The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region by Marcie Cohen Ferris

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Reviews about this book

  • Saveur

    Clocking in at about 350 pages, it's a commitment to be sure, but it's one that will leave you feeling informed, engaged, and, most of all, hungry.

    Full review
  • ISBN 10 146962995X
  • ISBN 13 9781469629957
  • Published Aug 01 2016
  • Format Paperback
  • Page Count 496
  • Language English
  • Edition Reprint
  • Countries United States
  • Publisher University of North Carolina Press

Publishers Text

In The Edible South, Marcie Cohen Ferris presents food as a new way to chronicle the American South's larger history. Ferris tells a richly illustrated story of southern food and the struggles of whites, blacks, Native Americans, and other people of the region to control the nourishment of their bodies and minds, livelihoods, lands, and citizenship. The experience of food serves as an evocative lens onto colonial settlements and antebellum plantations, New South cities and civil rights-era lunch counters, chronic hunger and agricultural reform, counterculture communes and iconic restaurants as Ferris reveals how food--as cuisine and as commodity--has expressed and shaped southern identity to the present day.

The region in which European settlers were greeted with unimaginable natural abundance was simultaneously the place where enslaved Africans vigilantly preserved cultural memory in cuisine and Native Americans held tight to kinship and food traditions despite mass expulsions. Southern food, Ferris argues, is intimately connected to the politics of power. The contradiction between the realities of fulsomeness and deprivation, privilege and poverty, in southern history resonates in the region's food traditions, both beloved and maligned.

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