Here’s Why You Should Care About Southern Food

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The Southern Discomfort Tour was basically a means to kind of like rip open the sutures and figure out a way to, you know, unravel this myth of the, you know, comfortable old South ever in rebellion.

It's always 1865, yesterday.

And, you know, if you're African-American, that vision really doesn't suit you.

The South is ours as well.

We built the South with a lot of other people, but we were the main builders of the colonial and antebellum South's infrastructure, economy, worldview, foodways.

This episode, Michael Twitty is busting the myth of the comfortable Old South wide open and many other myths as well.

You're listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

And we're talking with Michael Twitty, culinary historian and author of a new book, The Cooking Gene, a journey through African-American culinary history in the Old South.

I'm Nicola Twilley.

And I'm Cynthia Graeber.

You know, there are a lot of stereotypes out there about Southern food.

It's too easy to flash up a picture of, you know, the donut fried chicken sandwich and say, this is southern food, isn't it?

You know, it's kind of a clickbait.

Picturing a fried chicken donut sandwich or TV chef Paula Dean's bacon-wrapped fried mac and cheese when you think of the South, that's just lazy thinking, according to John T.

Edge.

You've heard from him before on Gastropod, and he also has a new book out, The Pot Liquor Papers, a Food History of the Modern South.

This episode, we're going deep into the story of Southern food because while it's super complicated and important on its own, it also tells us a lot about America.

It's where a great deal of American cuisine was born.

For good and for bad.

Talking about southern food with Michael and John T means talking about the origins of iconic all-American dishes in violence and slavery.

It means talking about poverty, power, land, and their connections with obesity today.

It means talking about heritage and appropriation of that heritage.

But it also means talking about really diverse and delicious foods, the origins of fine farm-to-table dining, and innovative solutions to some of the problems Michael and John T get fired up about.

We're going to take a step backwards in time here to the start of the 1500s.

In what is now the South, there were Native Americans and there were Europeans.

And then, in 1502, we have the first documented example of a European European merchant sending enslaved Africans to North America.

So now you have peoples from three different continents in the South.

There obviously was the food the Native Americans had been eating for thousands of years, and the Europeans brought their crops and food culture with them to replicate in what they called the New World.

And the Africans, even shackled on slave ships, some managed to bring some seeds from home as well as their culinary traditions.

The sheer scale of this mix, this is new in the history of the world.

People have to invent a whole new language to to describe this dazzling new foodscape that did not exist before 1502.

And you don't have, remember, you don't have words to describe this new world.

So there's this thing called an arakun, but it's tasty.

It's cute, but it's tasty.

And so our folks go, well, I don't know about the first part of the world, but I know the word coon.

There it is.

A possum.

And those are not words that English North Africans had before.

The word arakun is from the Virginia Algonquian, which became coon to the slaves.

Apossum was also an Algonquian name.

And then you have these new things like okra.

Okra!

I have to use a word from Nigeria, from Igbo, to describe it.

Okuru.

Michael has to use a word from Nigeria because the plant is originally from Africa.

And alongside okra came millet, sorghum, watermelon, pigeon peas, and bene, the ancestor of today's sesame.

So people are using these new words, creating a new language to describe a foodscape that did not exist before the transatlantic slave trade.

And that's what's made us so important to the story of American food waste.

Nobody knew what gumbo was.

That's because nobody was eating gumbo before the transatlantic slave trade.

There's debate about the etymology of the name, but the general consensus is that it derives from a different West African word for okra, king gumbo.

But then it also became a word for a soup, often made with okra.

The roux, the technique for the soup, is European, and ground sassafras leaves, or phyllae, are another critical ingredient in the dish and they're Native American.

What Michael's describing here is a blending, a creolization process, and that was driven by enslaved Africans from across the western coast of the continent.

We were the most diverse people in early America, and because of our blackness, we were crossing lines other people just didn't cross for generations.

The Europeans tended to stay with their own people, French with French, English with English, and so on.

The Africans didn't have the luxury of that choice.

They were forced to live alongside Africans from other African nations, as well as Native Americans and Europeans.

And they were the ones growing the food and cooking it.

Again, not by choice.

