Business, Media and Culture 2019

Mississippians are serious about food, and no one in Mississippi is as serious about food as John T. Edge.

John T. Edge writes about the American South. In 2017, Penguin published The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, named as book of the year by NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, and a host of others. Now in paperback, Nashville selected the book as a citywide read for 2018. Edge is also the host of the television show TrueSouth, which airs on the SEC Network and on ESPN.

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 directs the Southern Foodways Alliance, an institute of the Center for the Study 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 has written or edited more than a dozen books, including the foodways volume of the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. He is series editor of Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People, and Place, published by the University of Georgia Press. Edge has served as culinary curator for the weekend edition of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and has been featured on dozens of television shows, from “CBS Sunday Morning” to “Iron Chef.”