"Married," by Jo McDougall. Featured in Vinegar & Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. University of Georgia Press, 2018.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marlanda Dekine is a poet and author obsessed with ancestry, memory, and the process of staying within one’s own body. This poem appears in their collection Thresh & Hold, forthcoming from Hub City Press on March 29, 2022.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"Carlo Flunk the Seventh Grade," by Greg Brownderville. Featured in Vinegar & Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. University of Georgia Press, 2018.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In "Filipino Balikbayan is Homecoming in a Box," Gravy explores the histories underlying the balikbayan box—a large box filled with everything from tubes of toothpaste to cassette tapes to cans of Spam—that Filipinos in the United States customarily send home to family in the Philippines. There is an entire industry in Filipino enclaves across the United States dedicated to the logistics of shipping these boxes, which have been popular since the Philippines established the Balikbayan Program in the 1970s.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In "New Orleans Street Vendors, Old and New," Gravy explores the history of street food vendors in New Orleans, from Mr. Okra to the pralinière, or praline vendor. A conversation with urbanist Amy Stelly, who grew up in Tremé and remembers when street vendors populated her neighborhood, reveals that there is a fraught line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation. What is the legacy of street vendors today?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In "The Skinny on the South Beach Diet" producer Katie Jane Fernelius speaks with Adrienne Bitar, author of Diet and the Disease of Civilization, all about diet books and why they capture the American imagination. They discuss the South Beach Diet, in particular, and the ways it answered a specific moral panic over obesity in the early 2000s. But who and what are the inheritors of the diet book industry’s values today?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Gravy, "The Kitchen Electric: Selling Power to Rural America," producer Katie Jane Fernelius looks at the role of women in campaigns for electricity and electrical appliances. She speaks with scholar Rachele Dini at the University of Roehampton about how advertising portrayed and defined the modern housewife in print ads and commercials. Then, she speaks with Hal Wallace at the Smithsonian about the government-funded campaign for rural electrification, which featured home economists like Louisan Mamer. Altogether, she learns that industrialization and electrification may have been more transformative of women’s lives than any others––for better and worse. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of the Gravy podcast, “Orange Juice and the Making of the Sunshine State,” producer Katie Jane Fernelius examines how, for decades, the Florida Citrus Commission not only peddled orange juice, but Florida’s popular image as the sunshine state. She talks to James Padgett, a scholar who has studied Florida oranges; Fred Fejes, professor emeritus in the school of communication and multimedia studies at the Florida Atlantic University; and Ronni Sanlo, an LGBT historian and native Floridian. And Katie learns that to look into a glass of Florida orange juice is to look into the thorny mythologies of the state—and those who challenged the values those mythologies represented. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"Easy," by Ed Madden. Featured in Vinegar & Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. University of Georgia Press, 2018.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"Take the Woods Ballistic! Black Belt Nightlife" disrupts the sleepy picture of rural life by taking you into its nightlife. In Alabama’s Black Belt, the night scene has a beat all its own, rooted in a sense of deep community. We dive into bootlegging, clubbing, and a legendary Black Belt festival: the Footwash in Uniontown. Catherine Shelton of the Coleman Center for the Arts in York and Bosephus Gary of Bo’s Fashions in Uniontown take us into the mix, revealing how Black Belt residents balance a hard work week and an ongoing fight for environmental justice with nights of leisure and release.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices