Editor's note: The Southern Foodways Alliance delves deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of barbecue across the United States. SFA filmmaker Joe York wrote this remembrance of pitmaster Ricky Parker after attending Parker's funeral on Wednesday, May 1, in Lexington, Tennessee.

They buried Ricky Parker yesterday. A few miles down the road from the cinder block pits where he cooked whole hogs for more than half his life, from the sliding glass window where he sold sandwiches, from the creosote-stained door where he hung the “SOLD OUT” sign every afternoon to let the latecomers know not to bother, they gathered to say they were sorry, to say goodbye, to say that they didn’t know what to say.

They dressed him as he dressed himself. In blue Dickies, a tan work shirt with a pack of Swisher Sweets peeking from the breast pocket, and his burgundy and brown ball cap resting on the ledge of coffin, he went to his reward. The only thing missing was his greasy apron. I imagine it hangs on a nail somewhere back by the pits where he left it.
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Editor's note: The Southern Foodways Alliance delves deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of Southern food. Today's contributor, Emily Wallace, writes about food, art, and design.

The pattern is familiar: a small, circular border hatched with short, shallow lines; an interior ringed with four-leaf clovers. I craned my neck to glimpse a blueprint of one of the world’s best-known designs - that of the Oreo cookie. A copy of the line drawing for its emboss, drafted in 1952, hangs above a closet door in the Chapel Hill home of William J. Turnier.

Turnier handed me a step stool. “His name is in the lower right corner,” he told me. And I climbed up for a look at the print in an attempt to answer one of modern life’s biggest questions—one that had recently appeared as a headline on The New York Times website - “Who Made That Oreo Emboss?” The query, posed by designer Hillary Greenbaum, caught my eye, and I clicked the link in hopes to learn more. What I found near the top of the comments section was Turnier. He appeared as “Bill, Chapel Hill, NC,” and claimed that his father, William A. Turnier, was the artist.
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Editor's note: The Southern Foodways Alliance delves deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of Southern food. Today's contributor, Emile Dayan, writes a weekly SFA blog series called "Sustainable South" about food and the environment, nutrition, food access, food justice, agricultural issues and food politics.

Since 2000, Joe Nelson Icet has been advancing on Houston’s Northeastern front. He calls himself a guerrilla gardener. As founder and director of the Last Organic Outpost, he takes abandoned lots littered with trash and turns them into fertile land. Planted off of Emile Street, Icet engages the community in urban farming, his biggest plot in the industrial ruins of the old Comet Rice Mill. In doing so, land in Houston’s Fifth Ward is revitalized through farming.

The mission is simple:
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Editor's note: The Southern Foodways Alliance delves deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of Southern food. Today's contributor, Penny De Los Santos, is a senior contributing photographer to Saveur magazine and a contributing photographer to National Geographic magazine. We profiled her on Eatocracy back in 2010. Follow Penny on Twitter @pennydelossantos

I was editing a serious of images from a shoot I did in Minnesota, and I came across the frames in this post. It got me thinking about color and composition, about the elements of what really makes a great food photograph.

For me, it’s several elements:

Deliciousness
First and foremost, start with appetizing food or food that is interesting. This can be tricky. Case in point: the images I’m showing in this post. But here is the take-away: The food should make you hungry. Remember that you want people's mouths to water. If your mouth doesn't water when looking at the food, no one else's will, either.
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Editor's note: The Southern Foodways Alliance delves deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of Southern food. Today's contributor, Emile Dayan, writes a weekly SFA blog series called "Sustainable South" about food and the environment, nutrition, food access, food justice, agricultural issues and food politics.

To some, Bonita Conwell is a farmer. To others, a butcher. For rural Southern women and youth in agriculture, she is an advocate for economic and social justice. No matter how you frame her, Conwell is a tour de force in the Delta region of Mississippi, and her influence extends up the Mighty Mississippi to Chicago and westward to Houston, Texas.

