[This post, of course, was inspired by the likes of the great Rick Santorum, who once famously equated homosexuality to bestiality, and political commentator Michael Reagan, who so eloquently warned of the "slippery slope" between homosexuality and man-dog love, murder, etc. Personally, I'm very happy to hear that the Boy Scouts of America decided today to allow in gay members, and I hope that it's a sign of greater changes to come. As someone who was often called "gay" in high school for being an Eagle Scout, I think it only makes sense.]

I would have thought, in the wake of our moon landing in 1969, that fear and superstition would have slowly started to melt away in the face of science, giving rise to a new age of enlightenment, but that’s not really what happened. Instead, a great many of us doubled down on ignorance, denying global warming, and demanding, until blue in the face, that our President, in spite of the overwhelming documentation to the contrary, was born outside of the United States. And, as education budgets are being slashed, and the grasp of lowest-common-denominator “reality” television is becoming more strong, I think it’s likely that we’ll see the dumbing down of the American population continue, and our federal dollars being spent on things like walls along the Mexican border, instead of manned space exploration. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of humanity, and a big part of me thinks that we should just allow the whole experiment to end here on earth. But, at the same time, I also think that we’ve gone too far to just throw in the towel and give in to the forces of stupidity now. And it’s that part of me that thinks that we should begin looking more seriously at what it would take to get a rocket to Mars, full of brilliant astronauts of childbearing age, ready to blast off and leave this rapidly decaying planet of ours for good. So, that’s the big question for tonight – should we give up on earth, or should we focus our activities on saving it?

This, as I see it, is the biggest question facing humanity… and I think it’s summed up pretty well by the following two quotes – the first of which is from theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, and the second of which is from celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. I don’t think the two are by any means mutually exclusive, but, if you follow them through to their logical conclusions, I think you’ll agree that they point toward two very different visions for our future. So, with all that said, I’m curious as to what you stand… Should we put all of our efforts into finding another planet, where humanity might have a better chance of long term survival, or should we fight to make that future on earth? (Personally, I think we need to do both, but where’s the fun in arguing that?)

Let me start out by saying that I like that the Color Run took place in Ypsi this morning. Anything, in my opinion, that brings upwards of 15,000 people into the city, to spend their money, is a good thing, even if they do shut down a lot of streets, and leave tons of trash in their wake. It was incredibly cool to see Beezy’s, the Ugly Mug, and Sidetrack packed this morning, and a throng of people around the Growing Hope bicycle blender, waiting to buy smoothies from young Ypsilanti entrepreneurs. With all that said, though, I find the whole thing kind of weird… I just don’t get why anyone would spend $50 to have people throw shit in their faces as they jog… But, I guess, as religion plays less and less a part in the daily life of Americans, folks are hungry for (purchased) experiences that allow them to feel as though they’re part of something bigger than themselves… And, I suppose, this is probably better than goading bulls as they stampede through narrow alleyways, or any number of other things.

When I first heard that Ypsi would be one of 30 U.S. cities to host a 5K Color Run, and that some of the proceeds would be going to local non-profits, I sent off a note to the organization, asking just how much money our non-profits were likely to get. They told me, “The charities and their requirements, needs, partnerships, fundraising, disclosure limitations and agreements vary with each venue,” and suggested that I contact the charities directly. (The local charities that partnered with the Color Run were Ypsilanti Meals on Wheels, SOS Community Services, Michigan ElvisFest, Ypsilanti Area Jaycees, Downtown Association of Ypsilanti, Growing Hope and Food Gatherers.) While I’ve yet to reach out to any of them directly, I did hear from an anonymous source that the total contribution was in the ballpark of $13,000, with those charities that turned out the most volunteers this morning, getting larger shares.

So, here’s the math as I figure it… The last official count that I heard was that 17,500 had registered for today’s run. According to their site, registration, depending on how big of a team you to have, runs from $45 to $55. For the purposes of this exercise, we’ll be conservative, and assume $45. 17,500 people, paying $45 a piece, would yield a whopping $787,500. Assuming my source was right, and our local charities received $13,000, that means they received considerably less than 2% of the total take. And, for that $13,000, the corporate entity behind the Color Run not only got a lot of free publicity, but they also got a great deal of free labor… Not a bad business model, huh?

