Good Bedfellows: Food and Politics

Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch." When A.J. Liebling wrote those words, he was thinking of Earl Long, brother to longtime populist Louisiana governor Huey Long. As a native of the region with a taste for history, I get his drift. Of late, however, two Southern political personalities have impressed me. They seem progressive, enlightened. Both work in the world of food. And both hail from South Carolina, a state infamous for bad political ideas like, say, secession. Robert Barber ran for lieutenant governor last year and lost by a hair. When he's not playing politico, he runs a restaurant on the South Carolina Coast near Charleston. It's called Bowen's Island. They're famous for their oysters, harvested by locals from the marshes that surround the island. When Barber, still in the throes of his campaign, walked on stage at the 2006 James Beard Foundation Gala to accept an America's Classics Award, he wore a tux. But he also wore wading boots, a gesture of solidarity for the men who pick his oysters, men who weren't able to travel to New York and share the stage with him. More recently, I've gotten to know Emile De Felice. He's a Columbia-based farmer who raises Ossabaw hogs and tilts at various governmental windmills. When Barber was running for lieutenant governor, DeFelice was angling to be South Carolina Commissioner of Agriculture. His slogan, geared to give voice to the local foods movement, was "Put Your State on Your Plate." Both Barber and DeFelice lost. But from this distance, they look like a dream ticket for food-obsessive South Carolinians headed to the ballot box in 2010.