But it's "Hardee's," not "Hardy's."

I hope Maurice's in Cola has changed, but I doubt it. In addition to the flag, he used to have all manner of racist literature at the front of the location on Charleston Hwy. After I found that out, I started making my own damn mustard sauce.

Thank god there is John Edge to help illuminate the "soul" in soul food, because we got it by travelling our long and torturous path from then to now and beyond. We are evolving and in the South we have always evolved around the kitchen table, learned there, got the worst news and the best; and on Sunday supper was our Eucharist. If we had enough left over our parents would get us all together at the Dixie Pig in Hillside, (southern) Maryland, and consume barbeque unlike anything I've ever tasted anywhere else - including the late Lee Atwater's Red, Hot and Blue, now,sadly, just another chain like Po' Folks.

We may have learned the old hymns and our Bible verses in church (or synagogue, or the lodge or the deep woods) but we communed most deeply over food, and we still do. And as Edge points out, a lot of the traditional food which grew out of necessity wasn't all that unhealthy, really, especially if one was out all day working or playing one's ass off. This past Saturday our tribe had its annual family reunion in King George, Virginia, and only one of our generation (we first cousins are now the elders) was missing, having had an urgent angioplasty two days earlier. The reason: gluttony, not lima beans and pork fat. Not one of his eleven sisters and brothers have ever had any heart disease. COPD, yes, but that's not caused by the food.

One of the longest and most reverent discussions was about how their mother, our late aunt Dooty, could take "a pound of balogna, a bunch of lima beans and some tomatoes and create haute cuisine for fifteen people." It's true, too. She could, god bless her soul.

We continue to be held together by "mother, blood and soil", and out of those came our menu, which is our eucharist, the thing fuel that keeps most of us going when the lungs of many are giving out due to having grown up in tobacco country.

Maybe Mr. Edge would be kind enough to drop by the planation next Bastille Day and set with us awhile. There's always room for one more - or a dozen.

"He's toying around with Southern food, but he respects what he's toying around with; he understands it at its core before he starts playing with it. He's great."

Southern food does not need to be toyed with. "Honest" food does not need toying with, either. Anyone who prepares bacon cotton candy is simply putting one over on the Yankees--I hope.

Collards with a (yellow) (unsweetened) cornbread: there.

Try Melvin's (Maurice's brother), Bessinger's (some kin of his), and Ray Lever's.

Stephen Colbert says there are two kinds of barbecue in SC--racist and non-racist--and the racist is better.

The Flag still flies over Maurice's franchises, but now it's thrid on the flagpole, not on top where it was for years.

I'm sorry, but why would anyone go to a Klan hangout just to call the fuckers out? Listen: They are not civilized--even less so today than in the past. They will kill your ass dead, freelance writer.

I haven't read Mr. Edge's book or his pieces for such illuminating publications on haute cuisine as the NYT, but I can only believe that "the Faulkner of Southern food" writes much better and more authentically than he interviews.

True Southern food is not about gimmicks or tricks like Kool-Aid pickles or bacon cotton candy. Those are publicity stunts done to get just the kind of press Mr. Edge provides. It's the food equivalent of the geeks at the carnival. But it's not "traditional" Southern food.

Southern food is about making do with what's at hand; it's stone soup brought to life. And it's celebrating with any bounty when it's available because it won't last long in the heat and who knows what will happen tomorrow. Southerner's didn't eat dandelion greens because they were hip or cool, but because they were free and non-poisonous. The vinegar hid the bitterness of the greens. Southern cooking evolved from people enduring a hard life during hard times, but with one opportunity for indulgence -- food. You made Chess Pie because sugar kept, so you usually had it and eggs and milks were available out the back door -- someone's back door if not your own. Southern food is about sharing when you had something to share, which was usually food. Presents were hard to come by, but there was usually something in the larder. It's why vegetable plates, now known as vegetarian meals, were common. It's why my Cajun neighbor never used okra in her gumbo. As she carefully explained, "Po' people use dat okra. It just be for fillin'."

Southerners embraced fast food and Miracle Whip sandwiches for the same reason my Appalachian mother preferred blankets from Sears and used the family quilts for whelping puppies; it was "store bought" and indicated you were no longer subsistence poor. You had the cash money, as opposed to company chit, to buy things. What "store bought" has done to our health is another chapter in Southern food.

And there is no "Southern" food. There are many different Southern regions. You only need to look at the varying approaches to the ubiquitous barbecue or chili to recognize the vast differences in cooking development. A Southern Professor Higgins could just as easily identify what part of the South someone was from by his or her barbecue, chili or even cornbread as by accent. Entire Southern Baptist religious schisms have formed over whether to use mayonnaise or Miracle Whip in the potato salad. Don't even get in the middle of a pickle judging!

So I would appreciate it if Mr. Edge would stop making us out to be "The Beverly Hillbillies" lacking in discerning palates. It's not all NASCAR and pork rinds anymore than New York is all cheesecake and pastrami.

But if Mr. Edge's book is all about freak food, then a pox on him. He's no better than yet another carpet bagger making a mint off our suffering while holding us up for ridicule.