While most visitors know to drink bourbon at Husk and order fried chicken at Martha Lou’s, they probably don’t keep thoughts of slavery, saved seeds, poverty, and gentrification in mind while touring the city.
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Since I live in Charleston, I skipped right to the Restaurant Renaissance chapter extolling the works of South Carolina chefs like Martha Lou Gadsden and Sean Brock. The Potlikker Papers is a thorough investigation into the South’s past and present, and why it’s so important to know both. He explains the complicated manner in which Southern cuisine spread across America, and why dishes like shrimp and grits have become synonymous with Southern culture and dining throughout the country. While cataloging the history of cuisine in the modern South, Edge also tells stories of how civil rights movements and social changes were nourished around tables in restaurants and homes. Edge’s new book The Potlikker Papers proves that. This is inappropriate.” Like it or not, food is political, and John T. My least favorite Facebook hater is the commenter who feels it is necessary to tell us that they are unfollowing Eater because, “I came here for food, not politics. The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South But that’s the point of writing the real story of a human body. The traumas chronicled in the book include sexual assault, racism, and eating disorders. If you love food and restaurants, it’s worth interrogating the attitudes you have about bodies - both your own and others’. I’m still reckoning with the feelings kicked up by the book. Like that episode of This American Life Gay appeared on, Hunger forced me to confront my deepest beliefs about (my) fatness, beliefs I’ve constructed mental fortresses to avoid admitting. I have been carrying the weight of it with me in the days since. I read Hunger in one day, bringing it from my couch to an appointment and back to my couch again.
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(Ina Garten, as Gay points out, is a rare exception a woman who looks like she loves to eat, talking about food with gusto and without a whiff of shame.) We see them in photo spreads, on videos that play on our television and Facebook feeds. There’s a world of slim food-world women. literally everywhere?), there’s true currency in not looking like you give in to your hungers. The food we celebrate in print, on websites, on Instagram, and on television is (usually) at odds with the body our culture tells me I should have (or at least, should want to have).īut in food media (as in. It’s an uncompromising look at what it’s like to navigate the world with what Gay calls her “unruly” body that doctors cruelly label “super morbidly obese.” The injuries, violence, care, and comfort her body sustains or provides are the organizing thread of the memoir.įatness (along with its twin pillar, dieting) is a part of my life, and has been since puberty - I’m what Gay calls “Lane Bryant fat.” Working in food media, for me, is bizarre on that front. I’ve been eagerly awaiting Hunger, in large part because I’m still processing an episode of This American Life from last year called “ Tell Me I’m Fat” that featured an interview with Roxane Gay as its third act.