Southern Foodways Alliance 2019 Winter Symposium Preview

Food Is Work: In 2019 theSouthern Foodways Alliancefocuses on narratives of domestic and public labor that power growing, harvesting, transporting, cooking, and serving food.

We will document and study and explore foods born of labor movements and migrations, like pepperoni rolls in West Virginia and po-boys in New Orleans. We will catalogue and monetize second shift female labor in domestic spaces. We will showcase the work songs that Southerners have long sung, from Georgia cane fields to Carolina mills. We will tell stories of the cooks who have long fed the laboring South, from construction sites to tobacco fields.

We begin our year of oral history collection, film making, podcast producing, journal editing, and event staging with aone-day Winter Symposium in Birmingham, Alabama on February 9, whenAshley Christensen, the North Carolina restaurateur, speaks withMary-Frances Heckabout the promises of women-led restaurants; and Steve Palmer of the Indigo Road and Ben’s Friends speaks withHunter Lewisabout the evolution of the restaurant family ideal.

The Summer Field Trip (June 14-15) in Bentonville, Arkansas, and the fall Symposium (October 24-26) in Oxford, Mississippi will extend that theme. Food is work. That’s a reality. Join SFA as we pay homage to the women and men who do the work to feed the world.