The popular imagery of the South is often grounded in the past—large oak trees dripping in Spanish moss, the harsh and too often overlooked history of slavery, and the correspondingly large elegant plantation houses where the horrors of slavery occurred—all of which are integral parts of the origins of Southern food. Southern food calls to mind barbecue cooked over hot coals in an open pit at a roadside stand, or fried chicken and greens served on plastic tablecloths at a small family-owned restaurant. The debate over Southern foodways is often broken down into Southern/white food versus soul/black food, grounded in the historical context of racial oppression in the South. The representations of the South intertwine with racial inequality, then as now, and with food, to highlight how, for example, soul food emerged from the limited ingredients given to slaves on plantations compared with the bounty of produce and meat available to wealthy white Southerners (Miller, 2013). Inequality shaped many aspects of people's lives, including what appeared on their plates.

These representations only reflect part of the South. The South is often seen as exclusively white and black, trapped in the legacy of racial discrimination, characterized by conservative religious beliefs, and extensively rural and agrarian. However, more recently the southeastern United States has become known as the New South, with increasing appeal to tourists and those looking for a new region to call home (Stanonis, 2008). Immigration patterns have brought large numbers of blacks and whites back to the growing industry of the South as growth in other parts of the country has stagnated or declined. Although the South boasts a growing black population and increasingly cosmopolitan areas, since the early 1990s the South has also become home to a large number of Latinx immigrants, who represent over 15 percent of the population in the southern US, and a small Asian population, as well as the Indigenous groups who pre-date Europeans (Jones, 2019). This changing character of the region, while more recent and linked to large-scale immigration, also reflects the complexities of the South that have always existed, reaching far beyond the backward and racially oppressive history to reveal a complex culture filled with music, art, and food that sets it apart from the rest of the nation.