Or, 'I Believe They're Sinking Down' Catfish farming, which was one of the few bright spots in the Mississippi Delta economy, is grinding to a halt at an alarming pace, according to the New York Times. It is a victim of the rapid rise in feed costs; corn and soybean prices have tripled in the last two years. Catfish farmers simply cannot afford to buy food for their fish and are draining their ponds. “It’s a dead business,” said John Dillard, who pioneered the commercial farming of catfish in the late 1960s. Last year Dillard & Company raised 11 million fish. Next year it will raise none. People can eat imported fish, Mr. Dillard said, just as they use imported...
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Crawfish Monica, just one of the must-try foods at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fest. This weekend is the second weekend of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. The music ranges from the sublime (the gospel tent) to the ridiculous (Billy Joel on the Acura stage), but there is also food. In their wisdom, rather than providing the standard concessionaire fare, the guiding spirits of Jazz Fest have a competitive, juried process for getting food selling space inside the Fairgrounds. The entire thing takes place inside of a horse race track, which should give some sense of the scale. I had suggested an overview of these offering might be interesting for SE readers, and arrived at the...
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Southern Foodways appears on Fridays as part of our collaboration with the Southern Foodways Alliance, an organization based in Oxford, Mississippi, that "documents and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the American South." Dig in! It's cold today and snowing (or about to snow) here in Mississippi. We don't get snow that often. In fact, if this forecast becomes reality it will be the first real snow Oxford has seen in five or six years. Truth be told, I'd enjoy a little snow, sort of. The Ole Miss students are heading out of town for spring break. March Madness is upon us. My yard is full of daffodils. The tulip trees have bloomed and the rest of the trees aren't...
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Though I've had more than my fair share of oysters Mosca and chicken grande at Mosca's, the justifiably famous Creole Italian restaurant just outside New Orleans, I'd never really thought of the American South as having much in the way of an Italian restaurant tradition. But in the last two days I've eaten two terrific and totally different Italian meals in Mississippi that were each in their own way absolutely true to themselves and the towns they are situated in. L&M's Kitchen and Salumeria is the brainchild of Dan Latham, a native Mississippian and Ole Miss and French Culinary Institute grad who cooked and made salumi at Otto, Babbo, and Pó, Mario Batali's restaurants in New York City's Greenwich Village....
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This month's Esquire has a willfully ignorant piece by Iraq war veteran, blogger, and writer Colby Buzzell about the Mississippi Delta Tamale Trail. All the piece does is reinforce the worst kind of racial, regional, and cultural stereotyping that occasionally still goes on when "serious" writers deign to write about things like barbecue and tamales and fried chicken. Southern Foodways Alliance oral historian Amy Evans of Southern Foodways's Tamale Project had this to say in response to Buzzell's piece: While it's impossible for this guy to have missed our project online—or anywhere—and unprofessional and unwise to not make the slightest mention of us and our Tamale Trail, the thing that gets me the most is his portrayal of the Delta....
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