An often-repeated line about the southern food story is that restaurant culture was delayed in the U.S. South relative to the rest of the nation. Even Kim Severson’s recent New York Times profile of female chefs in North Carolina is a version of the argument. Concurrently, Elizabeth Engelhardt made the argument in her most recent book, A Mess of Greens, that we should study the foods and tables in the middle—beyond the fetishized plantation tables of excess or the differently romanticized tables of black and white poverty—to understand the daily decisions that connect past and future, processed and home grown, regional and national, individual and structural of southern food. This discussion, titled “Boardinghouse Space: Rewriting Southern Food Studies,” proposes that the public, middling restaurant table has been hiding in plain sight: the understudied, undercounted, but ever-present boardinghouse table in southern communities large and small.
This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.