While I felt very much a Southerner as a child, being Jewish gave me an outsider's perspective. People look at region in a variety of ways, and I always paid attention to food. Food rises above other things for me. From a young age, I saw food as a barometer of cultural identity, and I was fascinated by how people defined themselves through their food traditions.

Southern food that appears in contemporary popular culture is so exaggerated that it's hardly recognizable to most Southerners. This enriching of Southern food - fatter, richer, more over the top - is what we typically see on TV, in Hollywood films, and in Southern-style or country-themed chains like Cracker Barrel. Southern food becomes a caricature, like characters and props in a reality TV show.

Americans are experiencing a general hunger for authentic regional cuisine, of which Southern food represents one of the best and oldest examples.

Terroir - the taste of place - was important from the early South of the first Indian, African, and Europeans to the nineteenth-century South. During that time, Southerners ate far more locally and seasonally, from the ground they knew and grew up on. That idea connects back to today. You are a place. And as a Southerner, the food you place in your body speaks of your personal history, and of the broader Southern history.

Most Southerners recognize when a story about their own experience feels off-kilter or offensive. But Southerners are also fascinated by the way their region is presented in popular culture. It is exciting to see how filmmakers take great care to present worlds in which race, region, and food are deeply intertwined.

In studying food, you embrace everything. Food exposes the long, complex history of the South - slavery, Jim Crow segregation, class struggle, extreme hunger, sexism, and disenfranchisement. These issues are revealed through food encounters, and they contrast this with the pleasure and the inventiveness of Southern cuisine. Food is always at the heart of daily life in the South.

When I'm asked to define "Southern food," I usually turn that question back to my audience and ask them what they think. I hear responses like fried chicken, catfish, barbecue, collard greens, and sweet potatoes. These are excellent examples, because they are historically grounded. You can trace each dish back to the people who brought these food traditions to the South. Today, these foods are central to the core culinary grammar of the American South.