And these black cooks worked alongside, worked with, were married into, were violated by, were traded with, made war with, were friends with, were frenemies with people of Native European, Asian, and other African extraction.

And you were the cooks in the north, in the south, in the Caribbean.

You were sent to France to be educated, to learn how to cook French food.

You were apprenticed to bakers and pastry chefs.

And so enslaved Africans became the culinary experts, plain and simple.

And we're becoming the translators of everybody else's heritage.

And the thing about us is that it's not just the stuff that people assume is African.

That's only actually a small part of the story.

It's the fact that we can take other people's stuff.

jazz it up, literally, and the fact that I have to use the word jazz, which is a word of Central African origin, right?

To describe the process, and then put it back to them.

They'd be like, dang, this is this is out of sight.

What'd you do?

Well, I blackified it, you know, I blackified it, I made it taste better.

So, while the slaves were feeding everyone else and gaining all this culinary expertise, what were they able to eat?

There's no way to paint a pretty picture of this time period, but Michael says that enslaved Africans could

at times feed themselves healthily from their own labor.

Many Africans were able to farm small plots of land and grow a wide variety of crops, and they were, sometimes, able to eat food that they grew and hunted.

But never forget, it's always in this context of getting the leftovers.

The leftover scraps of thyme to garden after they've worked for their masters, the leftover foods from the table, like pot liquor.

You know, pot liquor is the stock that you get for making greens, but it's more than that.

There's bones and skin and marrow in that pot.

It is, you know, a watery graveyard for flora and fauna and and mineral.

I mean, it's just all of it.

And it's, it's stinky.

It's foul.

It's earthy.

And also even delicious, Michael says.

This was his first food fed to him by his grandmother.

Cornbread, crumbled up in pot liquor.

That was the black baby food for generations.

Eating that connected me to people born in slavery in my family.

Connected me to my grandmother.

But with a very important difference in how it was served.

In slavery time, children, toddlers through, you know, teenagers, they had to eat from a trough, a hog's trough, you know, and sometimes the horse's trough.

I mean, they would put the food in there, and then the horse would clean the rest of it up.

And they'd do with human beings and animals sharing the same vessel.

It was the crudest form of feeding.

There's a subversive knowledge embedded in that, though, that, you know, as we parse out the nutrients and we begin to understand where the nutritional value of greens resides after you cook them in such a fashion, after you boil greens down.

The nutrients are oftentimes leached out in the liquids.

So they were tossing away the pot liquor, feeding it to the enslaved, reserving the greens for themselves.

But in all actuality, the pot liquor is where the great nutrition resided.

Pot liquor is one example of the complexity that's an intrinsic part of the history of southern food.

It's brutal and dehumanizing, and yet also nutritious.

And to Michael, it's tasty, and it ties him to generations of his ancestors.

It does the same for John T.

too, because white Southerners eventually embraced pot liquor as well.

Like Michael said, this first wave of enslaved Africans arriving in America were settled on the eastern seaboard, and they were able to create a diverse food system in that landscape.

But then, at the end of the 1700s and the start of the 1800s, came the invention of the cotton gin and the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.

Throughout the early decades of the 1800s, there was an internal slave trade, what's been called the Second Middle Passage.

The largest forced migration of people in American history was the domestic slave trade.

And so the domestic slave trade took black folks from these ecosystems that were rich in diversity on the southeastern coast and pushed them inland to places where there just wasn't the same variety of plants, fish, food, resources.

And quite frankly, the slavery business had developed.

It went from being self-sufficient plantations to almost industrial monoculture.

Cotton was well suited for that.

One crop, one big check, make your money.

Some people did well with it, some people didn't.

The thing about working in the cotton fields is that it was really all-consuming, physically demanding work.

Not that plantation slaves in the East had it easy by any means, but cotton was different.

This crop, you know, get up, set up to sundown, work, get in that field, work.

You don't have time for a garden.

You don't have time to go fishing.

You don't have time to go hunting.

No, no, no, no, there's no, there'll be no more, there'll be no more task system where you get to like do your required acreage, but you can do your own thing.

You get to go trap and garden and fish anymore.

Uh-uh.

