Although entitled The Edible South: The Power of Food in the Making of an American Region, Marcie Cohen Ferris’s culinary concordance to southern history constantly reminds us that what is edible is not always nourishing, that the power of food is often found in the absence of it, and that food has often been key to the South’s undoing, as well as its making. Not a book about southern foodways per se, Ferris’s sprawling survey is really a re-staging of various key dramas of southern history, with food as the key prop. Along the way, she provides an account of the ongoing fetishization of southern foodways, a tale that begins in the outdoor kitchens of the plantation and continues in uncanny ways in the glossy pages of Garden and Gun and in the general rhetoric of neoagrarian southern revivalism. As is often the case with studies of southern culture, The Edible South wrestles with these dueling and sometimes intertwining narratives. It should appeal to folklorists interested in the southern appetite, or at least to folklorists interested in prevailing appetites for all things southern.

Ferris cautions us in the introduction that the book is not an encyclopedia. It does function as a handbook or a guidebook, however, and it reads more like a travel narrative than a scholarly monograph. But the landscape here is historical, with the book divided chronologically into three sections: Old South, New South, and Modern South. The first section focuses primarily on the role of food on the plantation, and Ferris treads familiar ground in highlighting various conflicting accounts of plantation sustenance. Through the lens of WPA slave narratives and the accounts of Northern-born governesses and European travelers, Ferris reveals a fraught culinary world that struck some as idyllic, pastoral, and bountiful, others as sumptuous and decadent, and still others as barbaric and repressive. Although it is not her theme, Ferris alludes occasionally here and throughout to the folk roots of southern cuisine and to historical rationales for those roots: West African precedents for the consumption of leafy greens and methods of rice preparation, for instance, or the suitability of pork for southern climates, terrains, and economies.

The story progresses with an overview of the Civil War through the lens of food and hunger. Despite the South’s long growing season and rich game resources, its inability to adequately or efficiently supply its army or its populace during the war led, directly and ironically, to its defeat by Union forces, who were often well-provisioned by an industrial food network rich in canned protein. Close examinations of specific scenarios, such as the Siege of Vicksburg, provide vivid illustrations of her point. The section ends with chapters on Reconstruction, which focus primarily on the efforts of white southerners to deal with a new home economy in which food was suddenly not cheaply produced by slave labor. Here, too, in Reconstruction-era cookbooks, Ferris surveys early precedents for the nostalgic fetishization of the Old South’s domestic economy.

In the second section, The New South, Ferris chronicles the mixed legacy of various federal, industrial, educational, and philanthropic efforts to reform and remediate Southern agriculture and the Southern diet. Even as the Rockefeller foundation, extension agents, land grant colleges, settlements schools, and Northern scientists promoted canning, empowered southern women through a progressive system of Domestic Science, and made steps towards eliminating seemingly epidemic pellagra, industrialized mechanization and the crop lien system robbed food of its nutrients and manual laborers of their jobs, often leaving small tenant farmers in inescapable debt. In these chapters, Ferris documents how federal programs and New Deal propaganda intersected with a burgeoning counter-industrial southern tourism market and how this meeting contributed both to various types of ethnic regionalism and, in some cases, to ethnic stereotyping. Just as Lyle Saxon’s regional collections from “Creole Country,” for instance, bolstered a regional identity expressed partially in southern folkways and foodways in particular, a darker, parallel longing for a prelapsarian Old South became incarnate in the coon songs of Tin Pan Alley and in increasingly prevalent Aunt Jemima and Dixie-branded goods—yet another stage in the ever-expanding commodification of symbolic southernness.

In the final section, the Modern South, food is the axis along which Ferris explores the legacy of Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, segregation, desegregation, and the food-based programs of the Great Society, which, like the benevolent programs of the New Deal, left a mixed legacy. Ferris is at her best here, skillfully illuminating the degree to which the crucial struggles of the Civil Rights movement were waged around basic food-related issues, and particularly around the question of who could and who couldn’t eat where. The chapters on lunch counter protests, sit-ins, and the 1961 Freedom Rides are the book’s most poignant. This section concludes with an extended analysis of the contemporary New Regionalism in Southern cooking, with particular focus on the movement’s origins in both the New American cuisine of the 1980s and the counter-cultural, local, and organic food movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Ferris’s tone as she discusses these trends flickers from a foodie’s gushing approval to a historian’s wry skepticism. There is so much to love, after all, in the sumptuous notion of terroir, in the cultural insurgent’s DIY desires, and in the mystically creolized roots of southern cuisine; but against the backdrop of Ferris’s involved tale, these culinary imaginaries seem both hopelessly bourgeois and eerily similar to an antebellum agrarian idyll. The New Regionalism may bewitch us, but Ferris seems to ask, haven’t we heard this sort of thing before? Are we truly progressing or are we trapped yet again in a Dixie feedback loop that tends to distort, invert, and recycle certain problematic tropologies inherent in Southern culture and the discourses surrounding it? In posing these questions, Ferris recapitulates a point that comes to bear in many studies of the American South: for better or worse, and despite all the spanking newness of various progressive southern enterprises, old times there are not forgotten.

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[Review length: 996 words • Review posted on May 4, 2015]