John T. Edge

Cool Enough For Collards
Egghead, back-roads rover and frat-boy slacker, John T. Edge is teaching a new generation to appreciate Southern food

by Drew Jubera
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
January 20, 2005

We've done lunch: mustard greens drizzled with hot pepper sauce, pickled cucumbers and onions, boiled okra, field peas, macaroni and cheese, ambrosia --- all washed down at a farmers market in the tiny Delta town of Drew, Miss., with sweet, sweet tea.

We'd already polished off a midmorning serving of fried chicken and poundcake on a bus in Cleveland, Miss., for no other reason than it became . . . available.

Before that: a breakfast of biscuits and syrup pressed from ribbon cane at Mattie's in downtown Greenwood. It was a too-early pick-me-up after a too-late night of sipping from a pass-around pint of Jack Daniel's, much of it downed on another bus, to Club Ebony, a juke joint in Indianola.

Even that sipping was preceded by more eating: dishes of stuffed rabbit, red snapper baked in sea salt, and before that --- before the afternoon sun slipped below the Delta's endless snowscape of high cotton --- tamales delivered from Doe's Eat Place, a legendary hole-in-the-wall.

And, if I remember correctly, before that: Virtually the first words to spill from the mouth of John T. Edge, emerging Pied Piper of Southern food and this story's here-there-everywhere subject, after he introduced himself on a Greenwood sidewalk:

"I toss my slice [of pie] in the trash and cast about for a diversion. It's time for a drink. I take refuge in what passes for the local den of iniquity, Sherlock's of Celebration [Fla.]. After drowning my disappointment with a couple of beers, I return to the festival. Turns out that Main Street USA looks better with a buzz on."

He's a mild-looking dude with a whooping, jailbreak laugh. He can do tweedy, as he sometimes must as director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, a kind of country-fried think tank of Southern eats with a national reputation among foodsters of all stripes (culinary, academic, journalistic, eataholic), earned from its home at the University of Mississippi.

Yet Edge, a baby-faced 41-year-old known to everybody as "John T.," is more comfortable in just about anything that's the opposite of tweedy --- jeans, shorts, T-shirt stamped "Bacon of the Month Club" --- as his chin's peekaboo soul patch suggests.

"He's got this kind of 'dutiful son' persona," says Diane McWhorter, Birmingham native and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Carry Me Home," a civil rights-era memoir. "He looks real innocent. But he's subversive."

Edge is many things to many people, which is one reason he's seated at the center table of what's being thought, talked and written about in the world of Southern food.

Through his work at the Foodways Alliance, Edge has galvanized a movable feast of the region's passionate foodocracy. The alliance is devoted to the study, preservation and celebration of Southern food, and its annual symposium at Ole Miss is perhaps the hottest food conference ticket in the country. It lures high thinkers and low eaters for a long weekend devoted to topics as diverse as barbecue, creole cuisine and the relationship between food and race.

It is from that outpost that Edge has also become an increasingly vital food writer, a new-generation chronicler of traditional regional foodways.

He blends equal parts Southern studies academic, back-roads rover and frat-boy slacker to create articles and books that are as much culinary anthropology as tales of good eatin'.

He's a regular contributor to magazines such as Gourmet and Saveur, and his books include "Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover's Companion to the South," a truth-seeking trek through the region's chicken shacks, fish camps and meat-and-three joints that introduces the people and culture behind the dishes he is served.

With a sensibility rooted both in research and rock 'n' roll, he has made throwback standbys like catfish and collards and fried pimento cheese . . . hip. Many see him as an incubating successor to John Egerton, the revered author of "Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History" and the alliance's guiding spirit.

"He's the next generation of Southerners," Egerton says. "When I ask myself, 'Have we made any progress?' I think of someone like him and say, 'We're definitely getting somewhere.' He's got the touch."

Adds Jane Daniels Lear, who edits Edge at Gourmet: "He has one of the most honest Southern voices out there. He's very nuanced. There are a lot of 'professional Southerners' out there, and he's not one of them. I can see him writing all sorts of things not tied to the South."

Indeed, Putnam recently published two of four planned books by Edge on national food icons: "Fried Chicken" and "Apple Pie." He traveled the country, from Seattle to Cambridge to Barberton, Ohio, to pry the meaning out of what people eat. A native Georgian, Edge is eager to apply what he does here to everywhere else --- to "split open a black-eyed pea pod," as food writer Ronni Lundy puts it, "and find information about race, gender and class."

"I just write about the South by way of food. Now I'm expanding beyond the South with these books," Edge says in his rubbed-down Gnat Line drawl. "My curiosity about the region informs my curiosity about the country. I always want to keep wandering."

Then he adds with a concluding, trademark whoop, "Maybe I'll decide America ain't for me and retreat back to the South."

"I was weaned on a steady diet of barbecue sandwiches, Brunswick stew, and sweet tea from Old Clinton Barbecue. During my teen years, I wolfed down chili dogs and slaw-capped dogs from the Nu-Way in Macon. While in my early twenties, I developed a taste for Atlanta icon Deacon Burton's fried chicken . . . His grease was the grease that bound Atlanta, black and white, young and old, rich and poor."

Edge's scenic, roundabout route to Mississippi, food writing and unofficial standing as everyman scholar of the down-home South unreels like an uncharted travelogue --- like, say, his still unrequited quest for chicken that is at once barbecued, battered and fried.

He was dubbed "John T." almost the instant he was born, to distinguish him from his father, also John Thomas Edge. He grew up in the former house of a Confederate officer on 14 acres in Clinton, a rural drive-through of several dozen people northeast of Macon.

An only child raised at the tail end of the civil rights movement, Edge viewed his parents as unabashed progressives. His mother once attended a local Klan rally to see if any of them were neighbors, Edge recalls. When a black playmate he invited to the public pool was told to leave, young John T. was forbidden by his parents to step foot in that pool again.

