Shelley Ingram grew up in a small town in Mississippi and often ate food made at local gas stations in an area without fast food or many other restaurants. After attending LSU, she studied folklore and literature at the University of Missouri. She’s spent the last 15 years teaching at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She and professors Casey Kayser from the University of Arkansas and Constance Bailey from Georgia State University compiled the recently released “Get It While It’s Hot: Gas Station, Roadside and Convenience Cuisine in the U.S. South.” It includes her piece on gas stations in the fiction of Jesmyn Ward and Attica Locke, as well as articles and interviews about road-side food, and a landscape of both unique destinations and homogenizing chains and commercialism. The book is published by LSU Press, and more information is available at lsupress.com.
Gambit: How did you get interested in writing about food and foodways?
Shelley Ingram: Being from Mississippi and the South, and then moving to the Midwest, food became an important topic of conversation. It became clear food is something we all want to talk about all the time. People love to confess their food.
The first folklore class I taught was about food and foodways, and it just took off from there. There’s a great book by Harry Crews. It’s called “A Childhood: The Biography of a Place.” It’s about a few years of his very young years growing up in South Georgia. Food is all through it. It’s so clear how important food is to his sense of identity and how he came to be who he was. You start noticing that everywhere.
I grew up in a small town in Mississippi, and me and one of my co-editors, Casey, she also grew up eating at gas stations. In my hometown, that was the only place there was to get food. We didn’t have fast food restaurants when I was young. The gas station was where you got hot food. She had the same experience. One day, she shared a southern gas station food meme and was like, “We should write about this.”…