On Thursday, March 22, the Nell Peel Wolfe Lecture Series hosted by Mississippi University for Women’s Gordy Honors College will feature John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance and author of “The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South.”
Southern Living says that in “The Potlikker Papers,” published in 2017 and now out in paperback, Edge “offers the most honest, brutal, beautiful, and insightful discussion to date on the country’s most complicated cuisine — from the food that fueled the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the Mexican, Vietnamese, and other international dishes that feed the New South.”
Edge is a contributing editor at Garden & Gun and a columnist for the Oxford American. For three years he wrote the monthly “United Taste” column for the New York Times.
His magazine and newspaper work has been featured in 11 editions of the Best Food Writing compilation, and he has won three James Beard Foundation awards and Beard’s M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award.
At the Southern Foodways Alliance, an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, Edge documents the diverse food cultures of the American South. The SFA has completed more than 900 oral histories and 50 films, focusing on people like fried chicken cooks, row crop farmers, oystermen and bartenders.
He has also written or edited more than a dozen books, including “Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion to the South” and “The Truck Food Cookbook,” a catalogue of modern American street food.
He served as editor of the Foodways volume of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and culinary curator for the weekend edition of NPR’s All Things Considered and has been featured on dozens of television shows, from CBS Sunday Morning to Iron Chef.
Copies of “The Potlikker Papers” are available for purchase at The Bookend, The W’s bookstore, and will also be available at the event.
This event begins at 6 p.m. in Nissan Auditorium, Parkinson Hall, and is free and open to the public.
For more information, contact the Honors College at [email protected] or 662-241-6850.
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