When John T. Edge arrived at UGA from a small town near Macon in 1980, he set out to escape the Confederate mythology he’d grown up with and become the artistic bon vivant his mother had aspired to be.
It didn’t quite work out that way. After three years of partying and late nights at the 40 Watt Club, Edge flunked out. But the experience—recounted in his new autobiography House of Smoke—set him on a path of discovery that took him to Atlanta, the University of Mississippi and eventually all over the South, reinventing food writing and broadening the definition of Southern cuisine along the way.
It’s doubtful Edge would ever use a word like “cuisine,” though. He’s always been more comfortable at a gas-station taqueria or roadside barbecue pit—the types of working-class, locally owned restaurants championed by the SEC Network show “TrueSouth” he cohosts with acclaimed sportswriter Wright Thompson. That’s what drove Edge to start the Southern Foodways Alliance, an Ole Miss-affiliated nonprofit that “documents, studies and explores the diverse food cultures of the changing American South.”
Edge spoke to Flagpole while on the road from Oxford, MS to Birmingham, AL to record a Southern Living podcast. On Wednesday, Sept. 24, he’ll be in Athens to discuss House of Smoke with Moni Basu, the director of UGA’s MFA in Narrative Nonfiction program, where Edge teaches part-time.
Edge grew up in what he calls the “Lost Cause terrarium” of Clinton, GA. Raised by a father who worked to rehabilitate prisoners and an alcoholic, antique-hoarding mother, his family lived in a ramshackle house once owned by Confederate officer Alfred Iverson, Jr. As a child, he recalls lecturing visitors about how Iverson tricked a much larger Union cavalry force into surrendering during Sherman’s March to the Sea. While his parents considered themselves moderates on race, they sent him to an all-white private school when the Supreme Court finally enforced integration in 1970.
Edge enrolled at UGA because “Athens, from my perspective as a small-town kid in Georgia, was a more literary place. It was a place where you could get your ya-ya’s out, and also go on a search about who you are.” This was around the time the John Belushi comedy Animal House came out, so he thought “joining a fraternity was a way to rebel.”
In House of Smoke, Edge recalls attending R.E.M. and Love Tractor shows (two of his frat brothers once “roughed up” Michael Stipe because he “looked weird”), as well as forming a friendship with painter John Cleaveland, who still lives in nearby Farmington. But like many UGA students, he got a few too many ya-ya’s out, and wound up leaving without a degree. “I started college at 17, and I was an immature 17,” he says. “It took flunking out of college and hitting rock bottom to pick myself back up.”
The next stop was Atlanta, where Edge worked as a waiter and in corporate jobs while living in the bohemian Inman Park neighborhood. This informal education inspired him in the late 1990s to go back to school at the Ole Miss Center for Southern Studies, which accepted him despite his lackluster GPA. That led to a career in food writing, with regular columns in prestigious publications like the Oxford American and Garden & Gun, as well as books like 2017’s The Potlikker Papers, netting him four prestigious James Beard awards. The Potlikker Papers includes a section about Blanche’s Open House, a downtown Athens restaurant that served as the headquarters for the KKK members who followed Black Army reservist Lemuel Penn to the Broad River Bridge and shot him to death in 1964.
With the Black Lives Matter movement at its peak in 2020, though, Edge’s career imploded. He cannot explain why he argued in favor of a gradualist approach to racial discrimination during a debate with Nigerian-born chef Tunde Wey, but within weeks dozens of colleagues were calling for his resignation. “They say he is a white man—however charming—who has too much power over who tells the story of food in a region where so much of the cuisine was created by enslaved people,” Kim Severson of The New York Times wrote about the controversy.
He stepped down as the Southern Foodways Alliance director in 2021. While devastating at the time, Edge now says that the ordeal taught him another lesson: In seeking to use his privilege to tell untold stories, he had become the type of well-meaning paternalistic white man he spent most of his adulthood fighting against. Searching for answers as to where he went wrong, Edge took a painful but cathartic look back at his childhood. “I reported out the book,” he says. “I did not rely on memory. I used memory as a prompt for research.”
Through it all, Edge has maintained his ties to Athens. House of Smoke includes a short passage about doing an interview with the “local weekly” circa 2001 that was cleverly headlined “Does Foucault Dunk His Cornpone?” (He confirmed the writer was then-Flagpole editor Richard Faussett.) In 2015, the late Valerie Boyd hired him as a faculty member for UGA’s new narrative nonfiction program. Edge cites his wife, artist Blair Hobbs, and Boyd, who died in 2022, as the two most important influences on House of Smoke. “She encouraged me to think about the power of my story,” he says of Boyd.
As he’s watched Athens grow over the decades, the 62-year-old says he embraces change and sees new development as a net positive, but believes big-money builders should do more to preserve arts and culture. “I think Athens is a reflection of the state as a whole. It continues to have challenges and fight against retrograde people, but it’s a much more tolerant place,” he says. “It’s a place like my home in Oxford that’s struggled with remaining in service to the artists and a certain cadre of students who make a college town a college town.”
Since Edge’s ouster from the SFA, the Trump administration has unleashed a backlash to the backlash—canceling diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and pressuring companies and universities alike to do the same. As exemplified by the recent right-wing furor over Cracker Barrel changing its logo, food is political now for very different reasons than it was five years ago. Edge says it reminds him of white conservatives’ response to Brown v. Board of Education.
“That massive resistance led to 15 years of turmoil,” he says. “Looking back, you say, ‘Yes, of course the forces of humanity and morality won out.’ Now we find ourselves at another inflection point, and I’m not just talking about politics, but culture and how we treat each other. Will the forces of humanity and morality win out again? I believe they will. I’m an optimist.”
WHAT: John T. Edge in conversation with Moni Basu
WHEN: Wednesday, Sept. 24, 6 p.m.
WHERE: UGA Special Collections Libraries
HOW MUCH: FREE!
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