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It's not a panacea, but nothing is. When you have almost nothing to start with, there is always food. I'm from the south and the foodie boom has been an enormous benefit for us. For most of my life there was a hard push to make a distinction between "southern food" and "soul food". It was a push from both ends of the political spectrum, as older white critics tried to keep it "white" and black critics in the 60s and 70s tried to get the taste of repression and feelings of stigma out of the menu. It led to a lot of weird scenarios where a critic might call a plate of greens from Oakland "enlightened" and the same plate in Memphis "limp, servile, and impotent". That's still a thing. From a purely rational viewpoint this seems ridiculous, but from the cultural standpoint it makes sense. Still, it's reification, anthropomorphism, and all that jazz, like Harriet Beecher Stowe calling loblolly pines lazy and immoral. The foodie boom offered a lot of mutual pride for a region that has always had an inferiority complex. As the lines blurred it was less "black" and "white" food and more "our" food. Everyone grew up eating collards, grits, cornbread, catfish, and okra. We all ate BBQ and drank sweet tea on the 4th. We all remembered eating tomato sandwiches with pepper and salt on cheap white bread as a kid. We all had pimento cheese. It was the one thing we weren't obligated to feel shame and resentment about in a region that is nothing but shame and resentment. Not that it's all peach cobbler. As a retired shrimper friend of mine said after seeing a $24 bowl of shrimp & grits, "Man, this is what we ate when we couldn't afford food and now they are pricing us out of it." Food is important. |