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Serving Up the American South: Foodways and Southern History

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 widereaching 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