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Art & Soul: The Culinary Arts - Food Is More About The Human Connection Than What's On Your Plate

Jason Thrasher

This week, "Art and Soul" is about the culinary arts.  89.1 WEMU's Lisa Barry and Jessica Webster talk to renowned southern food and history writer John T. Edge, who will be speaking at Zingerman's upcoming Camp Bacon.  

About John T. Edge

John T. Edge writes about the American South.  The Penguin Press published his latest book, The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Publisher‘s Weekly, and a host of others.  Now in paperback, Nashville selected the book as a citywide read for 2018. He is also writer and host for the television show TrueSouth, which airs on the SECNetwork.

Edge is a contributing editor at Garden & Gun and a columnist for the Oxford American.  For three years, he wrote the monthly “United Taste” column for the New York Times.  His magazine and newspaper work has been featured in eleven editions of the Best Food Writing compilation.  He has won three James Beard Foundation awards. In 2012, he won Beard’s M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award.

Edge holds an MA in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi.  And an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College.

He is director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, where he documents, studies, and explores the diverse food cultures of the American South.  The SFA has completed more than 900 oral histories and 100 films, focusing on people like fried chicken cooks, row crop farmers, oystermen, and bartenders.

Edge serves on the faculty of the MFA in Narrative Nonfiction program at the Grady College of the University of Georgia.  He has written or edited more than a dozen books, including the foodways volume of the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.  Edge is series editor of Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People, and Place, published by the University of Georgia Press.

He has served as culinary curator for the weekend edition of NPR’s All Things Considered, and he has been featured on dozens of television shows, from CBS Sunday Morning to Iron Chef.

About Camp Bacon

Camp Bacon
Credit Zingerman's Camp Bacon / zingermanscampbacon.com
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zingermanscampbacon.com
Camp Bacon 2019 Logo

Zingerman’s Camp Bacon® is a food lover’s camp.  It is a food historian’s camp.  It is a camp that fills your mind as much as your stomach. We love to taste the bacon and don’t get us wrong, you will leave having tasted a lot of bacon, but we are there to share the story behind the bacon.  We share with you new ways to appreciate bacon and talk about how what we feed the animal impacts the flavor of the meat you are eating.  The passion of our guest speakers is edible, you can literally taste the hard work and love they put into their bacon and dishes.  Join us!

It takes place May 31-June 2.  Click here for the full schedule, and click here for a list of speakers scheduled to attend.

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— Lisa Barry is the host of All Things Considered on WEMU. You can contact Lisa at 734.487.3363, on Twitter @LisaWEMU, or email her at lbarryma@emich.edu

Jessica has been a record store clerk, a Denny’s waitress, a newspaper reporter, a science writer, a mom, a higher education communicator, a radio host and (and one time) one of the most powerful people in the jazz industry.
Lisa Barry was a reporter, and host of All Things Considered on 89.1 WEMU.
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