The study of foodways - the intersection of food and culture - addresses a central issue in the humanities: how we connect the great dramas of history with the lives of ordinary people.
Marcie Cohen FerrisI think about what I eat every day. I try to eat as locally as I can and as healthily as I can. When you prepare a historic recipe that could as easily been eaten in the 1800s as in 2014, it is a powerful act. When you take that food and its associated memory and put it in your body, it becomes part of who you are. While most people do not think about it consciously, there is an honoring of history that happens during that meal.
Marcie Cohen FerrisTerroir - 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.
Marcie Cohen FerrisIn 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.
Marcie Cohen FerrisAmericans are experiencing a general hunger for authentic regional cuisine, of which Southern food represents one of the best and oldest examples.
Marcie Cohen FerrisMost 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.
Marcie Cohen Ferris