His father, a federal probation officer, read to him nightly, and his mother once toted him along to visit Flannery O'Connor's mother in Milledgeville. (His lone memory: "I was scared to death by the peacocks.") His culinary curiosity was piqued by his father, who took John T. with him on weekend jaunts to Atlanta to poke up and down Buford Highway, rummaging through ethnic stores and restaurants.

"He'd stop in a Chinese grocery and try to figure it out," Edge says. "I have this image of going into this Chinese grocery store, him grabbing a black chicken out of the refrigerator case and bringing it home."

Edge arrived at the University of Georgia still country to his core. Everything he needed to know about college he thought he'd learned from "Animal House," the gonzo campus comedy he saw just before landing in Athens.

"It taught me about college, about being rebellious," he remembers. "But I missed the point about education."

Edge became Sigma Nu social director, arranging parties and booking bands. (Proudest booking: Flat Duo Jets for $50 and a bottle of gin.) But he spent more time listening to local bar bands like the Squalls and Love Tractor than attending political science class.

After almost six years at UGA, he left two years short of a degree. He moved to Atlanta and became what he calls "corporate swine": a crackerjack salesman of financial analyses. He made money and traveled the region, often building into business trips three-hour drives to remote barbecue pits.

He also became fascinated with folk pottery and roamed the countryside on weekends in search of face jugs. When in town during the week, he'd spend hours-long lunches with a friend ferreting out obscure restaurants all over metro Atlanta. "We had a joke," he says. " 'Work is what you do before and after lunch.' "

It was a schizophrenic life: Friday morning in Memphis, meeting with brokers at Morgan Keegan; Friday night back in Atlanta, drinking with friends at the Yacht Club in Little Five Points.

But he'd always felt guilty about not finishing school, that he'd let his father down. Almost a decade after exiting Athens, he read an article that described Oxford, Miss., as a literary oasis, and some sort of light went on: He sold his house, traded his Acura for a '66 Plymouth Valiant convertible and, within two months, was enrolled in the Southern studies program at Ole Miss.

"I'd stored up enough confidence and money to make a drastic change," he says. "I proved I could succeed in the business world, so I could take a chance on something new."

This time around, "Animal House" was a cultural touchstone, not a how-to manual.

"He was quiet, modest, serious," recalls Charles Reagan Wilson, director of the school's Center for the Study of Southern Culture. "I think he always had the sense he'd been given a special opportunity, and he made the most of it."

Edge went on to get his master's degree at the center, zeroing in on food and its sly insight into the history, prejudices and native musicality of those who grow, cook and eat it. It was fallow soil at Ole Miss --- he remembers someone exclaiming, "You mean you're going to study grits?" and him responding, "Hell, yeah!" --- but it satisfied the impulse that drove him to Mississippi in the first place: to come to terms with the region and his complicated place in it.

"I have a deep pride as a Southerner and unresolved anger at the region and myself," he says. "Part of me when I hear 'Dixie' played, I swell with pride. But when the Dixiecrats took up the flag, that symbol was no longer available to me.

His answer, to himself: "A splayed hog over hickory logs. It's about community. The soulful goodness of smoked pig."

We're finished eating, for now. Edge is driving beneath the Delta's floor-to-ceiling sky, noodling along a countertop-flat two-lane from Drew back to Oxford, where he lives with his artist wife and 3-year-old son. There's cotton to the right of us, cotton to the left, and, rising from the emptied-out town of Lambert, a water tower painted to look like an enormous cotton boll.

Idling at a red light --- the red light --- in the next town, Edge glances left and spots an old man seated in a storefront's open doorway, knife in hand, eating a whole watermelon. A sign above him reads "Roberson Produce: I Have Tomatoes." Edge and the man wave to each other.

It's the sort of scene that under different circumstances Edge might stop to write about. His topics have been as various as New Orleans oyster shuckers, the late Alabama-born writer Eugene Walter ("His voice was all honey and mud . . ."), and a return to Blanche's Open House, in Athens, to explore the complex racial history of his favorite post-drunk collegiate diner ("When I call Blanche to set up an interview, I am rather vague about my intentions. I am not . . . keen on letting Blanche and Herbert know that this reformed frat boy has been leafing through their old FBI files, trying to make sense of their past and, by extension, my own.")

Edge hates the easy target practice that scenes like the watermelon man here in Marks, Miss., provides outsiders and drive-by Southerners. Geek-boy hipster that he is (Lundy's words), Edge is not an ironist.

"There's a subtlety to observations of the South that so many get wrong," he says as the light blinks green and he motors on down the road. "We are not carnival folk, a sideshow for your entertainment."

Edge is a realist, however, and knows what I know: Every story needs an ending, including this one. But after days roaming Mississippi with him, a finish proved elusive.

Until Saturday night. Following a fried chicken "throw down" in Oxford put on by the alliance, featuring four cooks frying under a tent in an empty field, Edge hosted a party at his house just up the street. The cozy bungalow filled quickly, with people spilling out to the front porch and back yard. Drinks and conversation flowed.

Then sometime after midnight, the local laws showed up: There'd been noise complaints. Edge, the former Sigma Nu social director, took an officer aside and explained that the partyers were actually noted chefs, professors and writers from around the country. As if on cue, a cluster of esteemed partyers began a raucous chant of the Ole Miss "Hotty Totty" cheer. The officer didn't have to say another word.

Edge waded through the horde inside to shoo everybody out. It took forever. At one point, as he wedged his way into the crammed kitchen, he turned to me, right behind him, and smiled: the subversive innocent. Guests were pouring into the Mississippi night, where a police car, lights flashing, remained parked in front of his house.