Serious Eats
Original White Lily Flour Plant Closes: The Geography of Taste
The news hit me like a ton of grits.
Smuckers, the company that bought the White Lily flour company, is closing the White Lily plant in Knoxville, Tennessee, at the end of the month. After that, White Lily will only be made at two plants in the midwest. According to the company, the While Lily flour produced at the two new plants is indistinguishable from the old.
A.) I'm sure that's not true.
B.) The product itself is not what's at stake here.
To every Southern baker I know, White Lily is synonymous with the South. It represents the soul of Southern baking tradition. Move White Lily out of the South? That's insane. That would be like moving Kossar's Bialys from Manhattan's Lower East Side to Manhattan, Kansas, or moving Tabasco Sauce production from Avery Island, Louisiana, to Santa Fe, or Gallo Wine from California to Salt Lake City. There's physical and geographical terroir, which the Washington Post's Jane Black describes as "a French term that literally translates as terrain but has come to mean the way foods and wine express the soil, climate, culture, and tradition of a region," and then there's the emotionally resonant aspects of terroir, which are in fact even more important.
The company claims it's the same product. A couple of award-wining Southern bakers and one baker, best-selling author, and food expert, Shirley Corriher, author of Cookwise, beg to differ.
They tried the new White Lily and found it somewhat different, if not radically different.
Would it have killed Smucker's to keep the plant in Knoxville? If the company would have asked me, I would have told it to open a grand Southern bakery right next door, a kind of Southern baking museum, and have people like the Magnolia Grill's Karen Barker and Watershed Restaurant chef and partner Scott Peacock function as baking consultants and curators. Make the White Lily plant into a tourist attraction featuring a restaurant with the world's greatest biscuits.
But you know what, serious eaters? The J. M. Smucker Company didn't ask me, and I'm sure that even if it did, anything I would have said or done wouldn't have made any difference whatsoever. I can only hope that if and when Thomas' English Muffins' parent company buys Kossar's Bialys, they leave Kossar's right where it belongs, on Grand Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where it's been forever.
Serious eaters, I feel this way about bialys. What local foodstuff, product, or ingredient in your neck of the woods needs to be protected?
Related
They Are Changing My Favorite Flour — Help!
Goodbye Local Flour [A Little Knoxvillian]