What is Southern Food?
Southern food is as diverse as the regions that make up the South. Charles Reagan Wilson, the Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, writes, “The South can be seen more productively, perhaps, as a collection of regions. The Appalachians, the Alleghenies, the Blue Ridge, and the Ozarks are the Mountain South. The Upland South has been a place of hill-country farmers, the tobacco business, and textile mills. The Lowland South is the Deep South, a place of cotton growing, the blues, warm Gulf Coast breezes, Florida beaches and Latin rhythms. The urban South has been the center of the New South, from Atlanta newspaper editor Henry Grady in the 1880s to Andrew Young today. One could chart more specific landscapes in Cajun Louisiana, the Kentucky bluegrass, the Mississippi Delta, and the Piney Woods. Each place is defined by its food as well as its terrain. Barbecue provides a classic example. All Southern regions can affirm the importance
