Gravy

In restaurants, economics and sexual harassment are intimately entwined. Restaurants, along with hotels, have the highest rates of sexual harassment of any industry. For a tipped worker, in particular, how and how much one gets paid can determine how empowered one feels to respond against harassment. We delve into why restaurants pay servers just $2.13 per hour and how that affects how they deal with bad clients. And we look at why money might not be the only culprit when it comes to harassment.

For much of the 19th Century, Carolina Gold rice was a favorite of American rice growers, before disappearing in the early 20th Century. Brought back to life in the 1980s, it again occupies a much beloved, if niche, place in the South's canon of heirloom ingredients. Now, Hagood Coxe, a daughter of a Carolina Gold farmer, wants to make sake, a Japanese rice wine, out of the grain.

Prison food often leads to poor health for the incarcerated. That's a public health problem everyone should care about because 95% of inmates return to their communities.

Cooperative extension is a century-old government program that places agricultural agents in counties to educate and work with farmers. But for years, agents failed to show up for Native American communities.

Community canneries–facilities, often subsidized by local government, where people can in bulk–are closing. With groceries easily available even in rural communities, there's less need. And with busy schedules, people have less time for the labor-intensive process of canning their own food. But people who continue to use the still-operational canneries, like Arnold and Donna Lafon, find community and pride in the practice.

In addition to her work as an international recording artist and civil rights activist, the Queen of Gospel entered the restaurant business in the late 1960s with Mahalia Jackson’s Glori-fried Chicken. The fast food chain was more than a brand extension for the star; it was the first African American-owned franchise in the South. Producer Betsy Shepherd tells how Mahalia used the gospel bird to push for economic empowerment in the black community.

Menudo, sopes, gorditas, tortas, gringas, huaraches, mangonadas, and alambres are just some of the specialty dishes of Dequeen, Arkansas, population 6,600. A majority of the town's residents are Latino. Many of them migrated from Mexico to southwest Arkansas for jobs in poultry processing plants. Producer Betsy Shepherd attends Fiesta Fest, the town’s Cinco de Mayo celebration, to sample local food and music and to hear stories from the men and women who make it.

Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s Appalachian-themed amusement park, draws millions of country fans and thrill seekers to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, every year. Recently, the park has started marketing itself as a culinary destination. Producer Betsy Shepherd goes on a Dollywood tasting tour to gain insight on her musical idol and experience Dolly’s vision of the mountain South.

In the early 1970s, two hundred hippies from San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury neighborhood resettled in rural Tennessee. They founded a vegetarian commune and agricultural operation called The Farm. With help from their neighbors and a psychedelic soundtrack from their house band, the back-to-landers got their social experiment off the ground and produced some of the first vegan cookbooks and commercial soy products in the United States.

How a radio show sold flour—and the Delta blues