Chicken so fiery it's been known to arouse backseat bouts of lust visible from the windows of the diner that makes it ("Hot Chicken"). Fried pies baked by an 88-year-old of few words and fewer teeth who uses a wheelchair ("& Fried Pies"). A garden grown atop a bus whose drivers are aiming straight for the White House on a quest to persuade the president to turn his lawn into a farm ("The W.H.O. Farm") … and then some. For nearly a decade, anthropologist-turned-filmmaker Joe York has been tooling around in his baby-blue station wagon to create intimate portraits of the faces and places that define the culinary and agricultural traditions of the American South in documentary shorts co-produced by the University of Mississippi and the Southern Foodways Alliance. (Most are available here.) And now, he's putting the finishing touches on a feature that serves as an overview of it all: "Pride and Joy: A Southern Foodways Alliance Film Project" will air this fall on public television channels across the region.

Ever since striking up a dialogue with York via our mutual friend, soul-food historian Adrian Miller, I've been enamored by his work not just for its culinary value but for the affinity it has with the great, character-driven storytelling of the South. In honor of his nearing premiere, I asked him to spin a bit more of his own yarn.

Describe your own relationship to Southern food.

I come from a pretty standard Southern family -- lots of cousins, great-aunts and uncles around -- and we'd get together and have Sunday dinner every week. Three meats, eight sides, two pies, a cake, cornbread -- I thought everybody did this. People have this sense of what Italian grandmothers are like, pinching you on the cheek and saying, "Mangia, mangia!" Well, they don't have anything on Southern grandmas. And even if you're not aware of it, you're part of that culture and versed in that lexicon. I went to Auburn [University in Alabama] for my undergraduate degree, where I was being taught about these Balinese cockfights that [anthropologist Clifford] Geertz wrote about, and I thought, "Why not just talk about my grandmother?" Imagine taking a regional census, but specifically through food culture. What traditions remain? What new things are coming, in what demographic shifts? What does this tell us about who we are? I wanted to study my backyard.

You've got 17 hard drives worth of footage. What has inspired you all these years?

To dispel the myths about Southern food that people have and enter into a discussion about the stereotypes that have dogged us. We don't deep-fry everything; there's incredible diversity from region to region. Almost every plate you have in the South, it doesn't matter what, is going to have the influence of Native Americans, of Europeans, of Africans from the Caribbean -- all these influences that you can parse out at any Sunday dinner that you sit down to. Our food has always been very inclusive -- maybe not as inclusive as we would like the culture itself to be, but the place that it all comes together is the table.

Let's say you go to Tennessee, and you know that you want to talk about the Memphis barbecue tradition. So you start there, and then you go to Lexington, where they do whole hog -- a lot of people outside of that city have no idea that's going on around them. Then to Nashville to learn about meat-and-threes. And then you go up into the mountains -- and that's just Tennessee. We could do the same for Alabama, Florida, the Carolinas.

What's the typical routine for a shoot?

Most of the time it's just me; I'm playing producer, cameraman, light man. They expect it to be three or four people staring at them, which I think is kinda nerve-racking. I'll put a wireless mic on 'em and just follow 'em around like a lost puppy all day, educating myself about what they do and raising questions about why they do it later. It's the difference between a formal portrait and a snapshot; they're both good, but the snapshot's more powerful because you miss so much when you're not just rolling with your subject.

You've met some real characters in the process, undoubtedly.

A lot of the people that we talk to and focus on are people who work really hard to do things that are not easy to do. They do it because that's what they do; they can't imagine a world in which what they do doesn't exist. Cooking whole hog. Curing bacon. Growing heirloom vegetables. And they don't get the recognition we think they deserve.

In South Carolina, there's Emile DeFelice, who runs a little place called Caw Caw Creek Pastured Pork ("Ride That Pig to Glory"). He categorizes it as a Montessori school for pigs; they're free range, they do what they do. So I'm filming him and then at the end of the day he's like, "I gotta be somewhere. I have a tango lesson." That was a total curve ball -- completely nutty -- and I loved it. And I said, "You're kidding -- you're a tango-dancing pig farmer?" He's one of the most self-possessed people I've ever met; he knows who he is and he's not making any apologies.

There's another guy we filmed ("Eggers") who goes out late winter, early spring and catches paddlefish, which look kind of like dolphins, and harvests the roe out of them. He's got all this caviar on the boat, probably worth $100 a can. But he says, "We don't eat that crap," and proceeds to open a can of Vienna sausages. I've spent a good bit of time with Vietnamese shrimpers on the Gulf Coast displaced by the fall of Saigon, who came here mostly through Catholic churches ("Phát Tài"). There's everything from a little shop in Jackson, Miss., that's managed to stay open by serving pig-ear sandwiches for $1.10 for years ("Smokes and Ears") to the Flora-Bama Interstate Mullet Toss ("Deadliest Throw") -- they get all these dead mullets, which is largely regarded as a trash fish, and see how far they can fling 'em from the Florida side of the state line to Alabama.

We've never worked with or done a story on somebody who I wouldn't like to sit down and have dinner with. I'm always learning. The more you learn, the more you want to learn, to find out things are not what you expected. The South is always surprising.

Zester Daily contributor Ruth Tobias is assistant editor at Sommelier Journal as well as a seasoned food-and-beverage writer for numerous city and national publications; she is also the author of the upcoming "Food Lover's Guide to Denver & Boulder" from Globe Pequot. Please visit her website or follow her @Denveater for further information.

Photo: Joe York. Credit: Hollis Bennett for Garden & Gun magazine

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