But, like I said, our local business people had a great day, and the neon corn starch-covered people that I came in contact with were all nice. Still, something seems odd about it… Maybe I’m just jealous that it didn’t occur to me to commoditize an Indian religious ritual.

I’ll give them credit, though. They’ve done a bang up job of marketing this thing.

[note to self: Now, I just need to find a way to Americanize this festival in Lebanon and bring it to the midwest with a pop soundtrack.]

Oh, and for what it’s worth, I think that this might also mark the end of legitimate rave culture. (It occurred to me this morning, as I was watching neon covered midwestern folks jogging into the park, where techno music was being blasted, that this is what rave culture looks like when it’s marketed to the suburban masses.)

To my knowledge, not much has changed since I first posted this a year ago, at least relative to how the money is shared with those non-profits that assist with the marketing of these events, and provide the free labor which makes them possible. There have, however, been changes on other fronts. Most notably, a competitor, seeing what a cash cow the Color Run is, has decided to get into the act. And, in fact, this group, called Color Me Rad, will be hosting a run of their own in Detroit on the very day the Color Run will be in Ypsi… Oh, and others have begun to join me in pointing out that this whole thing is a scam. Hopefully, over time, this will build, and the organizers will be forced to give more than 2% of their proceeds to the communities they shut down and trash… Of course, everyone seems to know how terrible of an organization the Susan G. Komen Foundations is, and yet they continue to keep right on going. The sad reality, I think, is that people just don’t give a shit. They like wearing pink ribbons, running through clouds of neon cornstarch, and feeling as though, by doing so, they’re making a difference.

Just to be clear, though, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t host this event. It’s good for business, and it brings a ton of people to Ypsi. I just wish that our non-profits shared a bit more in the obscene wealth that’s being created on our turf.

[note: Those who are interested in going deeper on this are encouraged to read through the 100+ comments which were left when this post first ran.]

Speaking of Muslim extremists, the Pakistani Taliban, who were quick to claim credit for the 2010 Time Square bomb, have come out and said that this wasn’t their doing. “Wherever we find Americans we will kill them,” they said in their statement, “but we don’t have any connection with the Boston explosions.” And, as of right now, it doesn’t look as though there’s much to suggest a Muslim connection. A young Saudi man, who was wounded at the bomb site, was questioned by police, and consented to have his apartment searched, but it looks now as though he’s not presently a suspect.

I know that people everywhere are anxious to use this horrific event to confirm their preexisting prejudices, whether they be against Muslims or the so-called Patriot Movement, but I’d like to think that we could manage a bit of self restraint, and see how the investigation plays out. I think we owe it to the victims of the bombing to do at least that much.

One more thing… Having been working in downtown Atlanta at the time of the Olympic bombing, I followed that investigation somewhat closely, and I’d encourage people to remember what happens when we stop following the facts, and choose instead to focus on certain individuals because we want immediate satisfaction, and like the narrative they embody.

Anticipating his own death not too long ago, Ebert, a lapsed Catholic, had the following to say.

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris…

What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes…

Someday I will no longer call out, and there will be no heartbeat. I will be dead. What happens then? From my point of view, nothing. Absolutely nothing. All the same, as I wrote to Monica Eng, whom I have known since she was six, “You’d better cry at my memorial service.”

[Bonus points for the Vonnegut reference.]

