Ronni
Lundy
[T]o me, it's the key to this organization that from the very outset there was a choice made to make it inclusive--not an exclusive organization…[T]here are other food organizations that you actually have to meet a professional criteria--some even a test in order to be a part of. More common is that there are other organizations that just tend to gravitate around a core kind of clique group of people who want to hold onto their turf and territory. And you know, John [Egerton] is the person who--who said years ago that the difference--that the defining thing about Southern food and--and most folkway foods--is that--as opposed to formal food instruction--is that it doesn't say you must learn to do this and you may never do it as well as I do. It says everyone is welcome at the table. – Ronni Lundy
Born in Corbin, Kentucky, Ronni Lundy has long chronicled the people of the hillbilly diaspora as a journalist and cookbook author. 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 a Southern Garden. She is the former restaurant reviewer and music critic for The Courier-Journal in Louisville, former editor of Louisville Magazine, and has contributed to many national magazines. Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes and Honest Fried Chicken was recognized by Gourmet magazine as one of six essential books on Southern cooking.
In 2005, Lundy served the Southern Foodways Alliance as editor of Cornbread Nation 3: Foods of the Mountain South. There she makes a passionate case for mountain ways and mountain people: “[L]ooking through the lens of real Southern mountain food—the methods of its growing, processing and eating—we began to see a vivid picture of a region and its people that had little in common with their most prevalent and demeaning stereotypes."
Listen to this 3-minute audio clip of Ronni Lundy talking about bringing people into the SFA and finding truth through food. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.] What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
SUBJECT: Ronni Lundy, SFA Founding Member
DATE: October 11, 2004
LOCATION: Oxford, MS
INTERVIEWER: April Grayson, Friend of the SFA
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April Grayson: I was wondering if you could tell me how you became involved with SFA [Southern Foodways Alliance].
Ronni Lundy: I'm sure John Egerton roped me into it, and I'm sure that--that 90-percent of your interviews begin that way you know. [Laughs] I--there have been a couple of attempts to form an organization around the concept of Southern food. Two that I was aware of that--that had been I think maybe perhaps a little more limited in their scope than SFA, actually is and John Egerton saw an opportunity when the Center for--is it the Center for…It's the Study of Southern Culture… So right when the Center--when the Center expressed a willingness to house us and to help us with a Director, John Egerton saw this great opportunity. And the wonderful thing that he did was instead of going to one or two people that he was close to, he went to I think there are 50 of us, and said would you be willing to come in on the ground floor and be involved with this, you know; contribute ideas; and he--I--to me it's the key to this organization that from the very outset there was a choice made to make it inclusive--not an exclusive organization. You know, there are other food organizations that you have to be invited to join; there are other food organizations that you actually have to meet a professional criteria--some even a test in order to be a part of; more common is that there are other organizations that just tend to gravitate around a core kind of clique group of people who want to hold onto their turf and territory. And you know, John is the person who--who said years ago that the difference--that the defining thing about Southern food and--and most folkway foods is that--as opposed to formal food instruction--is that it doesn't say you must learn to do this and you may never do it as well as I do. It says everyone is welcome at the table.
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[Did you know about] ASFI, the American Southern Food Institute and Society for Preservation and Revitalization of Southern Foods?
Interestingly enough, I had read about both of those organizations but had never been involved with them and--and they seem to be I think by virtue of the--the sheer mechanics of it they seem to be much more regionally focused--that--that they dealt with the people that were immediately in their regions. And--and Southern Foodways again reached out to every area that can be defined as Southern and also consciously included people who were not working in the South but working in a Southern food vernacular.
So do you think that inclusiveness is what has helped SFA survive as opposed to the other earlier--?