So not only did the slaves lose even the meager time they had to maybe tend to a small garden or maybe hunt, but cotton was so incredibly physically demanding all the time that they had to get as many calories as possible as quickly as possible.

So there's this sort of like, you know, we're forced into this really crappy diet.

And some of those tastes and flavors and some of those things stayed long after slavery.

It's too much salt.

There's too many starches and sugars.

Only difference between us and them is that they actually work sun up to sun down physically.

We don't.

This diet has been deadly for African Americans.

The statistics today are scary.

African Americans are one and a half times as likely to be obese, twice as likely to have diabetes.

They have some of the highest rates of hypertension in the world.

Lots of factors go into these diseases: poverty, lack of time and resources to exercise, structural inequalities.

But diet is a big one.

So there are a number of legacies of cotton.

It helped shape taste in a way that still echoes today, and it also shaped the landscape.

Michael says that the legacy of the monoculture still exists too, but today it takes the form of food deserts, places where it's incredibly difficult, difficult, if not impossible, to access fresh, healthy foods.

So yeah, I really wanted to break down why we have these food desert issues.

If you look at the map, you look at the map of the south, the areas with the worst food desert issues is the black belt of cotton.

It's right in front of your face.

The area where cotton was grown from southern Virginia all the way to East Texas is a solid belt.

of food deserts.

And we should want to know why.

Much of the food that's available in these food deserts today is fast fast food.

Michael talks about those tastes for fat, for starches, for sugar being a culinary legacy of cotton and slavery.

But the place where those tastes are mostly satiated today is fast food restaurants.

And they are another part of the South's culinary story.

Again, for good and for bad.

For John T., fast food is a story of terrible costs, yes, but also southern innovation and entrepreneurship.

The movement of fast food from places like KFC, from places like Hardee's, from places like Bojangles, those were not some visitation of a horror of fast food upon the South, the hyper-traditional South.

Those were Southerners who figured out how to feed a new generation of urbanizing Southerners.

The Southerners who spearheaded fast food drew on their local culinary history.

So the kind of attempt to package and sell a very traditional food, fried chicken or let's take biscuits.

It applies to biscuits as well, which also became a drive-through dish in the 1970s South those are attempts to repackage the traditional South and sell it back to a modernizing urbanizing South a South that was moving to suburbs a South that was

working away from home for the first time that was moving away from farms and moving to

factories and offices for their work.

And I think that in our kind of American adoption of fast food and the international adoption of fast food, KFC's story is just as resonant as McDonald's story.

And fried chicken and biscuits, they may have originally been prepared and perfected by enslaved black cooks, but they became a shared food of celebration across color lines in the South.

John T.

helped us tease out the whole complicated story in our episode on fried chicken.

But the point is, these were foods that you served on a Sunday after a week of hard physical labor.

And you recognize that traditional food carries with it a heavy calorie payload and may not be the healthiest thing to ingest every day.

And you move from eating it on Sunday to eating it from the drive-through four days a week, you see the peril of fast food play out there.

And you see it in high rates of diabetes.

You see it in high rates of heart attacks.

You see the cost to the South.

So the South was one of the leaders in both marketing and eating fast food, but it's not just a culinary development.

There were some major industrial agricultural developments in the South, too.

So if you think about the chicken industry and its boom, that chicken industry boom has been driven by innovations in places like Arkansas, wherein Tyson and other manufacturers found a way to shorten the growth time required for a chicken to come to weight and go to slaughter.

They also manipulated the product itself.

Because these southern companies weren't just pioneering innovations in raising chickens, they changed how that chicken was processed too, turning whole chickens into pre-portioned, weird shapes.

Companies like Tyson's are the ones who drove the fast food industry and delivered this new form of chicken to you.

And if you think about that corner of northwestern Arkansas where Tyson is headquartered, where Walmart is headquartered.

I'm trying to argue that that corner of northwestern Arkansas is one of the great kind of American hubs of innovation.

It's where the chicken went modern, and it's where kind of American consumer models were reinvented.

John T.

sounds kind of like he's admiring all of that southern innovation, and he is.

But of course, it comes at a cost, a health cost, an environmental cost, a cost to the animals, a cost to the workers.

But But you can innovate and cause harm at the same time.