Ebert didn’t know it, but our paths have crossed twice… at least in a kind of cosmic sense. The first time was in Atlanta, when Linette and I had the pleasure of spending an evening with his on-again-off-again collaborator, the ferociously un-PC Russ Meyer, who talked with us for some time about his friendship and working relationship with the young screenwriter. (Meyer, as I recall, after telling us how he’d like to kill that “skinny bitch” Kate Moss, explained to us that it was Ebert’s wife who kept them from seeing one another. I didn’t press the matter, but, seeing as how Ebert gave up booze, and sought treatment for alcoholism not too long after he and Meyer last worked together, I suspect there may have been good reason for him to keep his distance, whether it was his wife’s idea or his own.) The second crossing of paths took place at a zine conference in Santa Barbara, where an elderly man approached me with a half-century-old mimeographed booklet, asking me to turn it over and read the author’s name. It was a little, self-published sci-fi publication called Stymie, and the author was one Roger Ebert. (The whole zine movement, by the way, rose up out of the sci-fi fanzine scene in the 50s.) According to the old man who had handed it to me, Ebert, before turning to film criticism, had been a precocious kid, writing furiously in his parents’ basement about science fiction. And that’s what fascinated me about Ebert. As much as I would have liked to have talked with him about the debauchery of his time with Meyers, the highly cantilevered women in the cult director’s entourage, and the Sex Pistols, what I really wanted to find out more about was his early years, working alone in his parents’ basement.

Maybe it’s because I’d come into adulthood publishing zines of my own, and I felt a certain kinship there, but I really liked the vision of this super motivated kid in the suburbs, hammering out articles behind the backs of his conservative parents. I jotted down the address noted on the back of Symie, and wrote a letter, hoping that someone in his family might still live there, and asking for an interview. Unfortunately, I never heard anything back. I did, however, stumble across a mention that Ebert had made of Stymie, and his early forays into publishing, a little while ago online. Here’s a clip. I fear it will be of little interest to anyone but me, but, as I love the history of self-publishing, and think this is one important aspect of the man’s life that’s not likely to be celebrated elsewhere today, I’m going to include it.

… Prozines and fanzines were two different worlds, and it was in the virtual world of science fiction fandom that I started to learn to be a writer and a critic. Virtual, because for a long time I never met any other fans; they lived only in the pages of mimeographed fanzines that arrived at 410 E. Washington St. and were quickly hidden among the hundreds of SF mags in the basement, on metal shelves that cost four books of Green Stamps. “Hidden,” because at first I concealed my interest in fandom from my parents. Fanzines were not offensive in any way–certainly not in a sexual way, which would have been the worst way of all in a family living in the American Catholicism of the 1950s, but I sensed somehow that they were . . . dangerous. Dangerous, because untamed, unofficial, unlicensed. It was the time of beatniks and On the Road, which I also read, and no one who did not grow up in the fifties will be quite able to understand how subversive fandom seemed.

Most fanzines had a small circulation of a few hundred, but they created a reality so intriguing and self-referential that, for fans, they were the newspapers of a world. Looking through old issues of Xero, which during its brief glory was one of the best fanzines ever published, I was stunned by how immediate and vivid my reaction was to names not thought about for years: Harry Warner Jr., Mike Deckinger, Guy Terwilliger, Gene DeWeese, Bob Lichtman, bhob Stewart (how evocative that “h” was!), Walt Willis, Bob Tucker, “Ajay” Budrys, Ted White. I met Donald Westlake as an adult (we have been on a couple of cruises together) and he was surprised to find that I was already reading him in Xero. I found established professionals (Harlan Ellison, Donald A. Wollheim, Anthony Boucher, Frederik Pohl, Avram Davidson, James Blish) happy to contribute to a fanzine, indeed plunging passionately into the fray. I confess happily that as I scanned pages and pages of letters of comment (“locs”), my eye instinctively scanned for my own name, as it did forty years ago, and when I found it (Blish dismissing one of my locs), I felt the same flash of recognition, embarrassment and egoboo that I felt then; much muted, to be sure, diluted, but still there. Locs were the currency of payment for fanzine contributors; you wrote, and in the next issue got to read about what you had written. Today I can see my name on a full-page ad for a movie with disinterest, but what Harry Warner or Buck Coulson had to say about me–well, that was important.

