Edible South: the Power of Food and the Making of an American Region - Hardcover

Marcie Cohen Ferris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1469617684 ISBN 13: 9781469617688

Publisher: University North Carolina Pr, 2014

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"In this colorful and well-researched history, [Ferris] shows persuasively how food has shaped and nourished Southern identity."--"Kirkus"

"Ferris has exhaustively traced the origins of southern cooking. . . . [She] delves into the South's most significant foods. . . [and] performs a particularly important job by painstakingly explaining just how slave culture and subsequent Jim Crow laws and segregation made southern cooking unique."--"Booklist"

Impressive." --"Daily Beast"

[A] very readable survey--"Brown Alumni Magazine"

"This is a landmark study, thoroughly researched, clearly conveyed, and packed with illustrations. Ferris provides scholars and general readers much to savor."--"American Historical Review"
Impressive." --"Daily Beast"
[A] very readable survey--"Brown Alumni Magazine"
In the new and expanding field of food studies, ["The Edible South"] is a monumental book against which others shall be judged.--"Clarion-Ledger"
Extensively researched, "The Edible South" takes a new perspective on the American region and its rich, tumultuous history.--A "Saveur" September 2014 Best Food and Drink Release
"Demonstrates how power dynamics shaped Southern identity throughout its history and that food played a crucial part in its negotiation.--"Southern Historian"

About the Author:

Marcie Cohen Ferris, associate professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South.

About this edition

• Publisher: University North Carolina Pr
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1469617684
• ISBN 13: 9781469617688
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 512