Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

by Fannie Flagg

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe: Cooking as Mission and Ministry in Southern Culture


In the following excerpt, Dvorak examines the importance of cooking and serving food as a form of nurturing in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café.

The table spread with culinary delights easily triggers images of home, hearth and familial companionship. In southern culture, especially, food is nothing less than the social base of most interchanges of human experience and activity. The concept of "southern hospitality" has remained long after the demise of the antebellum era that birthed it. This graciousness surely began as much from logistics as generosity, for plantation and even tenant-farming neighbors, separated by hundreds of acres and miles of dirt roads, gathered at each other's homes for a gala "get together" that...

(The entire page is 2255 words.)

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