Wilson (Bob) Tucker was the first fan I met. He lived in Leland, a hamlet south of Bloomington, not far from Urbana. In the summer of 1958, still in high school, I was working as a reporter for the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, and was assigned to drive to Springfield to cover something at the state fair. I made a detour past his house. Bob and Fern made me feel right at home, and to meet them again I concocted a sort of fraud on my newspaper. We had a Sunday article on interior decorating, and I convinced an editor that I should write a piece about the household arrangements of one of Downstate Illinois’ major writers. Well, Tucker was major! In the endless fanzine debates about whether SF was really literature, The Long Loud Silence was always cited as real literature. Bob was a movie projectionist in Bloomington who wrote in his spare time (a writer with the same talent would be a best-seller today). The Tucker home was a modest two-bedroom suburban house with attached garage– “turn left off the highway when you get to the motel.” I photographed the high points of the interior decoration, which to my eye consisted of Bob’s typewriter, his desk, his shelves of books, his piles of SF magazines, his framed movie posters, and the Tuckers, standing in front of various compositions of the above. This article actually ran in the paper.

A year or so after that I joined Tucker and Ed Gorman, a fan from Cedar Rapids, on a trip to the MidWestCon in Cincinnati. We drove in my family’s Dodge, nearly skidding off a road in Indiana, talking all the way about fandom in a giddy rapid-fire exchange of inside jargon. At a motel in Cincinnati, I made people laugh with my reproductions of Bob and Ray routines, and drank a little beer, which felt like a lot of beer to an inexperienced drinker, and–here is the earth-shaking part–I actually met Buck and Juanita Coulson, Dick and Pat Lupoff, and Harlan Ellison! The Coulsons struck me as two of the nicest people I had ever met, the kind of people where you would like to move into their spare room, and the astonishingly long run of their Yandro was one of the monuments of fandom. The Lupoffs were enormously funny and smart New Yorkers–that city that the novels of Thomas Wolfe had forever colored in my daydreams. Harlan was–how old? Twenty? Young and cocky, with the color proofs for the cover of his new paperback that Berkeley Books was about to publish, and as he showed me the glossy reproduction, I knew envy of a desperately sincere kind.

The summer of 1961, now a student at the University of Illinois, I made my first trip to Europe on a $325 charter flight, and in Belfast visited Walt and Madeleine Willis. They invited me to tea–tomato sandwiches and Earl Grey–and took me around to meet James White, another of Belfast’s BNFs (Big Name Fans), whose prozine collection was carefully wrapped in brown parcel paper, year by year, and labeled (“F&SF 1957″). Fandom was a secret society and I had admission to friends everywhere who spoke the same arcane language.

In the summer of 1962, I found myself going to South Africa as the press agent for a tour of wheelchair athletes from the University of Illinois. After the long bus trip from Urbana, we stopped overnight at a motel near LaGuardia, and I called Dick and Pat Lupoff. We met for dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Times Square. Other members of our party included Lin Carter and his girlfriend, Gerry Deindorf, Walter Breen, and Ted and Sylvia White.

These meetings, these connections and conversations, were important because they existed in an alternative world to the one I inhabited. Fandom grew out of and fed a world-view that was dubious of received opinion, sarcastic, anarchic, geeky before that was fash-ionable. In those years it was heretical to take comic books or “Captain Video” seriously. Pop culture was not yet an academic subject. From Lenny Bruce, Stan Freberg, Harvey Kurtzman, Mort Sahl, and Bob and Ray we found an angle on America that cut through the orthodoxy of the Fifties and was an early form of what would come to be known as the Sixties.

I published my own fanzine (Stymie), cutting the ditto masters on an old L.C. Smith and paying an office supply company a few bucks to run it off for me. My freshman year in college I published The Spectator, a weekly “newspaper of politics and the arts” at the University, and this was a descendent of my fanzine. If I had only known it, I had stumbled on the format of the alternative weekly, but I didn’t know enough to give it away, and the ads and circulation income weren’t enough to keep it afloat; at the end of a year I sold it for two hundred dollars and joined the staff of The Daily Illini, then as now a great independent campus paper, and it took so much of my time that, little by little, fandom drifted out of sight…

And here, for those of you who don’t care so much about his 1950′s foray in self-publishing, are a few of my favorite videos of the beautiful, kind, thoughtful and generous Mr. Ebert in action… brilliantly egging on his old foil, Gene Siskel, defending Star Wars against a sci-fi hating asshole, and tearing apart the shittiest movies of 1983. (Those seeking more video clips can find a good list here.)

It’s like the “Young Lady, Old Woman” illusion for a new generation.

