Nashville serves lesson in equality via meat-and-three steam table

Friday, October 31, 2014, Vol. 38, No. 44

Attending the Southern Foodways Alliance symposium meant homework before class. Leading up to the meeting, we received a list of about 14 articles, 26 books, two thesis papers, five oral histories and nine films to help put the talks and meals we would have into context.

And then there’s the unwritten homework – taking vitamins, drinking lots of water and getting in a good workout before going.

That’s because in addition to organized talks, the unplanned ones begin over food and drink and go late into the night.

The 17th symposium of the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) took place Oct. 23-26 in Oxford, Miss., with the theme of “Who is Welcome at the Welcome Table?”

It marked the 50th anniversary of restaurant desegregation and encouraged us to look at other ways we remain divided because of race, class, gender and sexuality.

The discussions often challenged and inspired, and the issues will likely continue cooking in a stew of ideas, questions and conversations.

But in the meantime, a few highlights below include Nashville’s representation at the event:

You can take the meat-and-three out of Nashville, but you can’t take the soul out of the food.

The Nashville Steam Table Lunch in Black and White introduced SFA attendees to Arnold’s Country Kitchen and The Silver Sands’ Soul Food.

Just as it happens here, diners lined up to take a tray at the steam table before sitting down together to break hot water cornbread and taste squash casserole, turnip greens and green beans from Arnold’s and lima beans and black-eyed peas from The Silver Sands.

As the late Nashville writer John Egerton – himself a Southern Food Alliance founder – once noted, the steam table and the meat-and-three are among the most democratic restaurant experiences where everyone from music producer to policeman can meet and share a meal.

“We showed them our sense of community through food and our sense of place through food,” said Thomas Williams of Nashville. “Through the lunch line, everyone is equal.”

Understanding a food can help us start to understand a people.

Just as Arnold’s and the Silver Sands demonstrated their welcome table, foods from other regions of the South helped us understand and connect with people of those places.

We listened to oral histories with the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, the largest tribe east of the Mississippi and a group that does not have federal recognition.

But it’s talk of the collard sandwich, traditionally served at the Lumbee homecoming, that helped bring the Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South into a clearer, more approachable view.

“The collard sandwich represents for us inclusion – creating something for yourself that you then share with others,” said Malinda Maynor Lowery, a member of the Lumbee tribe and professor of history at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

“None of us have the luxury of unconsciousness. We have to think about these things.” - Ta-Nehisi Coates

Nashville native and New York Times editor Clay Risen walked us through how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law.

Risen published a book in April on the subject, “The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act.” Nashville sit-ins at downtown cafes were mentioned briefly in these sessions, along with a film about sit-ins in Jackson, Mississippi.

But also during the Friday morning discussions, Ta-Nehisi Coates, national correspondent for The Atlantic, delivered a tough talk on civil rights urging us to lose the nostalgia and pats on the back about progress.

The losses aren’t bumps on the road, he said, but the road itself. He spoke of both shame and anger and how to best harness those emotions for good.

And if food can help get us get closer to these questions and to understanding one another, then let’s eat.

For more information about the Southern Foodways Alliance, visit www.southernfoodways.org.

*In the food business, being “in the weeds” means being super busy. And that’s also how we would describe Nashville’s booming restaurant scene. In this column, Jennifer Justus, journalist, author and food culture writer, keeps us up to date on food, dining out and trends with bi-weekly reports from the table.