To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South by Angela Jill Cooley

Abstract

To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South. By Angela Jill Cooley. Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People, and Place. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 207. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4759-2; cloth, $69.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4758-5.) In this fascinating look at the social and legal effects of changing foodways in the twentieth-century South, Angela Jill Cooley argues that white southerners prioritized racial and gender control as they adapted first a new urban culture and then a mass consumer economy. In the Progressive era, white housekeepers marginalized African American cooks by promoting euthenics--a pseudoscience created by home economics founder Ellen H. Richards oriented toward improving the white race through imposing certain household standards (p. 30). After World War II, white southern proprietors turned the language of personal rights and what Cooley terms the myth of private space justify segregated public eating spaces (p. 136). Throughout the book, Cooley charts how white southerners benefited from the trends that made food more democratic--economic growth and nationalizing food practices--while claiming that the democratic legal shift associated with civil rights legislation was too intrusive. Such astute analysis characterizes this book, making it essential reading for historians of segregation in the South. While using a well-established periodization Cooley offers some significant new insights. In the first part of the twentieth century southern white women, influenced by the rise of domestic science and growing racial problems, attempted connect proper food preparation white supremacy. In public eating spaces, as lunch counters and other types of public eateries proliferated, policy makers feared that white women and black men might interact in locations beyond elite control. Cooley's careful research here indicates that racial segregation was part of a long-standing effort impose order that initially focused on deviations by class and gender. For example, the Atlanta city council sought keep restaurateurs from offering free food with alcohol sales, assuming the practice encouraged post-dinner interactions among men and women. But there and elsewhere, immigrant proprietors occasionally flouted the custom of maintaining dining rooms for elite white women, and further transgressed by employing white women as waitresses, who might then serve black men. By 1914 cities across the South began banning interracial eating, fearing that it contributed to racial mixing and thereby challenge[d] racial purity (p. 65). Between 1936 and 1959 federal food regulations, public education, and economic expansion brought food sciences into the mainstream and made public eating much more widespread. …