The Winter 2024 issue of Gravy culminates SFA’s year-long exploration of the theme, Where is the South?


Derek Hicks describes how his grandmother performs the South from her Los Angeles porch. Angie Maxwell argues that the South carries a bigger stick in national politics than we give ourselves credit for—and shows how food stakeholders can use it. Adan Medrano takes readers to the Texas-Mexico borderlands, where cuisine recognizes landscape over national boundaries. Sheeka Sanahori travels off the beaten path to find local flavor in Panama, where an ancient cuisine emerges from the landscape and crosses modern-day borders.


Columnist Hanna Raskin watches SEC football with South Carolina fans at a bar in Manhattan, asking: Is the South anywhere you can find SEC football on television? Gustavo Arellano profiles SFA’s 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award winner Eddie Hernandez, who brings his native Mexico to Atlanta at Taqueria del Sol with decades of success. Journalist Julia O’Malley takes us to Roscoe’s, a restaurant that serves Southern cuisine in Anchorage, Alaska.


Verse from Montgomery, Alabama-based poet Jacqueline Trimble tells of fried chicken, barbecue, and funeral food. Finally, Nicole Cabrera Mills, chef de cuisine at Pêche in New Orleans, shares a recipe highlighting her Filipino-American upbringing.