Cotton and Corn is a four-part series built from Louise Glanton’s 1930 Baltimore Sun feature on Alabama menus.
On October 19, 1930, readers of The Baltimore Sun’s Sunday paper received a full day of Alabama eating. Louise Glanton admitted she could not name one signature dish for her home state of Alabama , so she offered a menu instead: smothered chicken at breakfast, baked ham at dinner, fried trout at supper. Cooking, she joked, works like religion—some people have it and some don’t. Whose Alabama did that menu describe? Dominant-caste households hired lower-caste cooks. Tenant families in the black belt lived on fatback, cornmeal, and molasses, a diet that spread pellagra across the region. Cotton paid the landlord. Corn fed the tenant, barely. A menu is never neutral. It ranks people by who plans the meal, who cooks it, and who eats it. Isabel Wilkerson calls that inherited ranking caste, an unspoken code of instructions that has ordered the nation since its founding. In food, the dominant caste held the land, the stores, and the kitchens it did not work in, while pushing the lower caste toward the stove and the field (Wilkerson, Caste, 17–20). Those who broke these food rules are food rebels.
Question: When a newspaper calls a cuisine “genuine,” whose labor and whose hunger does it leave out?