The Larder is not driven by nostalgia. Reading such a collection of essays may not encourage food metaphors. "It's not a feast, not a gumbo, certainly not a home-cooked meal," Ted Ownby argues in his closing essay. Instead, it's a healthy step in the right direction, taken by the leading scholars in the field.
John T. Edge is the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including the foodways volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Elizabeth Engelhardt is a professor of American studies and women's and gender studies at the University of Texas, Austin and is the chair of the Department of American Studies. She is the author of A Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food (Georgia) and The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature. Ted Ownby is a professor of history and southern studies at the University of Mississippi and is the director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. He is the author of American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830–1998 and Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865–1920.