Geosciences Seminar Series: New Orleans' 'Renaissance' and the New Southern Food Movement

Catarina Passidomo, assistant professor of anthropology and Southern studies at the University of Mississippi, is the featured speaker for the Mississippi State Department of Geosciences' first seminar of the spring semester. In her talk titled "New Orleans' 'Renaissance' and the New Southern Food Movement," Passidomo explores the slippages and contradictions underlying ongoing food justice challenges for New Orleans and other Southern U.S. cities during what many are describing as a "renaissance" in Southern cuisine (Severson 2014; Ferris 2014). Through her case study, Passidomo seeks to demonstrate both the perils and possibilities of resurgent interest and investment in regional cuisine, celebrity chefs, and their rhetorical engagements with justice and humanitarianism. While these tensions and contradictions are particularly resonant within the context of the “New Southern Food Movement," Passidomo said these critiques and considerations are broadly applicable to contemporary food studies and particularly to engagements with notions of food justice, culinary tourism, the phenomenon of celebrity chefs, and the intersection of those topics.