I 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.

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.

If there was ever a food that had politics behind it, it is soul food. Soul food became a symbol of the black power movement in the late 1960s. Chef Marcus Samuelsson, with his soul food restaurant Red Rooster in Harlem, is very clear about what soul food represents. It is a food of memory, a food of labor.

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

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.

I 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.

If you live in the South, you are often a very short distance from a garden, or even a farm owned by your family or by your neighbor's family. When I was a child, even though I grew up in an era of highly processed food, the grocery store sold local field peas, lima beans, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes. While there is a deep sense of place in the South - and the foods of this place - I don't want to present a pastoral vision of the contemporary South. The majority of Southerners cannot access fresh, local, affordable food.