If you live in the South, you are often a very short distance from a garden, or even a farm owned by your family or by your neighbor's family. When I was a child, even though I grew up in… — Marcie Cohen Ferris Copy Share Image
Food is an important lens onto the civil rights movement. One of the central issues of the movement was the right to eat in… — Marcie Cohen Ferris Copy Share Image
The core cuisine of Southern food is established in the plantation South, within the world of slavery. To understand the plantation table, we must… — Marcie Cohen Ferris Copy Share Image
Historically, women's voices were central to food narratives, yet they were marginalized, and what happened at the table, the kitchen, the garden, and the fields was silenced. I'm very interested in how food appears in the historical record and animates our understanding of the South. It provides texture both to the past and to our contemporary experience. My work is… — Marcie Cohen Ferris Copy Share
Terroir - the taste of place - was important from the early South of the first Indian, African, and Europeans to the nineteenth-century South. During that time, Southerners ate far more locally and seasonally, from the ground they knew and grew up on. That idea connects back to today. You are a place. And as a Southerner, the food you… — Marcie Cohen Ferris Copy Share
Southern food derives its strength from many cultures. It's a melding of food cultures from Native Americans, enslaved African-Americans, and Europeans. — Marcie Cohen Ferris Copy Share
Southern food that appears in contemporary popular culture is so exaggerated that it's hardly recognizable to most Southerners. This enriching of Southern food - fatter, richer, more over the top - is what we typically see on TV, in Hollywood films, and in Southern-style or country-themed chains like Cracker Barrel. Southern food becomes a caricature, like characters and props in… — Marcie Cohen Ferris Copy Share
Most Southerners recognize when a story about their own experience feels off-kilter or offensive. But Southerners are also fascinated by the way their region… — Marcie Cohen Ferris Copy Share Image
When I'm asked to define "Southern food," I usually turn that question back to my audience and ask them what they think. I hear… — Marcie Cohen Ferris Copy Share Image
I think about what I eat every day. I try to eat as locally as I can and as healthily as I can. When… — Marcie Cohen Ferris Copy Share Image
While I felt very much a Southerner as a child, being Jewish gave me an outsider's perspective. People look at region in a variety… — Marcie Cohen Ferris Copy Share Image
Americans are experiencing a general hunger for authentic regional cuisine, of which Southern food represents one of the best and oldest examples. — Marcie Cohen Ferris Copy Share Image
In studying food, you embrace everything. Food exposes the long, complex history of the South - slavery, Jim Crow segregation, class struggle, extreme hunger,… — Marcie Cohen Ferris Copy Share Image