I mean, that's kind of my point is that, you know, these are brilliant business people who figured out how to sell America chicken parts and how to translate that onto fast food menus and how to translate that into styrofoam containers at Walmart.

That innovation is part of the fabric of the American story, the American business story.

That's one thread in the story of how the history of food in the South has shaped not just that region, but the

Emancipation officially came in 1863.

There had been promise of the famous 40 acres and a mule for freed Africans, but this largely didn't happen.

But even when former slaves did have the potential to farm, Michael says the idea of continuing to work the land was complicated.

The soil was a jail, a prison for those African Americans who did not have their own land or access to land.

It was a prison.

So even if African Americans had land or access to land after emancipation, that feeling persisted.

And then you went up north and it was like, ah, a breath of fresh air.

I don't have to, you know, yes, the steel mills are noisy.

Yes, the auto plant is dangerous.

Yes, the stockyards are filthy, but at least it ain't cotton.

At least it's not a field.

At least it's not the hot sun.

At least it's not working so that, you know, someone can take away two-thirds of what I earn and I have to scramble by with one-third and always go into debt.

That was such a devastating.

way to live for so many people of color that they just wanted to get out of it.

And so it's not just our children, but it's the generation before them and the generation before them that actually says the words, I ain't a damn slave.

I'm not gardening.

I don't want to do all that.

I mean, I've heard this a million times because they associate our fingers being in the dirt with slavery, not understanding that, you know, our fingers being in the dirt saved us, you know, saved us during the Depression.

It put food in our mouths.

Other people were, you know, standing in bread lines in the city.

We had farms.

We had gardens.

We knew how to make something from nothing.

And so that kind of, I wanted some of the kind of pride in people to let them know, no, no, no, our relationship with the land is a religious, a sacred thing.

Michael thinks there's an important place for farming today among African Americans in spite of and even because of their history.

We need to make peace with the fact that, yes, our gifts were used against us.

Our economy-changing, nation-building ways were used against us.

But that is no excuse to not save ourselves today

using those same skills that gave our ancestors sustenance.

And that's something that some black southerners have tried to do, most notably the fabulous Fannie Lou Hamer and her pig bank.

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John T is a huge fan.

Fannie Lou was born to sharecroppers in 1917 in Mississippi, one of 20 children.

She started working in the fields at six and dropped out of school at 12.

Even without formal education, though, she became a major force in politics after she attended a protest meeting in 1962.

She eventually helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

It was in opposition to the state's all-white delegation to the Democratic Convention.

So, many of us know Fannie Lou Hamer Hamer as a voting rights activist.

And I hope listeners know Fannie Lou Hamer as a voting rights activist.

I think of her as one of the boldest and most radical of Southerners.

And she

fought for access to the ballot in the 1960s at a moment when that was one of the most dangerous things a black Mississippian could do.

Yet, I think oftentimes we lose a thread of her story, a really important thread of her story, and is that Fannie Lou Hamer recognized, like Dr.

King recognized, that the next step after acquiring the right to vote was acquiring economic independence.

And Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi Delta native, thought that if black Southerners were going to acquire economic independence, they should rely on that agricultural knowledge that they had developed over generations.

And so she began the Freedom Farm Cooperative in the Mississippi Delta.

The notion of the Freedom Farm Cooperative was to return African Americans to the land, to build a cooperative.

It was not defined exclusively as an African American effort, but the great majority of folk who worked the land with Hamer were African Americans.

But she believed that in the Mississippi Delta, in the heart of the cotton-growing plutocracy, she believed that African Americans should work that land and that was their future.

That economic independence was dependent on a deep and profound knowledge of the land and an ability to work the land.

So, this is where the pigs come in.

In 1969, the same year that Fanny founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative, she came up with her pig idea.

It was a serious idea, but it had kind of a funny name.

It was playful.

I mean, her notion of economic independence was both serious-minded and playful.

One One of the original names she floated for this effort was the Oink Oink Project.

But the name she settled on was the Pig Bank.

And the notion was this.

It was she, on behalf of the Freedom Farm, would seed a black family a female pig.

When that female pig had piglets, the family would in turn raise those piglets and give back the sow to the bank.

