Welcome to the SFA

Welcome to the Southern Foodways Alliance -- an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture with headquarters at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi.

The Southern Foodways Alliance documents and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the American South. We set a common table where black and white, rich and poor -- all who gather-- may consider our history and our future in a spirit of reconciliation.

Could hominy bring harmony? Race, food on the table at session

By Drew Jubera
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, October 10, 2004

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Oxford, Miss. --- When asked to speak at a conference here this weekend on race and food --- the South's two hardiest obsessions --- Bernard Lafayette thought the organizers were nuts.

"I said, 'I don't know much about food,' " recalled the '60s civil rights activist who rode with Freedom Riders and sat at lunch counter sit-ins throughout the segregated South. "But they convinced me I have a lot of experience on food in jail. I've been in jail 27 times."

Lafayette remembered how jail food got better the farther into the country he was locked up. It was fresher, tastier, more down-home.

His mouth practically watered at the memory of buttermilk biscuits inside Mississippi's Parchman Prison, served with thick sorghum and bacon.
He also remembered a jail in rural Raymond, Miss.

"We were beaten and didn't stay long, but the food was good," Lafayette said. "The rice and stew was well-seasoned. I hated to leave."

Such were the unlikely remembrances, acknowledgements and debates at this annual conference put on by the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi.

Among this lively group of academics, cooks, historians and assorted foodies, the issue of race and cuisine has often boiled over during discussions of everything from fried chicken to barbecue to cakes.

So this year, for the group's seventh symposium --- on the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, which desegregated, among other things, the South's whites-only restaurants --- the program committee decided to debate and celebrate race for an entire conference titled "Southern Food in Black and White."

Among the talks during the four days of sessions, which end Sunday: "Mammy and Ole Miss: Domestic Relations," "Possum 'n' Taters --- Where Have You Gone?" and "Methods and Ethnographics of Watermelon Pickles."

"Every time we've had one of these meetings, the conversation always goes back to racial issues," said Damon Lee Fowler, a Savannah food writer and president of the group's diverse board of directors. "There was that uneasy balance that existed in the South that led to its cuisine, and this year we decided we were mature enough as an organization to take it on. We'd always tap-danced around the issue."

In fact, it was at one of the group's first conferences, in 1999, when Fowler, who is white, and Jessica Harris, a food writer who is black, started what amounted to a verbal food fight among members over the racial origins of fried chicken.

Similar exchanges have erupted virtually every year. Cookbook writer Nathalie Dupree remembered someone calling out that she was a racist after she challenged the African influence of some dish at one conference.

"I must have cried for two hours," she said.

But Dupree also understood why the subject ignited such strong reactions.

"People care because food is power," she said. "Whoever has control of the food, whether it's in Somalia or the South, had the power."

Added Adrian Miller, former deputy director of the Clinton administration's initiative on race, who moderated some of the weekend's sessions: "This is a marriage of two good things. If folks are just talking about race, people are either just talking to the converted or differing, and it peters out. You need something to sustain the effort."

That something at this conference is food --- almost literally tons of frying, steaming, simmering Southern stuff, with the distinctions of black and white quickly blurred in bitefuls of catfish and Coca-Cola brisket and sweet potato pie.

For some black members, the symbolism of having a conference on this subject at this magnolia-scented Deep South school, which needed federal troops to integrate it in 1962, was not lost.

"This is wonderful for me to come on this campus and see what they're doing today," said Leah Chase, a New Orleans creole chef and author. She recalled James Meredith, the black student who integrated Ole Miss, eating breakfast in her restaurant every morning with his lawyer before going to court.

"Now I see people coming together to talk about it," she said. "You're never going to get people to think just like you --- who would want that anyway? --- but you have to talk together. I think you get to know people through their food."

For most here, the real issue is no longer what food belongs to which people --- often billed as Southern food vs. soul food --- but acknowledging the roles of African-Americans in a segregated society that let them cook for whites and serve whites, but not eat with whites.

"This isn't about debating," said Harris, who has debated often in the past. "Your greens aren't like my greens, but they're both green. Therefore, we have something in common.

"But I would like to see some of the old black food traditions given their props," she added. "For us to acknowledge that they were a real and vital and vibrant part of foodways in what is unarguably one of the most unique culinary regions in the country."

Those props were given early in the conference, when a lunch of Coca-Cola brisket, served under the giant oaks of the university's famous "Grove," was made a tribute to the black cooks who served the all-white campus for more than a century.

Others sang the praises of black cooks in white households who turned otherwise bland shrimp dishes into memorable feasts, or of black cooks at famous New Orleans restaurants who died unknown and unremembered --- something that seems especially grievous in this era of the celebrity chef.

Still others debunked the mythology of hunky-dory relationships between white and black Southern women in homes during segregation: one servant, the other served.

Trudier Harris, co-editor of the "Oxford Companion to African American Literature" and daughter of a Tuscaloosa, Ala., domestic, recalled learning to cook meals at age 11 because her mother left before breakfast and returned after supper, cooking for her white employers.

"If we can't destroy the romance of black women working in white homes," she said, "we should work toward humanizing these women."

"That whole history has been buried," said Diane McWhorter, author of "Carry Me Home," the Pulitzer Prize-winning book about race relations in segregated Birmingham.

Her talk at the conference: "Back of the House: An Appreciation." "The front-of-the-house, back-of-the-house relationship among Southerners," summed up John T. Edge, the Southern Foodways director.

"There is this whole idea that soul food and the products of African-American experiences were innate, that they somehow sprung from the womb being able to cook fried chicken," Edge said. "When you talk about 'Mary's got the touch,' you're not paying homage to her 30 years in the kitchen. You're saying she did it through some sort of hoodoo, as opposed to damn hard work."

Nobody here thinks this symposium is going to turn race relations upside-down; most just think it will help get blacks and whites talking about a difficult subject the way Southerners have traditionally hashed things out: one dish at a time.

"I don't see this turning into this great global thing," Fowler said. "But within the microcosm of the South, I hope people will keep moving closer to understanding how interconnected we are as Southerners."

Added Edge, of something like fried chicken being a pathway to racial enlightenment, "Food is sneaky like that."

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