168
2020
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
NORTH CAROLINA FOODS AND FOODWAYS, A CONSUMING PASSION a review by Lorraine Hale Robinson Nanette Davidson. The Folk School Cookbook. John C. Campbell Folk School, 2018. Georgann Eubanks. The Month of Their Ripening: North Carolina Heritage Foods through the Year. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
LORRAINE HALE ROBINSON wrote, from 1998 to 2007, the entries in NCLR’s serialized “dictionary of North Carolina Writers,” as well as various articles (many food-related), sidebars, and reviews, while serving as Senior Associate Editor of NCLR. See, in particular, her original recipe for stuffed collards, which NCLR published in the 2007 issue. She retired in 2012, but continues to respond enthusiastically and wisely when called upon for advice and book reviews.
On a typical day, minute by minute, we rarely think about the atmosphere that we inhale and exhale, day-in, day-out. But food we think, we plan. This sort of planning has a long history. Menna (probably scribe to Pharaoh Thoth Moses IV, 1380 BCE) decided that “you can take it with you” and that you’d better, so his tomb is stockpiled with a small mountain of provisions for the journey into the afterlife. The diurnal decisions about what to eat and when to eat consume us. Should we cut out the carbs, eat like a paleo, go vegan, or score a double cheeseburger? The abundance in our stores and markets and food establishments is staggering. We are vibrating to the tension between choosing kale smoothies or sugar-chocopops for breakfast, an apple or a candy bar as a snack. Whether we are “breatharian” or omnivorous, if we eat and how we eat and where we eat and when we eat are profound signifiers of both personal and broader cultural values; and, unlike some personal behaviors that remain, for the most part, quite private, eating is often a shared activity, be it a family birthday party, a Thanksgiving dinner, or a wedding reception. While we might close the doors to some rooms in our house, we throw open the door to the dining room. So at multiple levels, food expresses our broader life philosophy and is a major component of our cultural identity, validating the things that we deem important. This validation often takes the form of how we apportion our resources: we make lists to help us decide whether or not to splurge on those sky-high steaks or on
that exotic vegetable. So food is connected to economics. Food also faces us with decisions that have political implications: do we buy non-GMO items or “fair trade” products? In 2018, nearly eighteen million hardcopy cookbooks alone were purchased. Obviously, the augured demise of the hardcopy cookbook has been greatly exaggerated. And one can trace recipe writing back to 6000 BCE’s receipt for something in Britain called Nettle Pudding and two early Mesopotamian recipes for beer (those Mesopotamians had their priorities right). So what is it about food writing (cookbooks and other food-related books) that generates sales in the millions? There is a hunger for what food “means” to people, whether that meaning is family associations, exotic ingredients, or cross-cultural connections. Food both creates and reinforces meaning; food words are threaded through our language. A woman calls her boyfriend “sweetie.” The team’s loss at season’s end is a “bitter” pill. The old sailor’s language is pretty “salty.” That supervisor is a real “sourpuss.” Food – how to produce/gather/forage/fish it; how to get enough of it and when and where it’s needed or wanted. We just can’t get away from it. Food is nourishment at so many levels: when we dine in or dine out, we are restoring ourselves, the original meaning of “restaurant,” from the French restaurer. And as food nourishes, so can food writing. The smörgåsbord of contemporary food writing encompasses cookbooks, memoirs, cultural histories, agricultural treatises, books on economics or geography,