Oh, I think it's what defines us; I think it is our greatest glory. I think it is the really--the core reason for this organization and it--and it comes through on so many levels--not just this geographic inclusiveness but there has been consciously from the outset we have verbalized that this is also an organization that includes all races and ethnicities and all classes of people from the South and--and--and that is very, very important to the survival of this organization. I don't think that those organizations--I don't know enough about those organizations to say this fully but I have no sense that they were attempting to be exclusive, but I think that they were limited by the--the support that they had. But the--you know it--it's such a boon to us just to have the shear physical support of the University of Mississippi--Mississippi, the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and--and to have someone like John T. Edge, who has been our Director from the get-go, who is just a Jack Russell Terrier of a director. [Laughs]
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[Did you attend] the organization meeting in Birmingham?
No, I was not at the organizational meeting in Birmingham either and I can't--I--I--there are several things that--that were happening all at the same time at that time, including a family illness of my mother, which I was the primary person dealing with. So I was not able to go to Birmingham, which truly broke my heart…But I could not wait to get [to Oxford] for the second conference which is--is the first one that I attended and forever remains an--an extraordinary event to me for--for many reasons.
Could you share some of those reasons?
…The--the nature of the--of the group when we meet
is--first of all these are such incredibly bright people that there is
all of this stimulating, intellectual conversation but they are so warm
also that it is very much--I have missed my family reunions…This
is like a family reunion for me, so that--so there's an emotional level
where that's true and where this organization has in fact responded on
a very personal level to be a support system.
It was--it was an extraordinary experience for me to be on the campus
of the University of Mississippi--meeting on the campus of the University
of Mississippi. I am 55 years old, so I grew up during the Civil Rights
Movement, and it was the defining experience of my life---the defining
experience of my political consciousness. My parents were very liberal
and very conscious of what was going on. We discussed the Civil Rights
Movement. We read everything we could get our hands on, saw it on television
and experienced it, and the University of Mississippi had meant one thing
to me and--and that was it was an--an icon of prejudice and segregation,
fear, you know. I drove through Philadelphia or past the turnoffs for
Philadelphia and Mississippi; it's very, very iconic in--in an incredibly
powerful way and there was a time in my life when I actually said I would
never set foot in the state of Mississippi. And I had since discovered
I've been coming through and stopping and had discovered things were changing
here, but I--I went over to Bernard Observatory, and I spoke at the end
of that [Foodways] conference. I was the last speaker. And the first night
that I was here, I was driving through the back woods on the way to Taylor
Grocery with Vertamae Grosvenor in the car and we were hysterical. We
were--we were giggling and going can you believe; here we are a white
girl and a black girl driving down the back roads of Mississippi and we're
not running from anybody. We're running to a group of people that welcome
us and--and are glad to see us? And then I stood up in front of that group
and saw black and white faces together in--in a genuine communion, you
know. There is no other way to describe this organization besides just
one great big communion for a whole weekend in this place. And I thought
you know we moved glacially and yet sometimes you get to stand back and
see where the--the glacier was and where it has come to and how it has
diminished in size. It's still enormous but it has diminished so incredibly
in size, and--and it was an extraordinary--extraordinary experience, you
know. And the fact that we have been breaking bread, particularly cornbread
with no sugar in it, all through that weekend together was--was really
incredible--really incredible.
It's--it—[there’s] nothing else that would have made me devoted to this organization and to its cause. And--and this weekend as you know seven--the seventh meeting, we met to discuss directly race and food and we're in a larger space now. We're not back in Bernard Observatory. But we discussed with such honesty and fierceness; we said the kinds of things to each other that families say to each other. There were bruised feelings, there were wounds opened and there was balm applied and wounds--wounds healed and nourishment given and we continued to be true to that initial vision that through food we not only are going to explore the past of the South, but we're going to shape the future of the South in a way that is going to be rich and inclusive and--and full of respect and love for one another. And I do--it gives me great joy to be involved in an organization like that.
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Do you think [the original mission] changed any over the years or--?
Well we have a real good time in this group, and we eat great, and we are very funny, and we are--we're just a great place to hang out. And I think that a lot of people who come to the group the first time come into it for those reasons, you know. A lot of people come to our meetings to find out a specific piece of information, something that's piqued their curiosity. A lot of people from out of the South are coming down to eat Southern food but think they know what Southern culture is about and are not really coming here to delve deeper.
