“Partaking of choice poultry cooked a la southern style”: Taste and Race in the New Deal Sensory Economy

This article discusses southern food on, across, and over the color line in 1930s United States. The aim of the article is to show how food was used to rhetorically reinforce and justify segregation while, in practice, foodways and taste preferences tended to sap it. My argument builds on the findings of cultural and social history scholars and the literature on the remaking of the categories of race and ethnicity in 1930s United States. Yet, my analysis is also informed by the field of sensory history and Mark Smith's remark that studying the senses as social constructs is a way to explain the “historically conditioned, visceral, emotional aspect of racial construction and racism.” My research goal is thus to highlight how taste, as a historically defined category of perception, was instrumental in the everyday making of race, gender, and class in the New Deal Era.