And then the next family would raise its own sow and have piglets.

It was a multi-level marketing scheme for the farm.

It was an ingenious way to grow the food supply.

Now we use terms like food sovereignty to talk about this, but Hamer was doing this work in the 1960s.

By the second year, there were 100 families involved.

But although it was a brilliant idea, it was really hard to make it work in the long run.

And the Freedom Farm movement only lasted a few years.

They had a hard time raising money.

Fannie Lou was in her 60s and she had a heart attack.

Plus, like Michael said, it was also hard to convince African Americans of the promise of farming, and it still is, though some are picking up Fannie Lou's mantle.

The Freedom Farm movement and the pig bank, we see echoes of that today in urban farming efforts in cities like Detroit and Memphis and Atlanta.

This generation of young farmers in their 20s are in many ways leveraging the experiments that people like Hamer executed in the Mississippi Delta.

And too often, though, they don't make those connections back to that past.

There's another kind of amnesia going on, an even more serious kind in some ways.

For a long time, the South was the poster child for poverty in America.

In the 1960s, TV documentaries like Harvest of Shame and Hunger in America shocked audiences nationwide.

But by the end of the 20th century, that image of the South was being replaced by something much more desirable.

And John T.

pins that reinvention on a magazine, the most profitable magazine in America in the 1980s, Southern Living.

Southern Living framed a South wherein people took pleasure in cooking, in gardening, in hunting, in those kind of leisure activities that a life in the South affords them.

And Southern Living framed the promise of a kind of becalmed South, a deracinated South that had left behind the tragedy of the antebellum era and had left behind the rancor of the civil rights movement.

Southern living presented this South that promised a new joy and appreciation of being a Southerner.

Obviously, throughout the civil rights period, the South is not looking too great to the rest of the country and to the world.

There are lynchings, and there was also voter suppression, sundown towns, separate drinking fountains and entrances, and all the horrors of Jim Crow.

But then in the 80s, Southern living offered a new way to appreciate the South, a whitewashed one, yes, but one that let some people feel some pride in their region.

And as part of that also came a new movement to celebrate the South's unique culinary traditions.

In a fine dining setting, not at a KFC.

That kind of moment when white chefs step to the fore, I think, signals a new value in Southern food, an appraisal of the possibilities of Southern food, that white chefs with comparative access to equity in businesses, with the ability to take entrepreneurial chances,

they see an opportunity.

And they also see a way to express their vision of the South that is not beholden to the old ways and the old times.

They figure, okay, between the four walls of this restaurant, I'm going to tell you a story about the South that is rooted in the farm, that is kind of an exaltation of this place.

You know, this kind of coalescing of like-minded progressive Southerners who found themselves at table and would carry the message and the moment forward into a

better, richer, more diverse South.

John was talking about all the folks who launched the Southern Food Revival, names like Bill Neal at Crook's Corner in Chapel Hill.

But today, perhaps the most famous person who represents these new progressive Southern chefs is Sean Brock.

He owns a restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina called Husk.

His restaurant has won all kinds of awards.

And what Sean has tried to do is to reach deep into the culinary and botanical history of the South to reclaim heirloom varieties as well as old dishes from centuries-old cookbooks.

He's created a unique Southern take on the farm-to-table movement.

He's even grown indigenous varieties of crops that were popular before the Civil War and that were at risk of extinction.

Brock's partner in crime, or rather in flavor revival, is David Shields, a professor at the University of South Carolina.

He does a lot of the historical detective work, tracking down obscure varietals or traditional crop rotation methods in 18th century agriculture journals.

And then those crops end up on Sean Brock's tables.

Things like the Bradford watermelon, which Dave Shields calls one of the absolute finest melons ever created, or palmetto asparagus, which is fat and tender, but comparatively low-yielding.

or Jimmy Red Corn, which Sean Brock is so obsessed with that he got a tattoo of it on his left forearm.

As John T says, people like Sean and David, they're progressive and they believe in a more diverse South.

They definitely honor the contribution of African Americans, and they have a lot of pride in the culinary history of the region.

They want to share it and celebrate it.

And that sounds a little kumbaya, and I don't think it was top of mind for folks then, but they did create these kind of safer spaces, these better spaces.

