Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) is an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, dedicated to the documentation, study and exploration of the foodways of the American South. Member-funded, it stages events, recognizes culinary contributions with awards and a hall of fame, produces documentary films, publishes writing, and maps the region’s culinary institutions recording oral history interviews. [1] The group has about 800 members, a mixture of chefs, academics, writers, and eaters.[ citation needed ]
John T. Edge, a writer and commentator, has served as the director of the SFA since its foundation in 1999. [2] A journalist, John Egerton, was one of the group's founders. [2] In 2007, the SFA established the John Egerton Prize [3] to recognize annually selected "artists, writers, scholars, and others—including artisans and farmers—whose work in the American South addresses issues of race, class, gender, and social and environmental justice, through the lens of food." John Martin Taylor was also a founding member.[ citation needed ] Current board members include Francis Lam and Rob Long. [4]
The annual Ruth Fertel Keeper of the Flame Award is made jointly by the Southern Foodways Alliance and the Fertel Foundation, and honors an unsung hero or heroine who has made a great contribution to food. [5] The award was first made in 2000. The honoree receives a monetary award and a documentary film is made about them. [6]
Claiborne Award recipients: [7]
In the Atlantic Monthly , Corby Kummer described the SFA as: “this country’s most intellectually engaged (and probably most engaging) food society." [8]
Ruth Ann Udstad Fertel was a Louisiana businesswoman, best known as the founder of Ruth's Chris Steak Houses, which was founded in 1965.
Edna Regina Lewis was a renowned American chef, teacher, and author who helped refine the American view of Southern cooking. She championed the use of fresh, in season ingredients and characterized Southern food as fried chicken, pork, and fresh vegetables – most especially greens. She wrote and co-wrote four books which covered Southern cooking and life in a small community of freed slaves and their descendants.
Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor was an American culinary anthropologist, griot, poet, food writer, and broadcaster on public media. Born into a Gullah family in the Low Country of South Carolina, she moved with them as a child to Philadelphia during the Great Migration. Later she lived in Paris before settling in New York City. She was active in the Black Arts Movement and performed on Broadway.
John T. Edge is a writer, commentator, and, since its founding in 1999, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. He has written several books on Southern food. He contributes to the Oxford American and the New York Times, and has written for Garden & Gun and Afar. In 2017, he published The Potlikker Papers, a personal history of Southern food.
In social science, foodways are the cultural, social, and economic practices relating to the production and consumption of food. Foodways often refers to the intersection of food in culture, traditions, and history.
John Egerton was an American journalist and author known for his writing on the Civil Rights Movement, Southern food, history of the South, and Southern culture.
Corby Kummer is executive director of Food & Society at the Aspen Institute, a senior lecturer at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science, and a senior editor of The Atlantic.
Frank Stitt III is the owner and executive chef of Highlands Bar and Grill, Bottega Restaurant, Bottega Cafe, and Chez Fon Fon in Birmingham, Alabama. He was inducted into the James Beard Foundation's "Who's Who of Food and Beverage" in 2011. He was also named the "Best Chef in the Southeast" in 2001 and was a 2008 finalist for its national "Outstanding Chef" award. His flagship restaurant Highlands Bar and Grill was selected the winner of the "Outstanding Restaurant" award in 2018. Also his pastry chef Dolester Miles was the winner of "Outstanding Pastry Chef" in 2018.
John Martin Taylor, also known as Hoppin' John, is an American food writer and culinary historian, known for his writing on the cooking of the American South, and, in particular, the foods of the lowcountry, the coastal plain of South Carolina and Georgia. He has played a role in reintroducing many traditional southern dishes, and has advocated the return to stone-ground, whole-grain, heirloom grits and cornmeal production.
Ella Brennan was an American restaurateur and part of a family of restaurateurs specializing in haute Louisiana Creole cuisine in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Ronni Lundy is an author and editor in the U.S. whose work focuses on traditional American foods and music. Her books include Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes and Honest Fried Chicken: The Heart and Soul of Southern Country Kitchens and Butter Beans to Blackberries: Recipes from the Southern Garden. Her book "Victuals" won the 2017 James Beard Foundation Book of the Year Award. She was a founding member of the Southern Foodways Alliance and, in 2005, edited Cornbread Nation 3: Foods of the Mountain South, the organization's occasional anthology of the region's best food writing. She was also the editor of a short-lived online food magazine, The Zenchilada.
Phila Hach — pronounced "File-ah Hah" was an American chef, restaurant owner, innkeeper, and caterer who authored 17 cookbooks, including recipe collections for the 1982 World's Fair, Opryland USA and Cracker Barrel restaurants. She has been called the "grand dame of southern cooking" and counted as good friends Duncan Hines and Julia Child. Hach catered functions for the United Nations, U.S. mayors and governors, military personnel and celebrities, and was the one of the pastry chefs at the wedding of Princess Diana.
Thomas McNamee is an American writer and Guggenheim Fellow. He has written four nonfiction books in the field of natural history and conservation, as well as a novel. He has also written biographies of notable culinary figures Craig Claiborne and Alice Waters.
Jessica B. Harris is an American culinary historian, college professor, cookbook author and journalist. She is professor emerita at Queens College, City University of New York, where she taught for 50 years, and is also the author of 15 books, including cookbooks, non-fiction food writing and memoir. She has twice won James Beard Foundation Awards, including for Lifetime Achievement in 2020, and her book High on the Hog was adapted in 2021 as a four-part Netflix series by the same name.
John Currence is an American chef based in Oxford, Mississippi. As of 2019 he owns four restaurants in the city of Oxford: City Grocery, Big Bad Breakfast, Bourè, and Snackbar in addition to a catering business, The Main Event. Currence also owns numerous Big Bad Breakfast locations in Alabama, Florida, Tennessee and South Carolina. He won a James Beard Award in 2009 for the category of Best Chef, South, at City Grocery. He later also participated in the third season of the Bravo television competition Top Chef Masters.
Adrian Miller is an American culinary historian, lawyer and public policy advisor. His books have twice won the James Beard Foundation Book Award for Reference and Scholarship: Soul Food in 2014 and Black Smoke in 2022. He is also the author of The President’s Kitchen Cabinet, which was nominated for a 2018 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Nonfiction. He also served as a White House advisor to U.S. president Bill Clinton.
Alzina Toups was a chef based in Galliano, Louisiana who specialized in Cajun cooking. Her restaurant was visited by Andrew Zimmern, Governor John Bel Edwards, and other notable figures.
Francis Lam is an American food journalist, cookbook editor, and since 2017 the host of American Public Media's The Splendid Table.
Kevin J. McCaffrey is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, editor, and oral historian based in New Orleans. His documentary and archivist work primarily focuses on Louisiana history and culture, with an emphasis on the region's culinary history and environmental issues. McCaffrey's work has received both national and regional recognition. He has worked with a number of notable organizations dedicated to preserving the history and culture of Louisiana and New Orleans, including New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation, Louisiana State Museum, Historic New Orleans Collection, WYES-TV, Loyola's Center for Environmental Communication, and the Louisiana Folklife Commission.
Ira Wallace is a gardener, teacher and author. She manages Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, a cooperatively-owned seed company. SESE is a source for heirloom seeds and other open-pollinated (non-hybrid) seeds with an emphasis on vegetables, flowers, and herbs that grow well in the Mid-Atlantic region. SESE partners with Monticello to put on an annual Heritage Harvest Festival in September. The festival, which was co-founded by Wallace in 2007, is a non-profit event designed to educate the public on the importance of organics and heritage varieties.