Southern Craft Food Diversity: Challenging the Myth of a US Food Revival

Description

An accessible and timely contribution to recent debates on diversity and the craft food movement. Driven by consumers' desire for slow and local food, craft breweries, traditional butchers, fromagers, and bakeries have been popping up across the US in the last twenty years. Typically urban and staffed predominantly by white middle class men, these industries are perceived as a departure from tradition and mainstream lifestyles. But this image obscures the diverse communities that have supported artisanal foods for centuries. Using the oral histories of over 100 people, this book brings to light the voices, experiences and histories of marginalised groups who keep Southern foodways alive. The larger than life stories of these individuals reveal the complex reality behind the movement and show how they are the backbone of the so-called "new explosion" of craft food.

Kaitland M. Byrd is Lecturer in Sociology at Virginia Tech and a visiting scholar at the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan.

"Although we may conceive of the American South through culinary stereotypes, Kaitland Byrd demonstrates how this view misleads. Examining the diversity of curing meats, winemaking, and fishing, Byrd powerfully argues that the South is a capacious kitchen." Gary Alan Fine, Northwestern University "Using oral histories of almost 100 individuals, Byrd offers a sociologically rich antidote to the whitewashed narrative of foodways in the South." David L. Brunsma, Virginia Tech