SARAH V. ROSS is the former executive director of the University of Georgia Center for Research and Education at Wormsloe in Savannah, Georgia, as well as president of the Wormsloe Foundation and executive director of the Wormsloe Institute for Environmental History, both foundations that conduct and coordinate agricultural and environmental research focused on Georgia’s coastal landscapes. After growing organic vegetables in the Coastal Plain for forty-five years, Ross now cultivates more than four hundred heirloom varieties of vegetables organically in experimental research plots in Savannah, Georgia, and in Alleghany County, North Carolina. Her focus is to classify flavor profiles, document growth rates, measure drought and flood tolerance, and identify pest and disease resistance of diverse varieties.
SOCIAL ROOTS is an interdisciplinary volume that draws on contributions from inside and outside the academy to explore the relationships between nature and culture as expressed in the foodways of the Georgia and South Carolina coasts.
In seventeen chapters, a handful of bespoke artworks, and recipes, Sarah V. Ross and her contributors illuminate the invisible threads that run in wild tangles through the Lowcountry, connecting massive live oaks and palmetto and freshwater sloughs with tidal waters flooding and draining the most extensive salt marshes on the Eastern Seaboard. These threads connect the landscape from the St. Marys River on the Georgia-Florida border to the confluence of Ashley and Cooper Rivers in Charleston, South Carolina. Flowing threads of tidal creeks—half ocean, half fresh river water—also connect us through time to cultures who feasted on an abundance of shellfish thousands of years ago. An enduring bounty of oysters, shrimps, crabs, clams, and mussels still lure us into their world.
Looking across time and geography, this book interweaves fundamental ecological principles as it honors three early cultures: Native American, European, and African. All were enmeshed with the coastal environment. All shared similar threads connecting food production: hunting, foraging, planting, cultivating, harvesting, preserving, and cooking. Across the ages, this ongoing connection—among land, harvester or farmer, and cook—forms the infrastructure of cookery practices. In large part, Lowcountry foodways are built simultaneously on scarcity and fickle opportunity. (description courtesy of University of Georgia Press)
BETSY CAIN was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She received both her BFA and MFA degrees from The University of Alabama, and also did formative undergraduate work at Auburn University and Instituto Allende, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. After the culmination of a national grant through The Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, New Mexico in 1981, Betsy and her husband, photographer David Kaminsky, moved to Savannah, Georgia, where she has maintained an independent studio practice for forty years. She has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries in cities such as Atlanta, Jacksonville, and New York. Her work has been collected by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, the Macon Museum of Arts and Sciences, Macon, GA, the Telfair Museums, Savannah, GA, and the Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, NM. Cain’s work is held in many corporate collections, including Coca-Cola USA, King & Spalding, Alston Bird and Chemical Bank, NYC. She was awarded the Macon Museum’s Bowen Award 2018 for Artistic Excellence and the Georgia Women in the Visual Arts, Governor’s Award. See more about Betsy Cain’s work and idyllic life on the Georgia saltmarsh HERE.
ROOSEVELT BROWNLEE “…lives on the curve of a quiet street in Savannah, GA, the tall stalks of okra in his vegetable garden just visible from the side drive. It’s one of many such streets in the port city, and only a few minutes from the old City Market area where he spent his earliest years. But in between those two Savannah addresses, Roosevelt has traveled the world, from France to Africa, the Caribbean to Denmark, cooking for everyone from Muddy Waters and Stan Getz to Nina Simone and the Rothchild family. His fried chicken was famous in Europe, his family’s red rice recipe honed and tweaked in chateau kitchens. With every deviled crab and pan of mac and cheese, he brought comfort and sustenance to jazz musicians hungry for a taste of home, and at the same time, introduced countless newcomers to the joys of good Southern cooking. Although he’s cooked for much of the last two decades in Savannah kitchens, he’s mostly retired now, though every so often you can see him at special events in the Lowcountry, big hotel spoon in hand, stirring a pan or a pot of something. If that happens, make sure that you get a taste of what he’s cooking. Remember, it’s the true stuff of legend” (bio courtesy of the wonderful Southern Fork podcast) Check out the late, great Jane Fishman’s Savannah Morning News profile of Chef Brownlee HERE
THE LEARNING CENTER of Senior Citizens, Inc. is Savannah’s center for lifelong learning. TLC welcomes members to the Center for Successful Aging in midtown Savannah and to their satellite campus at Skidaway Island for in-person programs. Programs on a vast variety of topics are offered seasonally both to TLC members and the public, and most are also available online and on-demand. Learn more HERE about upcoming fall talks, classes, and membership benefits.
*Ample FREE PARKING on Jasper Street beside the easily accessible entrance to TLC’s event facility.