I don't like kumbaya.

I don't like kumbaya at the table either.

For all he's celebrating Sean and David's accomplishments, John T agrees with Michael.

He certainly doesn't think it's all kumbaya either.

Yeah, no.

Neither John T nor Michael are going to be caught singing kumbaya over the southern table anytime soon.

Because the thing is, Sean Brock and David Shields and pretty much all the chefs and seed revivalists who you read about in this new version of the South, the version celebrated in Southern living, they're white.

That's an issue, and that's something that more and more white people are waking up to.

On a national level, we're recognizing that the real issue about who tells the story of Southern food, who curates Southern food culture, who directs the restaurants that interpret Southern food, who gets to do that is defined by access to capital.

Who has the money to open their own restaurant?

Who has the megaphone to tell a story about Southern food culture?

So you talk about the Southern food revival.

and these television personalities and these restaurants that, you know, become sort of like the heart of the new American food or

re-embracing tradition and getting back to basics.

Well, you know, when eminent domain and race riots and Jim Crow give you instability, constant instability, how are you going to compete with that?

How are you going to make the same life that your neighbor does?

You can't.

You can't compete with that.

You can't keep up.

You simply cannot have the same life.

And then

now the new, the new demons are gentrification and voter suppression.

I mean,

can we win?

So when I talk to people about this and they go, you guys have the same opportunities.

Oh, it's called redlining, boo.

It's called they can't give you a loan so you can have a brick and mortar building.

You know, yes, there are fantastic black chefs in Charleston, but they simply don't have the same opportunities as the folks who are landed have opportunities there today.

That's my argument.

This narrative where the accomplishments and the contributions of black farmers and cooks get written out of the picture in favor of whites, it's not a new one.

Back in the days of slavery, white women took credit for the dishes and recipes their black slaves in the kitchen created and perfected.

I mean, we weren't second best.

We weren't, okay, they were a nice contribution.

No, people thought of us as the people who you go to to get the best food from.

But not as someone you give the credit to.

In fact, arguably the best chef, almost certainly the most technically accomplished chef in America in its early years, was James James Hemings.

He was a slave, the older brother of Sally Hemmings, owned by Thomas Jefferson, and he trained in Paris.

James Hemmings should be the foundation of every single textbook on American food, right?

Because he is

the most classically trained chef in early America thanks to his relationship for good or for ill with Thomas Jefferson.

But I ask people who James Hemmings is, and audiences, I have three or four hands raised out of 100 people.

And to me, that that's a sign that people don't understand the power, the agency, the ownership of culinary excellence among people of African descent in America and the Americas.

Once you start looking through the history, you can find black chefs being overlooked in favor of whites again and again.

John T.

told us about Edna Lewis.

She was born in 1916 in rural Virginia, the granddaughter of freed slaves.

She grew up with seasonal fresh cooking and made her name cooking seasonal southern food in New York.

She was an inspiration to Alice Waters and Alice Waters today is thought of as the mother of farm to table cooking.

And John T's point is Edna was there first.

And, you know, think about her in the 1970s at a time, which is when she rose to prominence, 1970s, 1980s, at a time when so many people were quitting the farm.

Miss Lewis wrote a book, A Taste of Country Cooking, that was kind of a siren call to return to the farm.

And it was this elegant, assured African-American woman who, once you understand her backstory, was in no way simplistic, was in every way complicated.

Here's this African-American woman saying, no, there's value in the farm.

There is value in eating with the seasons.

And she wrote these lovely lyrical odes to the value of the farm.

at a time when few were listening to that, when people were still casting about for a European voice.

If you think about that moment, we deify Julia Child and we should.

And yet in that same moment, here's Edna Lewis raising her hand and saying, you know, what I knew growing up in Orange County, Virginia matters too.

And it's worth interpretation on a white tablecloth.

It's worth a restaurant backdrop.

It's worth your obeisance.

It's worth diners' money.

And she did that at a time when few saw that value.

She saw real and true value.

We too often hear from the likes of Paula Dean and not often enough hear from the likes of Edna Lewis.

And speaking of Paula Dean, some of you may remember a particularly unpleasant moment back in 2013 centered on Paula Dean and her racist language and attitudes.

