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s ’ t s i t r A palate , editor r o h t u a d o o for f e’s work c a ll a W y il Get a taste tor Em and illustra KE BY BROO
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he Bull City is home to renowned chefs, brewers and sommeliers, which makes it a utopia for foodies. It’s also a great place to live if you’re a food illustrator like Emily Wallace, an author and full-time art director and deputy editor for UNC’s Southern Cultures magazine. She lives in Tuscaloosa-Lakewood with her husband, Land Arnold, and their shaggy dog, Fred. One of her most prominent projects is “Road Sides: An Illustrated Companion to Dining and Driving in the American South,” an A-Z guide for staying well-fed when traveling through the Southern states. Released in October 2019, the book begins in Emily’s hometown of Smithfield, North Carolina, with the letter “A” for architecture and a spotlight on the giant blue snow cone that is Hills of Snow, which, you guessed it, sells snow cones. Emily attributes the origins of “Road Sides” to the iconic building and the roadside culture that surrounded it, which captured her attention throughout adolescence.
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“Roads are a literal way to bring together lots of interests from different places,” she says. “The roads are what connect them.” Emily moved to the Triangle in 2010 to attend UNC for her master’s degree “in pimento cheese” according to her website (technically, her master’s is in folklore with a concentration on food studies, but she wrote her thesis on the quintessential Southern spread). She also wrote and illustrated articles and comics for INDY Week’s food section during this time and was hired to create artwork for Scratch Bakery. An avid doodler since childhood, Emily says she found her passion for food artistry in grad school. She planted her roots in Durham after graduation and began focusing her art on what she’d been studying: food. She says she’s always been captivated by food labels and restaurant signage, so it seemed like a natural fit to incorporate those interests into her artwork. Emily says “Road Sides” feels like an extension of her day job at Southern Cultures, where she tries to tell the larger story of the South