“The Potlikker Papers - Food History of the Modern South” by John T. Edge, 2017
This is
basically a foodie’s guide to the U.S. South, with a garnish of politics on the side.
It is mostly a form of apolitical
cultural tub thumping common to upscale Southern liberals. It starts with a number of interesting chapters
that link the civil rights movement with food and one about rural hippies on
“The Farm” bringing the vegan to Tennessee. Then as the myth goes, after the 1978 election of
Carter the ‘New South’ was born (once again) and politics and economics
disappeared. Negatives are now just
‘stereotypes.’ The book becomes a long boosterish
litany of southern restaurants and roadhouses, chefs, culinary teachers and
food writers. It reads like an
advertising article from any local newspaper praising the latest restaurant
opening. In the process Edge almost claims Southern ownership of the farm-to-table
food movement. Only at the end does the
author wake up after the Paula Deen scandal and realize that food is STILL intertwined
with politics and economics in the South. As it is anywhere.
Suffering
from some kind of inferiority complex, pro-Southern culture professors
and pundits seem to have a serious blind spot when it comes to politics,
economics, statistics or quality-of-life gauges. They dwell on their mint
juleps and shrimp and grits and their next visit to a new restaurant. Edge himself seems to be for local and
non-industrial foodways, which is certainly progressive. But then he celebrates Memphis ribs being Fed Exed across the
country. He’s against industrial farming
but has an enthusiastic chapter on many of the fast food chains that came out
of the South, led by Kentucky Fried Chicken but which includes Hardees, Burger
King, Wendy’s, Chik fil-A, Long John Silver’s, Popeye’s, Schlotsky’s and others. He says at one point that vegetables are the
heart of southern cooking, then has involved chapters on artisanal pork
and dry-rub barbecue pork. He
understands that food involves health, but then ignores the idea. He never covers organic food, agro-ecology or sustainability. So it is hard to know what he actually
believes other than Southern promotion.
In that sense he comes across as the breathless professional P.T. Barnum
or Babbitt of ‘southern foodways.’ As he
puts it, food unites the South. I’ll put it another way. Food unites humanity.
Edge’s
early chapters are interesting. As
radicals like Fannie Lou Hamer might have said, “you can’t eat ballots.” A founder of the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party, she later started local co-op farms that provided fresh
vegetables and pork to starving African American’s in the Mississippi Delta. Edge profiles a home cook in Montgomery, Alabama
who fed Civil Rights activists like King and others in her house restaurant. He talks about a heroic waiter in a ‘white
gentry’ restaurant in Greenwood,
Mississippi who frankly talked to
the national media about racism and got fired for it. He reminds us of the Black Panther Party’s
breakfast program, which provided healthy and nutritious food, not chips and
soda. He also reminds us that many
left-wing black nationalists opposed ‘soul food’ due to its negative health
impacts. In these chapters he does not
forget that segregation’s intention was to hurt and exploit African-American
labor, land and businesses.
Paula Deen’s
racist 2013 comments as she cooked black-created food knocks Edge out of his
food coma. Deen was a ridiculous
southern TV cook who substituted doughnuts for bread in sandwiches, displaying
an unhealthy sweets fetish that is common in southern foods. African-Americans brought rice, black-eyed
peas, okra, watermelons, Kola nuts (first used in Coca-Cola), coffee, kidney
and lima beans and yams to the Americas. The book’s title comes from potlikker, the
healthy broth left in the master's pot that slaves used for their own cooking. Corn, the main ingredient of grits,
cornbread, bourbon, some whiskies and hominy, was a south-eastern Native
American food, as are peanuts, squash, sweet potatoes and others. Edge claims southern cooking originated from
black female cooks on plantations or private homes – though those many Southerners
without slaves or without servants must have eaten something! His references to Appalachian cooks might
provide an answer.
Of most
theoretical interest is Edge’s description of a nationalist and patriotic
debate over what is ‘American’ food. He
ignores the fact that the Americas
stretch from Tierra Del Fuego to the Arctic, so the U.S. cannot appropriate the name
for itself. Edge describes how many
southern chefs imitated the dreaded French, then except for the ones from New Orleans, shouldered
them away for more patriotic dishes. Edge
vacillates between nationalist tub-thumping for a ‘brawny’ American cuisine of
certain designated dishes (barbecue!) while dissing fusion - and realizing
that a nation of immigrants, including African-Americans, makes it inevitable
that fusion cuisines exist. The problem
with fusion is that local food cannot include slave-grown avocados from Mexico
or exotic ingredients from everywhere, so only melding the two ideas will be
environmentally possible.
 |
| Picking green tomatoes in Florida |
In the
second to the last chapter Edge regains an edge by commenting on the
slave-labor conditions for Latino workers in chicken processing plants and in Florida tomato
fields. The South hosts 3 of the top 4
chicken producers. But in the
process he’s praised right-to-work laws, corporate welfare and how Reagan helped
the South “colonize” the nation. As I
said, they have a very large blind-spot.
Southern
regionalism as not imagined by Edge is actually different than many
other U.S. regionalisms given the peculiar nature of the South’s long history
and its continued role as the most politically backward area in the U.S. There is no new South, unlike the post-Carter
propaganda of the Southern professional class and in spite of the proliferation
of cul-de-sacs and skyscrapers. There is
a newer, updated version of the ‘old South’ that has changed its clothes and
has still not been defeated.
On a
personal note, I’ve had a platter of 40 crayfish in a restaurant on Bourbon Street. I’ve eaten tasteless shrimp and grits in Athens. I’ve eaten at the touristy ‘southern’
restaurants in Charleston. ‘Southern’ food for the most part is heavy,
greasy food, light on the vegetables – rural comfort food really. I avoid it
except for the excellent cuisine in New
Orleans. There is
no doughnut like a beignet I gaur-ron-tee!
Other prior
reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left: “Southern
Cultural Nationalism,” “The Neo-Confederate States,” “Florida Will Sink,”
“Monroe, Alabama & To Kill a Mockingjay,” “Salt Sugar Fat,” “Foodopoly,”
“Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking,” “A Foodies Guide to Capitalism,” “Behind
the Kitchen Door,” “The Italian Brand,” “What is the Matter With the Rural U.S.?” “A
Redder Shade of Green.”
And I got
it gratis at Normal Books, Athens
Georgia
The Cranky
Yankee
January 25,
2020
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