Photo by Lucie Monk Carter
In the mid-morning crowd of freelancers, telecommuters, and college kids at The Orange Couch coffee shop in the Bywater, the auburn-haired woman with her neck wreathed in headphones was another stranger to me … until she spoke. I’ve heard Tina Antolini’s wry alto many times now through her role as host of the Southern Foodways Alliance’s podcast Gravy, a finalist for the James Beard Foundation’s 2016 “Best Podcast” award. In thirty-three episodes, so far, Gravy’s audio narratives have ranged from the trendy kitsch of mason jars and tamales at the Kentucky Derby to Natchez’ waning Jewish community and fried chicken’s mixed bag of economic empowerment and stereotypes.
Native to Maine, Antolini now lives in New Orleans, where she both produces and hosts Gravy and frequently hits the road in support of developing stories. Below, find excerpts from my conversation with Antolini on the comfort and catharsis of storytelling through food.
On the origins of Gravy:
TA: I worked for this documentary show called State of the (re)Union that traveled all over the country. Every episode, we’d go to a different city or town and do an hour of stories about what was building community in that place. We created a portrait of the place through the issues local people were working on. But while working there, I felt like there should be a public radio program that used food in an interesting way; that, in my mind, there stood this big missed opportunity to tell stories that actually went in all these different directions, because food was this nexus, this intersection point between environment, history, culture, and business. Why not use that?
And so I started having conversations with people I knew in the food world through having been tangentially connected to it for a long time. And one of those people was John T. Edge at the Southern Foodways Alliance. It turned out that they had been thinking about branching more seriously into podcasting and audio production. The timing just could not have been better. Instead of me going out to do my own thing, it was me partnering with them to create [Gravy] together. I get to build upon the work they’ve already been doing for a long time.
On food as a common denominator:
TA: We all eat. You can get into pretty much everybody’s experience through food. And because we all eat three meals a day, it’s also this omnipresent factor of life. As a storyteller, too, food is super attractive because it can lead us into so many different places. With the South in particular, food is such a deeply prized aspect of life. I can’t think of a better vehicle for exploration of this region than what people are eating, cooking, and harvesting. It created this big tent that I felt like we could get a lot of people and a lot of stories underneath.
Even before I was doing Gravy, I would be traveling and working on stories, and if I needed to start conversations with strangers, I’d just ask them where to eat in town. It’s territory that we all share and people feel comfortable around. People get excited talking about what to eat.
Gravy is not always about the most delicious stuff. If it was like that, you’d know where every story was going to land. Food can lead us to some more complicated, interesting places … which are, sometimes, also delicious. If you can ease people in with the things they like talking about, you can get to deeper spots if you persist with it.
On how a story unfolds:
TA: I remember early on I did this story with a guy named T Cooper who was living in Knoxville at the time. It was a story about evangelical Christian coffeehouses that weren’t expressly evangelical. That one was so eye-opening to me because it was in part about twenty-first-century Christianity and the way in which people are seeking to integrate that into everyday lives, and now everyday lives involve coffeehouse culture. But also a bunch of these coffee-shop owners thought of their latte slinging as holy work.
I produced a story that just came out at the end of December that was, like, a six- to eight-month reporting project. It was looking at the loss of black-owned farms in the South and how the USDA has discriminated against these farmers. The more I researched, the more I was astonished that this was something that was not widely known about. Any time that I’m having that experience of discovery in myself, that’s when I know that this is something that will really work for the podcast because I want the listeners to have that experience of discovery as well.
On getting to know the South:
TA: Even contemporary Southerners are not necessarily super acquainted with the whole region. Living in New Orleans, you may not know the weird history of a pocket of southwestern North Carolina. People think of the South as this region, but there are actually so many hyperlocal pockets.
Most familiar things, approached with new eyes and new curiosity, can be unpacked in a way that even somebody who’s lived in a place for a long time will reflect on [that familiar subject] differently. It’s actually been a real gift that I didn’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of the South when I started doing this work because I was ready to be surprised by things that people might have just taken for granted; and yet, pairing that with the knowledge that the staff at the SFA has of the region so that we’re not making dumb mistakes is essential.
On harder issues:
TA: My instinct is that we should go toward the discomfort. If we’re uncomfortable, that means it’s probably interesting. That’s one of the challenges as a journalist. To some degree, you have to put people in that position. But I feel like there’s a way you can do it that will actually end up feeling like a relief to people, a catharsis. I really do think it’s a powerful act, listening to people. Doing this work for more than a decade, I’ve seen that even when you’re asking people to talk about things that are uncomfortable for them, it can be really empowering for them to be heard.
The Southern Foodways Alliance has really been engaging with that work of the hard conversations and also the concept of the Welcome Table, everybody sitting and eating together. I feel like that concept has this huge capacity for healing in a region that is still working on it.
We did a story almost a year ago called “The Jemima Code” that is about the cookbooks written by African American cooks and chefs that sort of were invisible to the mainstream public for a long time. There was a real pain around some of the history there—the dynamics between slave cooks and their white owners that played out even after slavery. (Though then in that story I got to interview Leah Chase, who speaking of people it was an honor to get to sit with—such strength and such grace.) So even in the stories that have harder moments, there are always redemptive ones too. This is part of the power of food—it can lead us in these difficult directions and it can also heal. I really believe that.
On legacy:
TA: People [in the South] have maintained an attention to their history, family history and otherwise, on a level that’s culturally given credence [to history] that isn’t always given in the Northeast. It feels to me that, for Southerners, history is very present. What’s that quote everyone quotes? “The past isn’t even past”? You find that people have kept track of their generational legacies. They stay in the same places and build on [their legacies], which makes for really great stories because they have that generational memory as well. It gives you a really interesting vantage on how things have changed and are changing, too.
Listen to episodes of “Gravy” and subscribe to its companion print quarterly at southernfoodways.org.
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