O’Neill Keeps Local Flair Alive
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r. Martin O’Neill, head of the Department of Nutrition, Dietetics, and Hospitality Management at Auburn University, doesn’t ask for a whole lot out of a dining experience. It might be hard to imagine, but until recently, one of the Ireland native’s favorite restaurants was a hole-in-the-wall fish and chip restaurant in Belfast in Northern Ireland, with grime so thick on the windows you couldn’t see inside and “a wall of smoke and grease” that hit you when you opened the door. He would give his order of deep-fried pork sausage, egg, and chips—a “heart attack waiting to happen”—to a rough-looking waitress with a cigarette hanging from her mouth. He loved the simple, authentic experience—the food was uncomplicated and delicious, and the staff had mastered their menu, he says. Not long
O’Neill and Dale Katechis, founder and owner of Oskar Blues Brewery in Colorado, shake hands over an academic partnership for the graduate certificate program in Brewing Science and Operations.
ago, however, O’Neill returned to the restaurant to find that the place was cleaned up—unrecognizable. Not a bad thing if it hadn’t also “cleaned up” its version of his favorite dish. “They no longer cooked it in lard—they cooked it in oil, and it just wasn’t the same,” he said. Basically, the diner had changed its image and overcomplicated what it had done so well before, breaking one of O’Neill’s mantras that food should be very simple. Of course, attempting to make a dish more nutritious is commendable, he says, but taste and tradition shouldn’t be sacrificed in the process. In the last several years, O’Neill’s research has centered on how to keep deeply rooted culture and local flair alive in our dining experiences as our society migrates more toward convenient, microwave-ready meals—which really aren’t an “experience” at all. O’Neill and a colleague, Dr. Abel Alonso of the University of Western Sydney in Australia, have
been particularly interested in southern foods and how not only to keep these food traditions alive in our own southern states, but how they can be used as a tourist attraction and a socioeconomic development tool. “Alabama actually offers world-class food products—we try to get that out,” he says. “It’s a serious matter both economically and socially. “We always seem to be talking about the negatives (of Southern cuisine), and I am very passionate about looking at the other side of that fence.” In one of their latest research projects, Food Culture in the Southern United States: Preserving Traditional Foods or Slow Death?, O’Neill and his co-authors name dishes such as potato-chip chicken casserole, grilled catfish with strawberry salsa, shrimp Creole, sour cream potato salad, and chocolate pecan pie as a few examples of classic Southern cuisine that could really please the palate of anyone, anywhere—not just in the South (Alonso et al. 2011).
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