein public capacity to produce crossclass contact attains cover charge of meal, room, or cup of coffee, they are never entirely private, as access to and security for these businesses rely on state apparatuses of road and police force.In To Live and Dine in Dixie, Cooley explores many of paradoxes of segregation which are revealed by critical focus on food: not least of all that food prepared by people of color was often served to whites in segregated dining rooms and that putatively space of white middle-class kitchen was often integrated by black domestic workers. Cooley crystallizes this paradox by addressing the privileging of whiteness in consumer sphere and by arguing that few segregated spaces involved true separation of races (4, 108). Instead, she suggests that segregation required a careful performance of race-specific roles in moments of cross-racial contact (108). That Cooley focuses on food is neither accidental nor opportunistically timed to growth of academic food studies: she argues for restaurants as pivotal sites for modernization, urbanization, and suburbanization. But connection between food and other related discourses, perhaps especially gender, occasionally requires more articulation in her book.Contesting notion that Southern foodways are especially traditional, Cooley uses early sections of book to demonstrate that Southern cuisine is deeply modern, produced by technological innovation in middle-class kitchen (20), standardization of recipes in cookbooks and preparation instructions on consumer labels (20), home economics education in segregated Southern public schools (29), and by home demonstration and agricultural extension agents (39). …