Why so many foodie institutions fail: or thoughts on the Oxford Symposium and the Southern Foodways Alliance

Every time I poke about on the shelves and in the file drawers of my study, I run across the remains of failed “foodie” institutions, using the foodie here as a shorthand for the many gastronomic, food studies, foodways, and food history groups that have come and gone over the last thirty years. Programs for conferences that promised to be annual but that no longer exist. Issues of journals that have gone under. Names of food museums it might be fun to visit. Academic centers that have faded away.

The American Institute of Wine and Food, Oldways, and Slow Food never became the dominant organizations in the English-speaking world that it once seemed they might. Culinary historians’ groups have by and large survived but not grown. The International Association of Culinary Professionals got through rough times but shed its food history wing. The Museum of Southern Food and Beverage appears not to be as expansionist as it once was. On the other hand, The James Beard Foundation is going strong, the Museum of Food and Drink, and the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium is full of promise.

Foodie institutions, obviously, are not different from other institutions. In the modern world enthusiasts and entrepreneurs are constantly calling friends, getting together, raising money to support their favorite cause or interest.  I’ve done it myself though never to very good effect. Most never get very far.

I’ve been thinking about that the last few days as I follow at a distance two of the most venerable foodie organizations, the Oxford Food Symposium and the Southern Foodways Alliance. 

Both have been exceptionally successful.  They have survived start up days. They have waiting lists for their conferences, functional administrative structures, enough funding to function, have waiting lists for their conferences, support students, have associated books, journals and other publications (including podcasts in the case of the Oxford Symposium and videos and interviews in the case of Southern Foodways) and have broadened both their base and their range of interests.

This past week, the Oxford Symposium’s new website launched. It is the site of the virtual conference that will take place over the next couple of weeks. It’s a wonder.  Even if you are not a ticket holder, you can get some idea. If you are, just scrolling through the names and backgrounds of the other 499 people from around the world who were lucky enough to sign up in time, is a delight.  The work it must have taken to create this site is extraordinary. Hats off to the Chair Elizabeth Luard, the Trustees, and everyone else involved.

This past week coincidentally calls for the resignation of John T. Edge, Director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, were posted across social media and in the New York Times.  (If you have missed this painful, sorry outpouring, links to much of it are posted in Dianne Jacob’s most recent Will Write for Food Newsletter. You’ll have to sign up).

I have met John T. Edge just three times, so I write as an outsider. The last was in 2017 at a reading of his book on southern food, The Potlikker Papers, at a bookstore in Austin, before that in 2016 at a Southern Foodways Alliance conference on maize, and before that way back in the late 1990s a food history meeting sponsored by the International Association of Culinary Professionals.

For me, the 2016  SFA conference was a wonderful opportunity to hear or meet people whose work has been so important to food history and food studies, among them Nancie McDermott, Marcie Cohen Ferris, Michael Twitty, Sean Sherman, Maria Godoy, Tracie McMillan and David Shields. 

The conference was remarkable for two other reasons. First, SFA paid both my expenses and an honorarium, a sharp contrast to the many times I am asked to speak for expenses or even to pay my own way. Second, I got a peek at the meticulous planning, including editing all the major presentations, that went into the conference.  It created a wonderful and collegial environment to talk about often sensitive issues.

Institution building is a hard slog of raising money, careful administration, and taking care of social relations. Transitions of mission or leadership are perilous, all the more so when they become public spectacles.

So I want to thank John T. Edge for the care and energy I saw him put into SFA and the opportunities he gave me. 

Ironically I remember (no one else will) that at that long-ago 1990s IACP conference where I first met John T. Edge, I argued that we had to stop thinking of food history as women’s history, as safe history, as cozy history.No one now thinks of food history as cozy. Quite the reverse. It’s a social and political minefield that can destroy lives and reputations.

So I also fervently hope that the Southern Food Alliance that John T. Edge devoted so much of his life to will not be lost to the informal community of food writers, scholars and chefs as a place to to meet and to talk without the sound of mines going off.

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