Gravy Podcast

Series produced by Southern Foodways Alliance

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Gravy is the SFA’s collection of original stories—fresh, unexpected, and thought-provoking. Like all of the SFA’s work, Gravy shares stories of the changing American South through the foods we eat.

Gravy showcases a South that is constantly evolving, accommodating new immigrants, adopting new traditions, and lovingly maintaining old ones. It uses food as a means to explore all of that, to dig into lesser-known corners of the region, complicate stereotypes, document new dynamics, and give voice to the unsung folk who grow, cook, and serve our daily meals. Gravy the print journal lands in the mailboxes of SFA members four times per year. Gravy the podcast releases a new episode every other week.


161 Pieces

Order by: Newest First | Oldest First
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How did Huntsville, Alabama become home to a whole host of German restaurants? It has more to do with rocket science, than with Southerners’ love o...

Bought by KVLU


  • Added: Jul 28, 2016
  • Length: 33:42
  • Purchases: 1
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If you’ve never heard of a fish camp, don’t let the name fool you. It’s not a place where you fish or camp. Instead, the term designates a place wh...

Bought by KVLU and WABE


  • Added: Jul 07, 2016
  • Length: 22:44
  • Purchases: 2
Caption: Sunset overlooking Mobile Bay in Fairhope, Alabama. , Credit: Photo by Tina Antolini.
Imagine: crabs, fish, eels—a whole team of sea creatures—rushing towards the shore, and then sitting there, as if waiting to be caught. This isn’t ...

Bought by KVLU and PRX Remix


  • Added: Jun 16, 2016
  • Length: 22:01
  • Purchases: 2
Caption: The Azadi Market in Nashville's Little Kurdistan. , Credit: Photo by Ava Lowery.
The pride of Nashville: honky tonks and… Halal lamb? The area of the city known as Little Kurdistan contains a whole culinary universe that many pe...

Bought by KVLU and WABE


  • Added: Jun 02, 2016
  • Length: 28:21
  • Purchases: 2
Caption: Debra Ramirez, a Mossville native. , Credit: Photo by Tina Antolini.
The residents of Mossville, Louisiana have long prized self-sufficiency. Founded by freed slaves in the 1700s, Mossville was a place where everyone...

Bought by KVLU


  • Added: May 19, 2016
  • Length: 31:37
  • Purchases: 1
Caption: Alexis Diao's Father's Family in the Philippines.
When Alexis Diao’s father arrived in Tallahassee, Florida, he couldn’t even find coconut milk—let alone many other ingredients to make the Filipino...

Bought by KVLU, WJCT, and WABE


  • Added: May 05, 2016
  • Length: 26:13
  • Purchases: 3
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Every week, Cracker Barrel provides 4 million Americans with a studied version of down-home Southern food and hospitality. The dumplins and the chi...

Bought by WJCT and WABE


  • Added: Apr 21, 2016
  • Length: 26:03
  • Purchases: 2
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When it comes to a certain kind of bourbon, it doesn’t matter who you are or how much money you have—you can’t get it unless you’re exceptionally l...

Bought by KVLU and WABE


  • Added: Apr 07, 2016
  • Length: 26:50
  • Purchases: 2
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Jell-O could seem like a trivial food. It’s brightly colored, nutritionally void, and, hey, it jiggles. But in Appalachia, Jell-O marked a transfor...

Bought by West Virginia Public Broadcasting and WMMT


  • Added: Mar 24, 2016
  • Length: 21:41
  • Purchases: 2
Caption: Vimal Patel cooks inside -- and outside -- a room in the Day's Inn he operates in North Charleston. , Credit: Photo by Wade Spees for the Post & Courier.
We stay at them around the South and across the United States: Day’s Inn. Best Western. Quality Inn. But there is a food world behind the scenes at...

Bought by KVLU and WABE


  • Added: Mar 10, 2016
  • Length: 28:49
  • Purchases: 2
Caption: The winner of the World Cheese Dip Competition, held in Little Rock on October 31st, 2015: Poblano Goat Cheese Dip from Café @ Heifer. , Credit: Photo by Tina Antolini.
There’s a dish you’ll find at every kind of restaurant in Little Rock, from the pizza places to the burger joints: cheese dip. How did it become so...

Bought by KVLU


  • Added: Feb 25, 2016
  • Length: 26:34
  • Purchases: 1
Caption: The Pi Mai New Years Celebration in Morganton, NC, Credit: Photo by Katy Clune
Sticky rice. It may not be the first dish you expect to be served in a double-wide trailer in the mountain South, but in Morganton, North Carolina,...

Bought by WMMT, KVLU, and WABE


  • Added: Feb 12, 2016
  • Length: 29:44
  • Purchases: 3
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This is the story of Springdale, Arkansas, and how chicken transformed a once-sleepy rural town into the most ethnically diverse city in the state—...

Bought by KVLU and WABE


  • Added: Feb 02, 2016
  • Length: 21:15
  • Purchases: 2
Caption: Shirley Sherrod on the porch of the antebellum mansion at Resora Plantation , Credit: Photo by Tina Antolini.
Shirley Sherrod’s introduction to the intermingling of agriculture and racism came when she was 17 years old, with an incident that changed the cou...

Bought by West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WJCT, WABE, and KPTZ, Port Townsend, WA


  • Added: Jan 01, 2016
  • Length: 50:14
  • Purchases: 4
Caption: Oysters Mornay., Credit: Image courtesy of Ship Restaurant & Bar.
What do the restaurants of your childhood say about the place you grew up? In Jack Hitt’s case, the Oysters Mornay and Escargots Bourguignonne of h...

Bought by KVLU, KVLU, and WABE


  • Added: Dec 17, 2015
  • Length: 28:02
  • Purchases: 3
Caption: Mrs. Joyce Meyers, Credit: Photo by Alysia Burton Steele
The image of the Mississippi Delta the public usually gets is one of poverty-- or of cotton fields. But, on a search for women like her grandmother...

Bought by KVLU and WABE


  • Added: Dec 03, 2015
  • Length: 25:16
  • Purchases: 2
Caption: Food at Delicious Southern Cuisine, Los Angeles, CA. , Credit: Photo by Lena Nozizwe, copyright 2015.
Black-eyed peas and collards. Fried chicken and peach cobbler. Customers at Delicious Southern Cuisine in Los Angeles come for these soul food sta...

Bought by KVLU and WABE


  • Added: Nov 19, 2015
  • Length: 27:08
  • Purchases: 2
Caption: A 1936 photo of one of the first events reconnecting Cajuns and Acadians. It was taken at the Grand-Pre, the national historic site where the largest settlement of Acadians was before the expulsion of the mid 1700’s.  That's Simon Thibault's great uncle, , Credit: Photo courtesy of Simon Thibault.
How is a region of the far north—Canada—intimately connected to a region 2,000 miles away in the Deep South? In this episode of Gravy, the story of...

Bought by KVLU and WABE


  • Added: Nov 05, 2015
  • Length: 25:55
  • Purchases: 2
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They’re everywhere: in your fancy cocktail bar and your down home country restaurant. In the hands of farmer’s market shoppers and 7-Eleven Slurpee...

Bought by KVLU, West Virginia Public Broadcasting, and WABE


  • Added: Oct 22, 2015
  • Length: 25:46
  • Purchases: 3
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One of the more important places for the modern American diet may be... an obscure army base in Natick, Massachusetts. The Combat Feeding Directora...

Bought by KVLU, WMMT, and WABE


  • Added: Oct 08, 2015
  • Length: 28:21
  • Purchases: 3