Chris Savage: Eclectablog
Ben Connor Barrie: Damn Arbor
Patti Smith: The Palate of Patti
Edward Vielmetti: Vacuum
Mary Bilyeu: Food Floozie
Steven Krause: EMU Talk
Patrick Diehl: What’s the Diehl?
Anne Savage: The Savage Feast
Peter Larson: Freewheel Burning
Christine Barry: Blogging for Michigan
Mike White: The Projection Booth
Ruth Kraut: Ann Arbor School Musings
Sarah Rigg: I Did It So You Don’t Have To
Joseph Schafer: Invisible Oranges
Kenneth Bailey: Michigan Exposures
Chuck Marshall: Life in Michigan
Mark Maynard: Mark Maynard dotcom
Roger Kerson: Driving Growth

If you’re planning to join us, you can RSVP on Facebook.

[This was my Facebook update today. I thought that those of you who I refuse to friend might appreciate it as well.]

MARK: Perhaps, before we get started talking specifically about your work, you could share a little background about the Southern Foodways Alliance, how it got started, its mission, etc.

AMY: The Southern Foodways Alliance was founded in 1999. A member-supported non-profit, based at the University of Mississippi, we stage symposia on food culture, produce documentary films, collect oral histories, and publish compendiums of great writing.

Our mission is to document, study, and celebrate the diverse food cultures of the changing American South. We set a common table where black and white, rich and poor—all who gather—may consider our history and our future in a spirit of reconciliation.

Since 1999, we’ve added more than 700 oral history interviews to our online archive and produced 35 documentary films. We’ve only just begun.

(Go here for more on our history, and visit our SFA Founders’ Oral History Project, to read interviews with most all of our 50 founding members.)

MARK: When I first became acquainted with your work, I have to tell you that I was more than just a little bit jealous. As someone with an appreciation for the South, having grown up moving between Kentucky, Georgia and South Carolina, and degree in American Studies, who attempted to make a go of it at an historic archeologist, before giving it all up for the security of an office job, your career, at least as I understand it, is the stuff that dreams are made of. Please tell me one really bad thing about your job before we get into the good stuff… I think that might make this interview easier for me.

AMY: You know, I didn’t even know a job like this existed before I found myself in it. It is a really wonderful gig, I have to say, but there is one giant albatross around my oral historian neck: processing. For every week spent in the field collecting interviews, four more are spent in front of a computer screen. We’re now able to have multiple people collecting fieldwork for us, so I manage that, too. It’s all worth it, though, of course. So is the uptick in my waistline.

MARK: OK, now the good stuff. Tell us what it is that you do for the Southern Foodways Alliance?

AMY: I am the SFA’s lead oral historian. I travel the region collecting stories from people who make, grow, serve, and consume Southern food and drink. Until just a few years ago, I was the only oral historian but, as the organization has grown, we’ve been able to bring more people into the fold and invite colleagues to collaborate with us on projects throughout the region. Here lately, I’ve been attending more conferences to spread the good word about our documentary archive. I also conduct a week-long oral history workshop every May at our headquarters at the University of Mississippi.

MARK: In the time that you’ve been collecting oral histories have you noticed any larger trends? Are you, for instance, seeing any evidence of the old ways dying off? Or, are people, perhaps, coming to appreciate regional food traditions more, with the advent of “food tv” and the constant advance of corporate chains across the American landscape? In your opinion, is there a concerted effort to keep these things alive? And, if not, how do we get there?

AMY: After a decade doing this work, the only things I see dying are people. Southern food is on the upswing. It’s more popular that ever, it seems. It’s the generation of people who are connected to almost a century of the South’s culinary history that we’re losing. People like Alisa Lay of Greenwood, MS; Bill Tinker of Louisville, KY; Edna Stewart of Chicago, IL; and Joe Pope of Rosedale, MS, to whom we dedicated our Mississippi Delta Hot Tamale Trail. They are precisely why we are committed to oral history.

