Foodways come together in engaging academic work

Ask one’s family and friends what the word “foodways” means—I have tried this experiment several times—and one likely will receive either a puzzled look or the response that it references the methods through which the foods we eat come from farmers and ranchers to our dinner table. 

However, foodways is a relatively new term social scientists use to describe the cultural and economic practices relating to the production, distribution, and consumption of food. These scholars study what we eat, and how and why we eat it, and then connect that information to such diverse topics as social customs, race, gender and class. 

In The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South, editors John T. Edge, Director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, Elizabeth Engelhardt, a professor at the University of Texas-Austin, and Ted Ownby, Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, have collected sixteen essays in which the scholars “use food and foodways as lenses to examine human experience,” in this case, human experience gained from living in the American South.

This study of the relationship between humanity and food is not, of course, entirely new. Books and papers examining the impact of food on society—its social customs, its medicine, its technology, even its religion and politics—have increased in number, particularly in the last half-century. Take for example Reay Tannahill’s Food in History, first published in 1973 and later revised in 1988. An amateur food historian, Tannahill was one of many authors who called the public’s attention to food’s role in shaping mores and culture. That her erudite, witty book has remained in print reveals the public’s interest in what are now called foodways.

Its emphasis on regionalism distinguishes The Larder. Though the essays are definitely more academic than, say, Tannahill’s sweeping narrative, most readers will nonetheless find some topic with which they can identify. In “Bodies of the Dead,” for example, Wiley C. Prewitt Jr. looks at hunting in the American South, its place in the culture of food and its present condition. Prewitt gives a quick but thorough history of hunting in the South, pointing out the differences among game and hunting methods that African-Americans and poor whites preferred opposed to the elites’ methods. His comments on smaller game, particularly rabbits and possums, will remind older readers of their childhood, when wooden rabbit traps were a common sight in fields and men prided themselves on dogs that could tree a possum. He goes on to point out what many observers already know, that fewer hunters today have resulted in an explosion among certain animal populations, particularly deer. (Prewitt offers the observation that hunting has become popular for “those interested in the provenance of the meat they eat and those who seek to own the deaths of the animals they consume.”)

One essay that should interest many readers is Katie Rawson’s “America’s Place for Inclusion,” in which the author takes an academic stroll through Waffle House, the diner that has in the last 60 years blossomed from a single eatery in Atlanta to a national franchise. Rawson gives readers the gift of all fine writers of nonfiction: she invites us see a familiar object with new eyes. She describes Waffle House aspects that patrons may take for granted. It has remained a diner rather than a fast-food restaurant; it has remained an “open kitchen” restaurant,” which allows employees closer proximity to the customers; it offers, despite numerous failures, the idea of a restaurant attempting to practice inclusiveness in terms of its clientele.

A lengthy article by Justin A. Nystrom presents “Italian New Orleans” with an in-depth look at some of the immigrant families, their restaurants, and their influence on the French-Cajun culture of New Orleans. Tom Hanchett’s “A Salad Bowl City” examines Charlotte, particularly Central Avenue, and again looks at the influence of different immigrant groups on the eating habits of the Queen City. In “Eating Technology at Krispy Kreme,” Carolyn De La Pena asserts: “Krispy Kreme doughnuts have radiated a particular set of cultural complexities about the place of machines in the South.”

The Larder will not appeal to all readers. Some of the essays are freighted with academic language. Moreover, in some cases, some of the prejudices of these scholars relating to gender, race, and class mar what would otherwise be fascinating history. In Rawson’s Waffle House essay, an employee gives her logoed hat to a man looking to buy one. The man then goes home and washes “crusty old hair gel” out of the hat before wearing it. Rawson analyzes this incident as if it were somehow indicative of class differences, labor issues and snobbery.

I thought the guy just wanted a clean hat.

The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South, edited by John T. Edge, Elizabeth Engelhardt and Ted Ownby. The University of Georgia Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8203-4555-0