John T. Edge is director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. He is a contributing editor at Gourmet and writes for a number of other publications including the Oxford American and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Edge is editor of the forthcoming foodways volume of the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and is author of a number of books, including an expanded and revised paperback edition of Southern Belly from Algonquin Books. For a brief and shining moment, he ran a hotdog stand on the Oxford square, serving pimento-cheese-capped natural-casing dogs. He called the business Dunce Dogs, an homage to Ignatius J. Reilly, anti-hero protagonist of the novel Confederacy of Dunces.