What amazes me is our conversion rate [Laughs], which is pretty extraordinary. You know we have people who walk in here who are just here for the ribs and end up staying for the religion and that's pretty--pretty impressive, you know--come back year after year; say that they had no idea that--that we were going to stand up and argue with each other about--about who gets the right to claim fried chicken and why that matters, you know. So I think that we have--we have grown; we have broadened what we do, but no, I don't think that we have lost the core focus and you know that's illustrated in the fact that--that we are in a time in this country when we have all but stopped the dialogue on race in--in any sort of political or public forum. We use catch-phrases; we--we do double-speak; we pretend that appointing a black man as the Secretary of Defense and as a Supreme Court Justice has resolved issues for everyone; we create a demonized class of poor white people that both liberals and conservatives attribute with all the horrible characteristics that, in fact, they are guilty of and--and that demonized class always--always speaks with a Southern drawl. We--we continue over the table and using food as the rubric--we continue to talk about this in frank and sometimes painful terms in the hopes that we can move on--keep moving on and keep reaching some level of--of truth about it, you know.
[A]re there specific topics or projects that you would like to see as something to take on in the future?
Yeah, there are certain things that are very important to me and--and I looked around this year and [Laughs] I can see that we're actually doing some of them instead of paying lip service. One of them--one thing that's been incredibly important to me is that we needed a younger membership. We need--we need--I see myself as part of the geezer generation; I'm 55. From the outset, it has thrilled me to see younger and younger people joining the organization actively--not just--not just coming to the party but--but becoming Board Members and being on committees and, you know, doing work like the oral history work and this--it's essential for this to be what we intend it to be which is an organization for the future as well as the past. And I think that we can do even more outreach. Right now we have this wonderful Glory Foods Scholarship that assures that we are bringing more young African Americans into the professional realm of making food, writing about food, food scholarship, in--in all aspects. I think we had a young woman who works in farming and production this year who is one of the recipients as well as a scholar, and we've had young budding chefs, etcetera. The--the purpose is two-fold; it's to bring them into this world and to also give them a good grounding in what their roots are.
I would love to see us create some sort of scholarship program that also invites in poor white students as well and affords them some level of dignity. It's--it--poor white Southerners right now--particularly young poor white Southerners are facing a--a cultural discrimination that the generation of young black Southerners--my generation of young black Southerners faced, which is that there are tremendous assumptions about who they are. There's a stereotypical presence that is overwhelming and I can see that being a part of our organization and working in Foodways and understanding your culture and understanding the hard work and the intelligence, the ingenuity, the creativity, the people who prepared food for the last centuries, gives you a grounding and understanding and being proud of who you are, and I'd love to see us be able to do that--to reach out across a class divide as well as a color divide.
I want--I want to see us explore class issues more specifically. I'd like to see us take on gender issues. It's--it's very interesting; at some point we are going to have to have a conference talking about the white woman in the kitchen of the South because in--in our determination to restore the--the rightful place of black cooks and farmers and--and nurturers, we have to some extent demonized white women from--from past centuries up to--up through the 20th Century and we are going to have to do some--some hard work and speak some difficult truths to say it was not all the way that--that it is now being presented. It certainly wasn't romantic the way it was presented years ago, but it is not the way it's being presented now. So I hope that we're going to talk about that.
I would like very much for this organization to be--to take as one of its causes--to take up as one of its causes the small farmer in the South and finding--helping to nurture and encourage the--the continuance of small farmers. Right now we are--we are rediscovering the richness of the Southern garden, which is the garden of America, you know…The economics of food is--is a story of the economics of the South. It--it is also a story of global economics right now and we need to be talking about that a lot and studying that a lot. So those are all directions I'd like to see this organization go.
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I was wondering if I could shift a little bit to the personal, and if you could start by telling me your date and place of birth.