MARK: The work you’re doing is incredibly important. It’s vital that we capture the history of regular Americans, of all walks of life, and food, perhaps more than anything else, really gets to the heart of who we are. It’s our history, our heart, our culture, all rolled up into one. I’m curious if you have any sense just how much of this history was lost before your group, and others, began documenting it. It’s easy to see on a satellite image, for instance, just how much of the Amazon rainforest disappears each year, but how do we measure the loss in this area which you study?

AMY: In my oral history workshop I always share the African proverb, when an old [person] dies, a library burns to the ground. There’s no way to measure what’s been lost, only document what remains. Again, this is precisely why we’re doing this work.

That said, there are plenty of young people doing new and exciting things, and we’re committed to documenting them, too. Take, for example, Hieu Pham in Atlanta, GA. Pham is a born-and-raised Atlantan, but his parents bring a mix of Cambodian, Chinese, and Vietnamese heritage to the table. In 2008 at the age of 25, Pham opened Crawfish Shack Seafood on Atlanta’s Buford Highway, where he serves fresh po-boys with a Vietnamese-influenced remoulade, spring rolls made with Louisiana shrimp, and a traditional Vietnamese drink of pressed sugarcane spiked with sweet Louisiana satsumas in lieu of sweet tea.

Hieu Pham, Crawfish Shack Seafood, Atlanta, GA:

MARK: I’m curious to know if there’s a great white whale in your field of study. Is there some culinary myth that you’ve heard about for years, but haven’t been able to find real evidence of?

AMY: No great white whale, only a driving urge to document and share. That, and culinary myths aren’t really our bag. We’re more interested in celebrating the uncelebrated, exploring culture through food, and building an archive that documents the changing foodways of our region. The latter is only just now beginning to show its value. Take, for example, our Southern Boudin Trail, where we feature more than 40 oral histories about boudin (pork liver, rice, onions and various other herbs and spices squeezed into a sausage casing and served hot). They are all interesting stand-alone interviews. Collectively, though, they tell a bigger, broader, deeper story about the evolution of a particular food in the context of a certain place and time. Which is to say, the boudin that old-timer John Saucier of Saucier’s Sausage Kitchen makes (using not just the liver but all of the organ meats form a hog) speaks to boudin’s origins and the fading boucherie tradition of South Central Louisiana. It’s is a far cry from the alligator and chicken boudin being served in some establishments today, which are perfectly acceptable and actually quite popular versions of boudin, but they have very little to do with what John Saucier makes.

John Saucier, Saucier’s Sausage Kitchen, Mamou, LA:

MARK: I’m not sure to what extent, if at all, you’ve researched New Orleans, but I’m curious what the post-Katrina diaspera meant for the food culture that was there.

AMY: We’ve conducted quite a lot of fieldwork in and around New Orleans. In fact, our Southern Boudin and Southern Gumbo Trails were specifically created to spur culinary tourism in the state after Hurricane Katrina.

Just last year we produced the Down the Bayou oral history project, and many of the subjects who shared their stories mention of Katrina. Nick Collins of Collins Oyster Company in Golden Meadow, Louisiana, is a good example. Katrina remains a part of the cultural fabric of southern Louisiana — and southern Mississippi, I might add.

Visit our Oral History Project index and scroll down to the Louisiana heading to see all the work we’ve collected in the sate.

MARK: How is your work funded?

AMY: Our documentary work is funded in large part by private and corporate donations.

MARK: Can you tell us about one of your favorite interviews?

AMY: Too many to count! But my interview with John Saucier of Saucier’s Sausage Kitchen, an interview from the Southern Boudin Trail that I mentioned earlier, is definitely a favorite. I happened upon one of his handmade signs while in the field in Cajun Country, found my way to his front door, and talked him into visiting with me. He was a lovely interview, and, as I mentioned above, his boudin story ended up being very important to the project. I often know who I will be interviewing before I head into the field, but it’s interviews like this ones—the surprises—that are especially memorable. What’s more is that after the interview, Mr. Saucier and his wife invited me to join them for a lunch of venison stew, homemade bread, and peppers from their garden.

Another memorable interview was with Leann Hines, a chicken farmer in Greenwood, Mississippi. She is an inspiration. And, in fact, I just had an email exchange with her the other day. In a postscript she added, “I love all my new friends that I never would have known if not for the chickens and one little mosquito.” Listen to her audio slideshow online, and you’ll understand just what she means. She is AMAZING.

