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.

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.

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.

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.

The working poor in the South are often blamed for their reliance on "traditional" Southern food, while in reality, most are eating the same heavily processed, cheap, convenience foods that the majority of working people eat across the United States.

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.