Uh-hmm, I think I can remember that. [Laughs] I was born on August 1st in--in 1949 in Corbin, Kentucky, which is in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains and my family--my parents were both from Corbin and all of my--not all of my but many of my kinfolks were from there. When I was a year old we moved to Louisville, Kentucky and I was raised in the city; so I was part of the hillbilly Diaspora. But we went home every summer and I spent--even when I was a little child, when I was about three or four years old, my great-aunts and uncles would come up on the L&N train from Corbin and they would get me and take me back down to Corbin for a couple days. So I grew up in two places as a child, and--and then as I grew older I became more of a--a city girl and more involved in--you know I'm a baby-boomer and I'm more involved in the world of the 1960s but I have since discovered that--that a lot--that most of my life, my--as I came of age has been a process of trying to bring together these--these two worlds that I had one foot in, traditional Appalachian culture, and one foot in the 1960s and 1970s America sort of breaking open like this over-ripe fruit, you know and that incredible culture; and so most of my life and certainly most of my work has been a process of trying to bring those two things together.
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I was wondering if you could talk about the meals of your childhood. Who were the preparers in your home and what were the meals like and was there a ceremony around that?
Oh, yeah. [Laughs] My mother prepared all the meals in my home. Now in--in my house in Louisville; when we went to Corbin aunts and cousins whose houses we stayed at would prepare meals and it surprised me-something I thought of when I was older is that my mother in most cases deferred to whoever's house we were at. She did not become involved in preparing the food. There were a couple of exceptions--when we stayed with her brother and my aunt--both she and my aunt cooked together and there was a very--I was conscious--I--I--one of my first consciousnesses was what we ate--what you ate a lot of at certain people's houses because they were known for making that and what you didn't eat at their houses and--and there was a pecking order….
…So--but--but in my home my mother cooked. My mother cooked three meals a day. There was not a formal eating time. My father was a factory worker and he worked swing shift which means that two days of the week he worked from seven until three and two days of the week he worked from three until eleven and two nights of the week he worked from eleven at night until seven in the morning and one day he was off unless he was working overtime which he often did because we were very poor and--and needed the money. So--so sometimes the family meal was in the afternoon and sometimes the family meal was of an evening and sometimes the family meal was a Midnight breakfast. I--I got to stay up until like ten o’clock at night when I was a child so that daddy and I could have breakfast together before he went off to work. And my mom--she often didn’t eat at that time but she cooked and we stayed in the--in the kitchen together.
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So how did you transition into food professionally and--?
By default…Well this may--will come as no surprise probably to anyone who has ever heard me speak [at] Southern Foodways, but I think I had written a couple--I wrote a couple of food pieces for the Courier Journal. I--I wrote for them as a feature--features writer from the early 1980s until the mid-1990s. I was variously a frequent contributor, and then I was a staff writer, and I was the pop music critic, and I wrote primarily about music--popular music, a--a great deal about--I was really lucky, I came in just as bluegrass music started to infiltrate country and people liked Dwight Yoakam and Lyle Lovett came along and K.D. Lang, and I was able to talk and write about these people.
But occasionally I would write something about food because I was interested in food. I had been--before I started writing at the age of 30 professionally, I had made money by working in restaurants. I was a waitress and a cook and a manager of restaurants through my 20s. So I had a little bit of an insider's knowledge. Esquire Magazine through--through a series of circumstances and the grace of Roy Blunt, Jr. had invited me to do a piece about Sam Bush, a bluegrass musician, and when I did, the person who did their--their front section called Man at His Best, Anita LeClerc the editor there, contacted me and said we'd love to have you write pieces for us about Southern culture. Is there anything that you really would like to write about? And I said Yes, ma'am; I want to write about how you really make cornbread because a lot of people are getting this wrong. And--and so they let me write this piece about cornbread that begins, If God had meant for cornbread to be--to have sugar in it he'd have called it cake, you know which has--which has become--which apparently is going to be on my tombstone when I die. [Laughs] I hope, you know….