Leann Hines, Levee Run Farm, Greenwood, MS:

MARK: How did you come to this career?

AMY: I fell into it really. I have a fine arts background (BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art) but in 2001, at the age of 30, I decided I wanted to go back to school. Not for art but for a cultural studies degree. More than that, though, I wanted to get out and explore. Long story short, I found the Southern Studies program that’s part of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi and knew immediately that it would be a good fit. It was the documentary studies part of the program that hooked me. I had a graduate assistantship with the SFA, which, at that time, was only three years old. They were just turning their attention to oral history, so my classmate Joe York (who now makes all of our documentary films) and I collaborated on the SFA’s very first oral history project, documenting barbecue joints in Memphis, TN. I continued to do projects for the SFA after graduating in 2003 and was hired as the SFA’s full-time oral historian in 2005. I still make paintings and have an annual show at Koelsch Gallery in Houston, Texas.

MARK: What was your favorite meal?

AMY: Milkshakes with A. L. and Gloria Quick at the Burger King in Apalachicola, Florida. I made three fieldwork-gathering trips to Franklin County, Florida, for our Florida’s Forgotten Coast project, and I made this date with the Quicks each time.

Second favorite meal might have to be the one with John Saucier mentioned above.

MARK: If there was one food you’d like for people everywhere experience, what would it be?

AMY: Anything shared by the person who grew/harvested/cooked/served it. Food is always better when there’s a story to go with it.

MARK: If I were to be looking for the best fried chicken in the world, where would I be most likely to find it?

AMY: I hope to never find the best. I’d rather keep tasting, comparing, craving. Greatness should be a never-ending quest. That said, I have to confess that I’ve eaten at Gus’s in Memphis twice in the past ten days.

MARK: Is there anything that you’ve seen prepared that you’ve refused to eat?

AMY: Nope. I’ll eat whatever doesn’t eat me first. This, of course, is not a job requirement, but it does come in handy. For me, it’s never usually about the kind of food but the quantity of a certain thing being consumed over a short period of time that can be hard. Spending a week in the field to document barbecue, for example, has its hazards.

MARK: If things aren’t going well, and you’re just not connecting with your interview subject, what do you do? Do you have a foolproof question that you break out in case of emergency?

AMY: In the decade I’ve been doing this work, there have really only been a few people who have not being giving interview subject. Generally, people like being paid attention to, celebrated for what their doing, and sharing their story. If the interview happens to not be going well, you just have to gauge your subject and try to find a way around the problem. Every situation will have different solutions because people are different. There is no foolproof question, although asking someone what they had for breakfast — and the beginning of an interview or when the need for a change of tone shows itself — is a great was to get people out of their own head and think about something specific instead of how nervous or uncomfortable they are. It’s a wonderful icebreaker.

MARK: Do oral historians hang out together somewhere? If so, what do they talk about?

AMY: They do, actually. The Oral History Association has an annual meeting, and there are other groups and events that bring people together to talk about the field of oral history. And when they get together, they talk shop. I’ve also found that oral historians are quite chatty, which likely has something to do that we’re always the ones listening.

[note: The painting above, of the man in the overalls, is a portrait of Robert Earl "Doc" Mathis, done by Amy, who, as she mentioned above, can be found painting, when she's not traveling through the South, eating, and collecting oral histories.]

[note: The videos above only contain small snippets of the interviews which Amy has collected. If you follow the associated links, you will find her transcribed interviews in their entirety.]

And, if all that talk of boudin and fried chicken got your mouth watering, you’ll be happy to know that The Southern Foodways Alliance has produced an awesome cookbook.

Oh, and this is the short documentary film on country ham that first brought the Southern Foodways Alliance to my attention. It was produced by Amy’s associate, Joe York, and features Madisonville, Tennessee’s world-renowned bacon and country ham producer Allan Benton. And it totally brings back delightful childhood memories of eating ham and biscuits at my grandmother’s table in Liberty, Kentucky.

Cured from Southern Foodways on Vimeo.