Cornbread Nation 7: The Best of Southern Food Writing

How does Southern food look from the outside? The form is caught in constantly dueling stereotypes: It's so often imagined as either the touchingly down-home feast or the heartstopping health scourge of a nation. But as any Southern transplant will tell you once they've spent time in the region, Southerners share their lives in food, with a complex mix of stories of belonging and not belonging and of traditions that form identities of many kinds.

Cornbread Nation 7, edited by Francis Lam, brings together the best Southern food writing from recent years, including well-known food writers such as Sara Roahen and Brett Anderson, a couple of classic writers such as Langston Hughes, and some newcomers. The collection, divided into five sections ("Come In and Stay Awhile," "Provisions and Providers," "Five Ways of Looking at Southern Food," "The South, Stepping Out," and "Southerners Going Home"), tells the stories both of Southerners as they move through the world and of those who ended up in the South. It explores from where and from whom food comes, and it looks at what food means to culture and how it relates to home.

FRANCIS LAM is editor-at-large at Clarkson Potter. He appears at the Critics’ Table in the fifth season of Top Chef Masters (Bravo). He was features editor at Gilt Taste, which was awarded six IACP awards and four James Beard award nominations in its first two years. His own writing has been nominated for a James Beard award and three IACP awards, winning one. He has served as senior writer at Salon.com and a contributing editor at Gourmet, and his work has appeared in the 2006-13 editions of Best Food Writing. JOHN T. EDGE is the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including the foodways volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.