A conversation with Southern author John T. Edge

“House of Smoke: A Southerner Goes Searching for Home” by John T. Edge, Crown, 272 pages.

For the past quarter-century, John T. Edge has been one of the leading voices shaping how Americans, especially in the South, think about food. Growing up in Georgia, Edge experimented with identities: a Lost Cause fanboy raised in the home of Confederate Gen. Alfred Iverson Jr., University of Georgia "frat bro," Athens cool town scenester and college dropout.

He discovered his academic leanings and authorial voice at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture.

His first byline, a 1998 “Oxford American” essay, was a slick bit of immersive journalism working as a Bourbon Street Lucky Dog vendor, à la Ignatius J. Reilly. The next year, he co-founded the Southern Foodways