Producing Heritage: Politics, Patrimony, and Palatability in the Reinvention of Lowcountry Cuisine

Abstract

This article explores the way heritage agrobiodiversity provides fertile terrain for staking new claims of locality, culinary regional identity, and deliciousness in the United States. To do so it considers the contemporary reinvention of an “authentic” southern cuisine in the Carolina Lowcountry. In this region, heritage grains—otherwise perceived to be bland or unremarkable—are being strategically positioned to serve as a vehicle for promoting a culinary and cultural distinctiveness rooted in biodiversity and Lowcountry cuisine is being built on discourses of heritage and taste. Focusing in depth on two instrumental actors in the region’s agricultural and culinary reinvention, it is suggested that, much like the concept of terroir, heirloom grains are being employed to leverage new values on the marketplace and construct new definitions of deliciousness. The reinvention process, however, is riddled with accentuations and erasures, emphasizing the “tasty” aspects while eliding unsavory others.

Keywords:

• taste
• cultural politics
• authenticity
• heritage
• identity
• Lowcountry cuisine

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express sincere gratitude to Glenn Stone, Zachary Nowak, and Emily Contois for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. He also much appreciates the feedback from participants at the Digesting Discourses conference at Indiana University and the Food and Landscapes conference at Umbra Institute, and especially Michael Di Giovine and Alice Julier. Thanks are offered too to Greg de St. Maurice and Theresa Miller, the anonymous reviewers of Food, Culture, and Society, and the selection committee for the ASFS Alex McIntosh Prize.

Notes

1. Heirloom grains, otherwise known as heritage or landrace, are cereal varietals that have been farmer-selected for particular qualities (yield, taste, nutrition, etc.) over the course of several generations and are adapted to particular geographic locales and culinary cultures.

2. Since the depression era over ninety percent of landrace varietals are either no longer cultivated or have become extinct entirely (Fowler and Mooney 1990). However, in the last quarter century “more than fifteen thousand heritage foods have returned to the U.S. foodscape” (Nabhan 2013, 8).

3. Certainly many grain-based foods—such as bread, biscuits, corn puddings, etc.—are far from tasteless. In the Lowcountry, however, it is the grains themselves, not their prepared form, that are being reconceptualized as tasty. Moreover, I emphasize that taste itself is simultaneously persistent and mutable, that nostalgia for bygone flavors is quite genuine but that the consumption context is critical. As is the case with other forms of cucina povera dietary monotony can render the most delicious foods dull. Extracted from their historic culinary context and re-embedded as haute cuisine, I suggest that heritage grains are suspended in a cultural and culinary politics of accentuation and erasure.

4. A full discussion of the fraught notion of authenticity is beyond the scope of this article. I use scare quotes throughout to signal the complex, contested nature of this term. For more on the topic see Regina Bendix (1997), and, specifically in relation to foodways, Long (2004).

5. A thorough review of the extensive body of literature on cultural heritage is beyond this article’s scope. For more in-depth discussion see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998), Smith (2006), and Harrison (2013).

6. The tastemakers of Lowcountry cuisine recently sparred in a well-publicized rhetorical battle in which African American food writer Michael Twitty accused elite Charleston chefs, including Brock, of cultural appropriation and of refusing to acknowledge their debt to the Geechee culinary tradition (see Dixler 2016 and Haire 2016).