Food is essential to southern culture, and collard greens play a central role in the South’s culinary traditions. A feast to the famished, a reward to the strong, and a comfort to the weary, collards have long been held dear in the food-loving southern heart. In Collards: A Southern Tradition from Seed to Table, Edward H. Davis and John T. Morgan provide this emblematic and beloved vegetable the full-length survey its fascinating and complex history merits.   The book begins with collards’ obscure origins. Like a good detective story, the search for collards’ home country leads the authors both to Europe and West Africa, where they unravel a tale as surprising and complex as that of southern people themselves. Crossing back over the Atlantic, the authors traverse miles of American back roads, from Arkansas to Florida and from Virginia to Louisiana. They vividly recount visits to homes, gardens, grocers, farms, and restaurants where the many varieties of collards are honored, from the familiar green collards to the yellow cabbage collard and rare purple cultivars.   In uncovering the secrets of growing collards, the authors locate prize-winning patches of the plant, interview “seed savers,” and provide useful tips for kitchen gardeners. They also describe how collards made the leap from kitchen garden staple to highly valued commercial crop.   Collards captures the tastes, smells, and prize-winning recipes from the South’s premier collards festivals. They find collards at the homes of farmers, jazz musicians, governors, and steel workers. Kin to cabbage and broccoli but superior to both in nutritional value, collard greens transcend human divisions of black and white, rich and poor, sophisticated and rustic, and urban and rural.   Food trends may come and go, but collards are a tradition that southerners return to again and again. Richly illustrated in color, Collards demonstrates the abiding centrality of this green leafy vegetable to the foodways of the American South. In it, readers will rediscover an old friend.

This book explores how religious groups work to create sustainable relationships between people, places and environments. This interdisciplinary volume deepens our understanding of this relationship, revealing that the geographical imagination—our sense of place—is a key aspect of the sustainability ideas and practices of religious groups.  The book begins with a broad examination of how place shapes faith-based ideas about sustainability, with examples drawn from indigenous Hawaiians and the sacred texts of Judaism and Islam. Empirical case studies from North America, Europe, Central Asia and Africa follow, illustrating how a local, bounded, and sacred sense of place informs religious-based efforts to protect people and natural resources from threatening economic and political forces. Other contributors demonstrate that a cosmopolitan geographical imagination, viewing place as extending from the local to the global, shapes the struggles of Christian, Jewish and interfaith groupsto promote just and sustainable food systems and battle the climate crisis.

This book explores how religious groups work to create sustainable relationships between people, places and environments. This interdisciplinary volume deepens our understanding of this relationship, revealing that the geographical imagination—our sense of place—is a key aspect of the sustainability ideas and practices of religious groups.  The book begins with a broad examination of how place shapes faith-based ideas about sustainability, with examples drawn from indigenous Hawaiians and the sacred texts of Judaism and Islam. Empirical case studies from North America, Europe, Central Asia and Africa follow, illustrating how a local, bounded, and sacred sense of place informs religious-based efforts to protect people and natural resources from threatening economic and political forces. Other contributors demonstrate that a cosmopolitan geographical imagination, viewing place as extending from the local to the global, shapes the struggles of Christian, Jewish and interfaith groupsto promote just and sustainable food systems and battle the climate crisis.

Food is essential to southern culture, and collard greens play a central role in the South’s culinary traditions. A feast to the famished, a reward to the strong, and a comfort to the weary, collards have long been held dear in the food-loving southern heart. In Collards: A Southern Tradition from Seed to Table, Edward H. Davis and John T. Morgan provide this emblematic and beloved vegetable the full-length survey its fascinating and complex history merits.   The book begins with collards’ obscure origins. Like a good detective story, the search for collards’ home country leads the authors both to Europe and West Africa, where they unravel a tale as surprising and complex as that of southern people themselves. Crossing back over the Atlantic, the authors traverse miles of American back roads, from Arkansas to Florida and from Virginia to Louisiana. They vividly recount visits to homes, gardens, grocers, farms, and restaurants where the many varieties of collards are honored, from the familiar green collards to the yellow cabbage collard and rare purple cultivars.   In uncovering the secrets of growing collards, the authors locate prize-winning patches of the plant, interview “seed savers,” and provide useful tips for kitchen gardeners. They also describe how collards made the leap from kitchen garden staple to highly valued commercial crop.   Collards captures the tastes, smells, and prize-winning recipes from the South’s premier collards festivals. They find collards at the homes of farmers, jazz musicians, governors, and steel workers. Kin to cabbage and broccoli but superior to both in nutritional value, collard greens transcend human divisions of black and white, rich and poor, sophisticated and rustic, and urban and rural.   Food trends may come and go, but collards are a tradition that southerners return to again and again. Richly illustrated in color, Collards demonstrates the abiding centrality of this green leafy vegetable to the foodways of the American South. In it, readers will rediscover an old friend.

This book explores how religious groups work to create sustainable relationships between people, places and environments. This interdisciplinary volume deepens our understanding of this relationship, revealing that the geographical imagination—our sense of place—is a key aspect of the sustainability ideas and practices of religious groups.  The book begins with a broad examination of how place shapes faith-based ideas about sustainability, with examples drawn from indigenous Hawaiians and the sacred texts of Judaism and Islam. Empirical case studies from North America, Europe, Central Asia and Africa follow, illustrating how a local, bounded, and sacred sense of place informs religious-based efforts to protect people and natural resources from threatening economic and political forces. Other contributors demonstrate that a cosmopolitan geographical imagination, viewing place as extending from the local to the global, shapes the struggles of Christian, Jewish and interfaith groupsto promote just and sustainable food systems and battle the climate crisis.

This book explores how religious groups work to create sustainable relationships between people, places and environments. This interdisciplinary volume deepens our understanding of this relationship, revealing that the geographical imagination—our sense of place—is a key aspect of the sustainability ideas and practices of religious groups.  The book begins with a broad examination of how place shapes faith-based ideas about sustainability, with examples drawn from indigenous Hawaiians and the sacred texts of Judaism and Islam. Empirical case studies from North America, Europe, Central Asia and Africa follow, illustrating how a local, bounded, and sacred sense of place informs religious-based efforts to protect people and natural resources from threatening economic and political forces. Other contributors demonstrate that a cosmopolitan geographical imagination, viewing place as extending from the local to the global, shapes the struggles of Christian, Jewish and interfaith groupsto promote just and sustainable food systems and battle the climate crisis.