Edible North Carolina: Journey Across a State of Flavor Panel Discussion

Join celebrated food writers Marcie Cohen Ferris and KC Hysmith for an afternoon of conversation about the contemporary North Carolina food landscape. Cohen Ferris and Hysmith will talk with essayists from their book, Edible North Carolina, including celebrated Chef Ricky Moore, food historian Dr. Michelle King, cultural anthropologist, Dr. Courtney Lewis, and food journalist Victoria Bouloubasis.

Marcie Cohen Ferris, author of The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region and Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South, is professor emerita of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

KC Hysmith is a Texas-bred, North Carolina-based writer, food historian, recipe developer, and photographer. She is interested in the intersection between food, gender, and the digital landscape.

About the speakers

Michelle T. King is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Department of History, where she specializes in modern Chinese gender history and food history. She is the editor of Culinary Nationalism in Asia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). In 2020-21 King was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars grant for her forthcoming book on Taiwan’s beloved postwar television cooking celebrity Fu Pei-mei (1931-2004).

Courtney Lewis is an associate professor at Duke University in the Department of Cultural Anthropology, where she specializes in Indigenous economic studies and food and agricultural sovereignty. Lewis is the author of Sovereign Entrepreneurs: Cherokee Small Business Owners and the Making of Economic Sovereignty (UNC Press, 2019). She is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

Victoria Bouloubasis is a freelance journalist, food writer and filmmaker. Her work aims to dispel myths about the Global South—its people and places—against the backdrop of complex social, political and personal histories. She often tells stories at the intersection of food, labor and immigration.  A working journalist since 2008, Victoria has reported from the rural U.S. South and Midwest, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Greece. She is based in Durham, N.C., where she deejays with the Mamis & the Papis DJ collective.

With decades of fine dining restaurant and hospitality experience, Chef Ricky Moore believes that ordinary, simple food can be extraordinary when executed at the highest level. Moore created Saltbox Seafood Joint® in Durham, North Carolina in 2012. Drawing inspiration from classic American fish camps and waterside seafood shacks, Saltbox celebrates local, fresh seafood. In 2022, Chef Ricky Moore was awarded Best Chef: Southeast by the James Beard Foundation.