Told through the Foods We Eat

Above: Crystal Wilkinson and Ron Davis’s amazing bookstore+coffee shop+community space, Wild Fig, in Lexington, Kentucky.

Friends,

Through a confluence of fate and good luck, I was able to attend this year’s Southern Foodways Alliance Summer Symposium. I became a fan of SFA after finding their podcast Gravy while looking for food-related radio, and have since consumed their wide-ranging content. They do oral histories, short films, a quarterly magazine, and a series of anthologies of southern food writing. Their tagline is “stories of the changing American South told through the foods we eat.”

The conference reflected the same broadness in that mission statement. We listened to academics, chefs, community organizers, authors, and people from local nonprofits. The people I broke bread with included someone who is about to publish a peach-based cookbook (and was exposed to the Georgia vs. South Carolina peach bragging conflict in the process), a Lodge cast iron sales rep, and the owner of a bakery in Virginia endorsed by a former president . I learned a lot, including that there was a Jewish-owned distillery in my hometown of Paducah, Kentucky that I’d never heard of. I watched a folk opera about corn . We sampled food from local restaurants, from the fancy/historic Holly Hill Inn to a tacqueria in a neighborhood known as Mexington . We also had food grown on local farms, including several that are represented by the organization Black Soil , which is doing really cool work in terms of reconnecting people with farms and raising the profile of Black-owned farms.

The food was incredibly good, of course. I think a cup of grits changed my life.

One of the best aspects of the conference was the way in which the host city itself, Lexington, was always in the spotlight. I’m a very city-centric traveler. I like to sit in spots where I can see the city moving past, I like to walk, I like to try to figure out public transportation. Often, when I go to an academic conference (or even a writers’ conference), it feels like I’m taking part in a walled-off event that has no connection to the city it’s in beyond that being the place they got an economic incentive to be in. This symposium was completely different. They varied up where we met, so we had to move around the city to attend events. Many of the attendees were, by design, from the area, and they were on hand to tell us about the places we were visiting or nearby attractions or things we should check out near our accommodations. The presenters, many of whom were also from the area, had physical locations associated with their work we could go visit during downtime (including The Wild Fig, pictured above). All of these little connections to Lexington amplified the rest of the trip as well: I’d pass by places and realize I’d heard someone talking about it or I’d be thinking about what some of the artists’ normal day-to-day Lexington life was like as I walked through their farmers’ markets or sat in a coffee shop.

Ultimately, it made me be really present in both the moment and the geographic space in a way I don’t feel like I often am.

Now, SFA has a bigger budget than many organizations, but I still think smaller/leaner organizations could learn something from them in terms of incorporating the city and thus giving something to the attendees to have in common beyond binge drinking. But maybe that’s not appealing! Or there’s not enough incentive to do so. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just a little more primed than usual to want to be recognizant of the reality of the space I occupy, when so much of my life takes place on circuitry I never see.

How do you like to get to know a city? If you were thinking about moving somewhere, what are the first aspects of local life that you would investigate? Of course, the traffic, the weather, and the housing costs are all important, but what beyond that?

Where is the heartbeat of your city?

Further Reading:

• Conference related: Crystal Wilkinson on Black land. Margaret Renkl on Southern writers. Jessica Salfia on the WV teacher strikes. Eli Keel on Robert Gipe . Knoxville in photos. Elizabeth Catte on pushing back against Elegy . Max Blau on Chiliquila Ogletree . Chris Offutt on writing about Appalachia.
• Helen Rosner on Anthony Bourdain .
• Overflowing with tomatoes like we are? This recipe was a delicious and simple one: Tomato tarte tatin .
• I’ve recommended Anne Helen Petersen a few times before, but here it is again. Her latest newsletter is especially good.
• This summer, in article form or tweet form .
• I get to vote for MJ Hegar, which is pretty cool .
• Happy Bloomsday . (The Ulysses x Crazy Ex-Girlfriend crossover event you didn’t know you needed.)
• Happy 4th of July .

I hope this note finds you well. It’s been raining an unusual amount here. I’m trying to perfect a Mexican chocolate-style bread and it’s going okay. I’ll give you a recipe when I’m really happy with it.

-g