THE QUESTION OF DINNER: A CONVERSATION WITH TUNDE WEY

—John T. Edge, “The Question of Dinner”

John T. Edge, the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance and author of The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, has served as an Oxford American food columnist since 1997; under the shingle “Local Fare,” he interrogates trends, profiles innovative figures, and upends assumptions (sometimes his own previous assumptions) with passion, style, and intelligence. In his latest column, “The Question of Dinner,” he attends one of Tunde Wey’s Blackness in America dinners in Memphis and explores how restaurants can serve as “lyceums where social and political changes gestate.”

For this video, filmmaker Ethan Payne interviewed Edge and Wey in Memphis, along with Chef Kelly English, the proprietor of Second Line, and Zandria F. Robinson, who helped lead the guided conversation.