But John T.

argues that that whole situation actually had a silver lining because Michael, who today is one of the leading voices on southern food, stepped up and responded to Paula.

And in so doing, he turned the media spotlight onto the much larger problem.

Michael Twittey writes this kind of world-weary, confessional, open letter to Paula Dean.

And in doing it, he doesn't so much dismiss her as dismiss the larger enterprise of writing about and telling stories about southern food culture that dismisses the black contribution.

Michael basically argues that we have overlooked the black genius that drove southern food culture.

We have dismissed it as mere labor when we should think about it as intelligence earned over generations at the stove and in fields and at tables.

Yeah, I mean,

that was my argument with the whole Paula Dean letter.

in 2013 was that, you know, everybody was putting so much emphasis on Paula Dean the N-word, they forgot about the fact that we're constantly having to deal with the article title, Where Are the Black Chefs?

Well, the Black Chefs were there for generations and still are.

You know, Austin Leslie, for God's sakes, who invented and popularized the fried turkey.

But who's heard of Austin Leslie?

Michael has no major problem with Sean Brock or David Shields or any of those other white southerners who are shining a spotlight on the region's food.

He admires what they're doing.

They're friends.

It's not that they're white and they're doing this.

Okay, great.

If you were a southerner, this is your heritage too, of any color background.

Not just salt and pepper southerners, not just red, white, and black southerners, but Middle Eastern ones and East Asian ones who are newcomers, Latino ones who are newcomers as well.

But you need to have context.

You need to have respect for when and where you enter the narrative and for when and where other people enter that narrative.

And I think that Sean and David Shields, other folks are very sincere, well-meaning people.

But I think that the food media and other media has put far too much emphasis on this white savior thing.

I think the more important story, and this is just from my heart, from my perspective, is can the South heal itself through its food, through its food culture, through its food politics?

Can African Americans reclaim their identity, their history before it's too late?

Because more places are being bought up and sold out of our hands, losing more farmland, losing more family land, land, losing the graves of our ancestors, losing lives because we face these chronic illnesses when we could be eating those heirloom vegetables and thriving and living healthier, better lives.

I mean, this is a massive issue, a massive problem.

Our kids are being threatened now with not even being able to have, you know, school breakfast.

We're back to that.

So, I mean, I respect their work.

They're great people, they're lovely people.

I'm not saying we can't continue to shine a light on the work they're doing in the kitchen and in scholarly fields.

I mean, these are my acquaintances.

These are my friends.

These are my colleagues.

But what I'm getting at is that we can't let go of the other side of the coin.

There is something very beautiful and very important about black men and black women finding their way back through food to the heart of their tradition and using it to rescue.

the parts of ourselves today that are suffering.

Michael, as we said at the start, is author of a new book, The Cooking Gene.

But that's the culmination of years spent rediscovering and reclaiming his own culinary heritage in the South.

After that Paula Dean letter, Michael embarked on what he called his Southern discomfort tour.

He did public cooking demonstrations of what his enslaved ancestors would have cooked in plantation houses and slave shacks throughout the South.

It was powerful interpretive history in the places where nostalgia for the Old South is most entrenched.

Michael challenged his audiences to really think about that culinary heritage and what it was built on.

And Michael's not the only one.

There are African-American chefs and farmers around the region claiming their place in this revival.

John T.

describes the work of Mashama Bailey.

Like Edna Lewis, she cooked in top restaurants in New York.

In 2014, she opened her own restaurant called The Gray in Savannah.

Even though the industry is dominated by white men and it's incredibly hard to get financing, Mashama and her restaurant quickly became national stars.

Mashama has developed relationships with the Southeastern African American Farmers Organic Network, a savanna-based organization that works with black farmers to retain their land and build value in their land by farming organically.

So that change, that promise of a restaurant like The Gray, where a chef like Mashama Bailey, a African-American chef, has equity in the restaurant, has capital in the restaurant, and is telling a story about the South against a backdrop of Paula Dean's messaging about the region.

That to me shows great hope and great promise.

And that is one of the ways that black chefs are contributing to a newer and more important dialogue about the region.

