Coastal South Carolina and Georgia
Lowcountry & Gullah Geechee This is the clearest, most intact line of West African foodways anywhere in the United States. The Gullah Geechee people, descendants of Africans brought to the rice coast to grow a crop most white enslavers did not know how to grow, built a culture that held.
Open the region → Alabama, Mississippi, inland Georgia
The Deep South When people say 'soul food,' this is most often what they mean. The inland Deep South is where field peas, collards, mustard and turnip greens, cornbread, pork, and slow-cooked everything became the grammar of the Black American table.
Open the region → New Orleans and the Gulf
Louisiana & Creole Louisiana is a convergence: West African, Caribbean, French, Spanish, and Indigenous Choctaw and Houma traditions meeting in a place that refused to choose. What came out of that collision is one of the most technically demanding cuisines on the continent.
Open the region → Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky
Upper South & Appalachian Edge This is Edna Lewis country. The Upper South is where the garden, the smokehouse, and the cellar do the teaching. It is quieter food than the Deep South, more restrained, more pointed, more tied to the turning of the season.
Open the region → Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia
The Great Migration North Between 1910 and 1970, six million Black Americans left the South. They brought their kitchens with them. Southern food did not stay Southern. It became Chicago rib tips and hot links, Detroit coneys reimagined, Harlem fried chicken and waffles, Philly's catfish and grits.
Open the region → Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle
The West Coast The Second Great Migration and the military-industrial pull of World War II moved Black Americans west. Louisiana and East Texas went to Oakland and South Central. Mississippi and Arkansas went to Seattle and Portland. The food went with them, and it kept moving.
Open the region →