Eating & Drinking Together: How Food Shapes Culture

*All events are FREE, but we do ask that you please register so that we can monitor attendance and venue capacity.*

JULIA SKINNER and MARCIE COHEN FERRIS are both food historians and they bring deep understanding of the role of food and drink in our past and in our present. Each author examines how culinary excellence, entrepreneurship, and the struggle for racial justice converge in shaping food equity. Hosted by TAL BELVINS

DR. JULIA SKINNER  is passionate about what we eat and the stories behind it. She uses her broad-ranging background, from libraries to kitchens to visual art and even city bus driving to help us understand our food. She is the author of Our Fermented Lives: A History of How Fermented Foods Have Shaped Cultures & Communities. She also owns Root, Atlanta’s fermentation and food history company offering classes, consulting, and other services worldwide. Julia’s writing has appeared in a number of national and regional outlets, as well as in scholarly journals, and she writes and illustrates a weekly newsletter on food issues. Julia is an avid fermenter, regularly brewing and pickling whatever she can get her hands on, as well as working with wild plants in her garden. You can follow her work at @rootkitchens or @bookishjulia.

MARCIE COHEN FERRIS, author of The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region and Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South, is professor emerita of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

TAL BLEVINS is the owner of MACHETE, a James Beard-nominated restaurant in Greensboro, NC.