Social Roots is an interdisciplinary volume that draws on contributions from inside and outside the academy to explore the relationships between nature and culture as expressed in the foodways of the Georgia and South Carolina coasts.
In seventeen chapters, a handful of bespoke artworks, and recipes, Sarah V. Ross and her contributors illuminate the invisible threads that run in wild tangles through the Lowcountry, connecting massive live oaks and palmetto and freshwater sloughs with tidal waters flooding and draining the most extensive salt marshes on the Eastern Seaboard. These threads connect the landscape from the St. Marys River on the Georgia-Florida border to the confluence of Ashley and Cooper Rivers in Charleston, South Carolina. Flowing threads of tidal creekshalf ocean, half fresh river wateralso connect us through time to cultures who feasted on an abundance of shellfish thousands of years ago. An enduring bounty of oysters, shrimps, crabs, clams, and mussels still lure us into their world.
Looking across time and geography, this book interweaves fundamental ecological principles as it honors three early cultures: Native American, European, and African. All were enmeshed with the coastal environment. All shared similar threads connecting food production: hunting, foraging, planting, cultivating, harvesting, preserving, and cooking. Across the ages, this ongoing connectionamong land, harvester or farmer, and cookforms the infrastructure of cookery practices. In large part, Lowcountry foodways are built simultaneously on scarcity and fickle opportunity.
Recenzijas
This book is the story behind the farm-to-table movement. It brings together the global, multicultural, crosscultural, transnational mash-up that is southern cuisine, which continues to re-invent itself. My mouth was watering after nearly every chapter. While reading, I was constantly making connections between the cultural and natural influences on every meal I plan, prep, and eat. This book will change the way we think about lowcountry foodways. -- Christopher J. Manganiello * author of Southern Water, Southern Power: How the Politics of Cheap Energy and Water Scarcity Shaped a Region * Sarah V. Ross's language is accessible to a general audience, and she does a good job helping readers find connections between academic and artistic disciplinesand the work of Wormsloe plantationon the common grounds of natural environment and regional foodways. -- Lynn A. Nelson * author of Pharsalia: An Environmental Biography of a Southern Plantation, 1780-1880 * The depth and breadth of information about foodways in the Lowcountry make Social Roots an invaluable resource for research and classrooms focused on that area or topic. -- M. A. Lange * CHOICE *
Papildus informācija
A celebration of the natural and culinary bounty of the southern Lowcountry
SARAH V. ROSS is the former executive director of the University of Georgia Center for Research and Education at Wormsloe in Savannah, Georgia, as well as president of the Wormsloe Foundation and executive director of the Wormsloe Institute for Environmental History, both foundations that conduct and coordinate agricultural and environmental research focused on Georgias coastal landscapes. After growing organic vegetables in the Coastal Plain for forty-five years, Ross now cultivates more than four hundred heirloom varieties of vegetables organically in experimental research plots in Savannah, Georgia, and in Alleghany County, North Carolina. Her focus is to classify flavor profiles, document growth rates, measure drought and flood tolerance, and identify pest and disease resistance of diverse varieties.