…In fact, what--what I know is what I--I have learned by my own experience, which I think is an important thing to understand. There's a real value to the kind of scholarship that is being done by many of my peers who spend a great deal of time in--in libraries and sorting through past information and past references. But--but the other thing that I love about Southern Foodways is that we equally value--what we're doing right now, the oral experience and I--and I value that because it allows people at the table that have otherwise been shut out--you know part of the reason we don't have an understanding of the black contribution to Southern food is that it was not written down, you know. The people who wrote down things were--were exclusively white and the same thing is true of Appalachian--certainly of rural Appalachian cooking and rural white cooking. So--so that allows us to the table, you know; and--and I love--you know I love my work. My work all through my life has been to--to listen to good music and dance, to eat good food, and to ask people questions that you otherwise wouldn't be able to ask them in polite society. Why do you do that? [Laughs] So it's--it's really great; so that--that was how I started doing that and from that I did other cookbooks. I have retired from recipe writing. There is so many people. I'm--writing recipes is like writing in a second language for me because I was--is it Kathy Starr who calls it a Dump Cook? I'm trying to remember, but you know I was basically one of those people who stand in--and I call it a refrigerator cook that I stand there and look at the refrigerator and go oh we'll put that together, you know. So I now often write text for books that have other people’s recipes--people who I admire like John Stehling of--of the Early Girl Eatery in Asheville, North Carolina, and mostly they just let me sit around and pronounce things and that’s really fun--make pronouncements. [Laughs]
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Do you have an ideal Southern--if I came to you and said Ronni what is your--serve me your favorite Southern meal what would be the--?
There--I--the first answer is this; it would be summer and everything that we would be putting on the table would have come from our garden or a neighbor's garden or, to be more realistic in this time and age, the farm market. And it--it would have corn cut off the cob and cooked in bacon grease simmered low--slow in bacon grease and then it would have green beans--real white half-runners, not--not the ones that are being sold commercially now because they're being bred for the wrong reasons, but an heirloom from Bill Best. That's what it would have, and that would be a green bean that would have a big bean in it and be good and meaty. It would have fresh tomatoes and cucumbers and real cornbread without, of course, any sugar in it and it would have squash and it--you know there would be some variety type vegetable, some--if--squash--if there was yellow squash right then that would be there. If there was eggplant it would be something with eggplant. If--if you had to have a meat it would be pork, of course, that had been raised by a farmer that I knew and cured by a farmer that I knew, but you might have fried green tomatoes instead. That--that would serve as a meat, but actually you don't have to have a meat for this--this meal. And there would be iced tea and there would be fresh watermelon and there would be a cobbler. And--and there would just be so many vegetables on the table that you know there's be eight or nine and you'd be--oh there would be my mother's coleslaw which is just made with mayonnaise. And, God bless John T. Edge, it would be Duke's Mayonnaise instead of Hellmann’s. You can tell him I have come over to the light, and--and potato salad and all that wonderful stuff and then there would be people around the table who--enough people to eat everything on the table and savor it and love it and tell good stories. And--and that would be the deal.
Now as the seasons change you understand that--that meal would change and--and in winter it would be a really simple meal of soup beans which are--for mountain people that is pinto beans. If you're having navy beans you're having bean soup. But if you're having soup beans you're having pinto beans, and there would be a sweet onion sliced on the side or maybe a green onion from somebody's winter garden if--if that was happening and some sort of relish or pickles and a big glass of milk and hot cornbread, a big hot wedge of cornbread and momma's coleslaw would be there again with that meal and things that had been put up--anything that had been put up by the aunts and that would be--that would be that meal. You know there are different meals that--at different times of the year.
It's hard--it's hard to pin it down and since--since my horizons have broadened as well, I've added more deep Southern things like lady cream-peas, oh--hmm, God they should be on any--anybody's list or purple hull peas, you know and--and green--and oh in the--in the winter meal you would have kale greens because I'm from the mountain South, so we--we did kale and not collard. But you'd have--you'd have a winter green on the table, and then you'd have mashed potatoes on the table. And you would put the mashed potatoes on the plate next to the greens, so that when you did your fork, you'd scoop up a little bite of each, which is--which is a nod to our Irish history. In Colcannon, you know, which is--is the green and the--and the potatoes cooked together. Okay, I've got to stop. I know--I know and we're starving now and--and we'd have to keep going on for hours.
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