I think we've reached a moment when black voices are getting their due when they've long ago earned the megaphone and we finally

turned up the amp.

And Mashama does it quietly and speaks with her food.

Michael does it by stepping to the podium and speaking eloquently.

Those voices matter a great deal and I think it's important at the close of my book to kind of redirect the conversation to them because so much of the past 20 and 30 years of kind of new southern cuisine has been white dominated.

John T recognizes that there's an irony in a white guy writing a book about southern food whose conclusion is that we've heard too much from white voices and too little from black ones.

But he is a southerner and he's both proud and ashamed of the region's history.

I was born and raised in Georgia and my wife and I now raise our young son in Mississippi.

I belong to those places and love them deeply.

I love this place and at times I'm angered by this place.

And I think that's what it takes to truly regard a place, to appreciate a place, to understand a place.

You have to hold in your mind this deep and abiding love for it and a strong and driving question of it.

I think that's the, I mean, you know, a blind obeisance to your place and your people gets you nowhere.

But southern food to John T is about far more than the South, both yesterday and today.

In a way, the story of the South is the story of America.

If you think about food as a passkey to understanding the way we comport ourselves as Americans.

If you think about food as a past key to thinking about our moral responsibilities to one another, if you think about food as an expression of creativity, if you think about food as

an

indulgence in which we revel in the joys of the land and the streams that course through our nation, there's no better place to apprehend those relationships than the American South.

The tragedy of the South, the poverty-engendered creativity of the South, and the promise of the South are all kind of reflective of these American ideals, these American tribulations writ small.

The history of Southern food is the history of American food culture, is the history of the nation.

So if the history of southern food is the history of the nation, we asked Michael, what is southern food?

Wow.

Now you know how to get somebody in trouble, don't don't you?

Lord of mercy.

Southern food is about inheritance, and it's also about transformation.

I, like everybody else, born into a southern family with southern people, kind of learned the sort of like static, frozen in time way of being southern.

It's bigger and better than that.

I've always said that the southern people are a family and joked that we are a dysfunctional family, but we're still a family.

And if our, if in our food ways, we have the wisdom to change, to evolve, to morph, to better, to shift, then we have the same, we can apply that same wisdom to issues of racial and social justice and become better family to each other.

For Michael, at its heart, this is what his Southern Discomfort Tour was all about.

It was less about creating an indictment against the white South.

than creating an invitation to dialogue, to eat, to sit, to talk, to figure it out.

And also make room for, as I said, all the rest of the folks who are Southern, who don't fit into that salt and pepper model, who are bringing other narratives to the table and new ways of understanding what being Southern and what Southern food is.

Because now Southern food is samosa in Atlanta.

It's Korean food.

It's Vietnamese food.

It's Middle Eastern food in Tennessee.

It's food created by transgender chefs.

It's food created by, you know, vegan black Jews.

And it's native people reclaiming pre-colonial southern food.

We really are blessed to live in a time of such cultural and culinary inflorescence.

And that's why I wanted this book to happen because I wanted us to have a piece of the table.

Because if we don't have a piece of the table, then we have to knock the legs off of it.

A huge thanks this episode to Michael Twitty.

Listener Shannon Bowens wrote in to suggest that we should interview him a while back.

Thank you, Shannon.

Michael has a new book coming out, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South.

It comes out on August 1st, but you can already pre-order it.

Links at gastropod.com.

An equally huge thanks to John T.

Edge, whose new book, The Potlicker Papers, is out on bookstore shelves now.

Both books tell so many more stories than we could cover in this episode, so definitely check them out.

Links on our website, as always.

We'd also like to thank Andrew Harper of the Southern Documentary Project for taping John T for us.

Let us know what you think by commenting at gastropod.com, or you can also find us on Twitter and Facebook at Gastropodcast.

We'll be back in two weeks with the terrifying tale of hundreds of thousands of beef burgers that turned out to be horse instead.

Till next time.

This month on Explain It to Me, we're talking about all things wellness.

We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well.

Collagen smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes and fitness trackers.

But what does it actually mean to be well?

Why do we want that so badly?

And is all this money really making us healthier and happier?

That's this month on Explain It To Me, presented by Pureleaf.