Edible South -The Cultural Politics of Food and Cuisine

AgBioFEWS Cohort 3 Organized Guest Panel with:

›  Marcie Cohen Ferris, PhD, Interim Director, Center for the Study of the American South at UNC-Chapel Hill ›  Michaela DeSoucey, PhD, Associate Professor of Sociology at NC State

Abstracts

• Marcie Cohen Ferris’ work examines how evolving food cultures in North Carolina and the larger American South speak to the region’s complex history, culture(s), and struggle for racial justice, food equity, food sovereignty embodied in the powerful voices of a contemporary generation of farmers, food makers and creators, activists, scholars, policy makers, consumers, and more.
• Michaela DeSoucey’s exploration of ‘food culture’ requires us to acknowledge the complexity and paradoxes of the memories, desires, emotions, and debates that ‘flavor’ different ingredients and dishes. She will discuss what a cultural sociological lens brings to the contemporary study of food culture, focusing on boundaries and ethics as markers of social differentiation.

Related links:

• Edible North Carolina
• Center for the Study of the American South

Speaker Bios

Marcie Cohen Ferris (@ferrismcf), editor of Edible North Carolina, is a writer and educator whose work explores the American South through its foodways and the southern Jewish experience. She is interim director of UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South and an emeritus professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she serves as an editor for Southern Cultures, a quarterly journal of the history and cultures of the U.S. South. Ferris’s books include The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region and Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South. She is a co-editor of Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History. In 2018, Ferris received the Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southern Foodways Alliance.

Michaela DeSoucey is Associate Professor of Sociology at North Carolina State University. She is a qualitative, cultural sociologist whose research examines cultural and moral markets, consumer-focused organizations, and the politics of authenticity and risk, specifically around food. She is the award-winning author of Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food, published by Princeton University Press (2016), as well as numerous articles on food-related topics from bean-to-bar chocolate to craft beer to food halls to peanut allergy.

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GES Colloquium is jointly taught by Drs. Jen Baltzegar and Dawn Rodriguez-Ward, who you may contact with any class-specific questions. Colloquium will be held in-person in Poe 202, as well as live-streamed via Zoom. Please subscribe to the GES newsletter and Twitter for updates.

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