Debunking the mythologized South of the food writing world

Pick up a contemporary cookbook or food magazine from the American South and you may notice that much of the writing isn’t really about the food at all. In the late twentieth century, Southern boosters began elevating particular foods and drinks into what they lovingly called “foodways.” Their aim, however, was less to celebrate the food than to rebrand the Southern culture such foodways were now said to express—replacing the troubled history of the Confederacy with a folksy, authentic, and beneficent cornbread nation. This “timeless” way of life, they claimed, not only unified a hundred million Southerners, it also distinguished them from the rest of the country and the world.

Scholars who study the region today—historians, sociologists, literary critics—have rarely taken these claims seriously enough to respond to them. But as The Strange Career of Cornbread Nationalism shows, foodways fantasies and the feelings they strive to work up carry an ugly, antidemocratic legacy that warrants closer examination.

Blunt, authoritative, and surprisingly funny, this book questions a seemingly harmless image so widely disseminated it has been taken for granted as the truth, even as history paints a very different picture.