Welcome!
Why launch Foodlore and More? For years I have been posting pieces on agriculture, food, and the culinary profession on Facebook. Eleven years of posting have created a backlog so vast that I can no longer access pieces I have written readily. This newsletter is an effort to organize all of that information into a more searchable, useful form. It also gives me room to present material I have written that is longer than the 600 words I set as a norm for posts. I have written a great number of “notes” on subjects that exceed 1000 words, and these need a home. Many of these notes are too miscellaneous to shape into a book. Some of the material is material cut from Southern Provisions, The Culinarians, and Taste the State.
Late in 2009 when I first began posting on Facebook I wanted my conversation with friends to be more than trading personal news. My work with the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation had connected me with farmers, millers, and chefs—people who were migrating to the platform—and they possessed lots of information interesting to me; I wanted to reciprocate by offering what I knew about food history. I welcomed the opportunity to present information in a more informal way than I used in my academic writing. (In 2009 I had just published Pioneering American Wine with the University of Georgia Press and was preparing the manuscript of The Golden Seed, an essay collection for the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation.) I looked on my posts as being experiments in presenting information in a way that combines solid information with amusing style. I also welcomed the chance to make short forays into topics and fields that usually stood outside my familiar subjects. You know the results.
I will continue to post on Facebook. But I have decided a more expansive, permanent, and searchable medium would serve both me and you better. So . . . Foodlore and More. I intend for this to be a real newsletter, that is a periodical that contains a variety of contents, some extensive, some short, with illustrations, and also an audio component—a set of stories in podcast form. Each issue of the newsletter will have writings on ingredients, culinary history, the lives of chefs or histories of restaurants, and a historic recipe or menu with my commentary. Some issues will have a special focus—the first will concentrate on Georgia. Another will concentrate on Slow Food’s Ark of Taste. Others will be rooted to seasons or occasions. Some will be miscellaneous.
My thinking is that I will post a portion of everything I write on facebook—but the full presentation will be in the newsletter.
There is a lot of information about food on the web. But few people do rigorous field to table history, tying agriculture to cooking. Those who do—Betty Fussell, William Woys Weaver, and Gary Nabham—treat regions and traditions that differ from those that stand at the center of my research. I remain greatly interested in Southern Food. Yet working on the national Slow Food Ark of Taste Committee has turned my attention to fruit breeding in California and the Pacific Northwest, oat farming, and squash culture in New England in recent years. My curiosity constantly expands the scope of my interests and my researches—and these new matters will appear in future issues of Foodlore & More.
There will be a subscription fee for the newsletter. I presume that over the course of the next years I will be publishing over 500 pages of material—more than a monograph. Since I’ve been paid for my intellectual labor for the books I’ve written, I think it right to get some recompense for these efforts. Of course you can keep accessing the free postings on facebook, but there will be substantially more in Foodlore & More. Subscription charge: $5 per month or $50 per year.