Based in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, Conwell is the driving force behind Robert’s Meat Market. Built in 1985, the market found success in providing Mississippi-made meat products to Southerners living in Chicago. To the west, Conwell sells the greens of her sweet potato crops - a part of the root that is usually discarded - to an African market in Houston. SFA director John T. Edge is such a fan of Conwell's sweet potato greens that he included them on his list of the top ten dishes of 2012 for Garden & Gun magazine.
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Editor's note: The Southern Foodways Alliance delves deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of Southern food. Today's contributor, Emile Dayan, writes a weekly SFA blog series called "Sustainable South" about food and the environment, nutrition, food access, food justice, agricultural issues and food politics.

It is National Farmworker Awareness Week. Chef Andrea Reusing preluded the week with an informative TEDxUNC talk in Chapel Hill.

A lot of us are obsessed with food. “We argue about whether pork tastes better if the pig eats peanuts or if the pig eats acorns…But there is a problem,” she says. We often ignore something that is much more fundamental to the way we live: The lives of the people who harvest the food we eat.
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This year, the Southern Foodways Alliance celebrates women, work, and food. Today's subject is Karen Barker, who was happily co-proprietor and pastry chef of the Magnolia Grill in Durham, North Carolina (1986–2012). Now, happily, she is not.

I grew up in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, where there was a very strong corner-bakery culture but little actual home baking. People tended to purchase their breads and desserts rather than produce them out of cramped urban kitchens.

I was lucky that my maternal grandmother, an exception to this rule, lived upstairs. She was a Russian immigrant who barely spoke English, had no written recipes, and never used standardized measures. Bubby Fanny turned out an amazing array of Eastern European specialties and taught me that homemade sweets were a tribute to one's family and always included the ingredients of time and love.
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In honor of Mardi Gras, the Southern Foodways Alliance celebrates the unique food of New Orleans. Today's story comes courtesy of Sara Roahen, author of "Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table." It should also be noted that many sno-ball stands are closed at this time of year, but that's not stopping anyone from dreaming about them.

First things first: a New Orleans sno-ball is not a snow cone - a pre-frozen, rock-hard concoction like those sold from ice cream trucks and concession stands elsewhere. As each of our New Orleans Sno-Balls oral history subjects attest, New Orleans sno is a product of locally made, carefully stored, and expertly shaved-to-order ice.

The sugary syrups that color and flavor a New Orleans sno-ball are equally important to the final product, and each sno-ball maker protects his own syrup recipes. In fact, a majority of the recipes at Hansen’s Sno-Bliz in Uptown, Williams Plum Street Snowballs near Riverbend, and Sal’s Sno-Balls in Old Metairie have survived several generations of ownership.
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This year, the Southern Foodways Alliance celebrates women, work, and food. As we embark on new documentary projects in keeping with this theme, we'd like to share some of the wonderful stories we already have in our archive. Today, we introduce you to Alzina Toups of Galliano, Louisiana, whose interview is part of our Down the Bayou oral history project.

Alzina Toups’ paternal ancestors came to Louisiana from Nova Scotia, as did so many Cajuns. Her mother’s family - “great, great cooks” - was Portuguese, though both of Alzina’s parents primarily spoke French at home. Alzina still peppers her conversation with French words and phrases. A woman whose faith infiltrates all areas of her life, Alzina treated us to a French prayer-song during the interview below.
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The Southern Foodways Alliance has a pretty solid collection of community cookbooks in their office—and many more in their staffers' home libraries. Check back often for their Throwback Recipes.

Today's Cookbook:
The Pick of the Crop
Published by the North Sunflower PTA of Drew, Mississippi
First edition 1978

The community cookbook most important to my development as a cook and, particularly, as a Southern cook, is "The Pick of the Crop." It was published the year after I was born in 1978 by the North Sunflower PTA of Drew, Mississippi. I do not know the details of the book’s journey out of the Delta and 100 miles east to the red clay hills of Mississippi in which I was raised, but it was hands-down the most constant source of recipes that sustained my family.

My mother’s copy is littered with her left-handed checks and notes like “try this!,” “soo good!,” or “easy!”. Mark’s Chicken, Cabbage Casserole, and Sausage-Rice Casserole were all in regular rotation on the McGreger supper table, but the first dish that I personally ever became known for was Mrs. Archie Manning’s Chicken Spaghetti I.
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