Southern Living: Can't Beat the Eats!

 

As a legal fellow with the United Auto Workers, I spent a lot of time bumping along dirt roads in the middle of the American South. Paired up with another organizer, we'd drive from house to house, crisscrossing the back woods of Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama to talk to auto workers about the Gospel of Unionism. I have a friend that said I'm like a kitty in a paper bag, but I honestly really enjoyed this part of my job. Regardless of the doors shut in our faces or the veiled threat of guns & dogs the next time we show on someone's "goddamn fucking lawn," there's just something great about getting to know people and hearing their stories. Yes, these people make decent money, especially for the standard of living in these areas, but no one goes to work to get hurt. Or to be told that the company will take care of them...until the day comes when it just sidelines them simply because there are eager young people ready to work for much less.

It was a hard sell, to be sure. I would talk to a man about the security that forming a union provides, and all he had to do was to point to the beautiful homes behind him and say, "The company bought me those." Collective action problems aside, we were just so outgunned. My partner and I would drive around for eight or nine hours a day and on a good day, probably six of the fifteen people we try to see would be home. And out of those six, maybe two would want to talk. Our biggest impact was really that our presence in town kept the company on its toes. As soon as news got out that the UAW was in town, the company would dole out minor promotions, give small bumps to salaries. So we do some good just by being there, in a way.

Fried pork chop, cornbread, rice, and mixed veggies at Christine's Backporch in Jackson, Mississippi

That's the ambling and the working, but I also became known for picking out sweet sweet places for lunch. Armed with Yelp and with help from locals, we definitely had some good eats. Below was my first Southern meal, and it was at Christine's Backporch in Canton, MS. True to its name, I think it was Christine who welcomed us into her home and we sat in a converted living room to wait for the food. Southern cuisine gets ragged on for its grease, its calorific-ness, and the denial of vegetables as a food group. Not that it wasn't true for the most part, but (a) YOLO and (b) I just ended up having the food over the course of two meals (as well as hitting up the hotel gyms as often as I could).

My first stop was in Jackson, Mississippi:

The above was post-lunch gorging at Two Sisters in Jackson, MS. Let's skip the usual accolades about the amazing fried chicken and move right on to the bourbon bread pudding balls. I definitely had a hefty scoop of those things and I don't think I could see straight on the road afterward due to the sugar/tastiness.

When I first posted about having sushi in Jackson, Mississippi, friends made fun of me: "Did you get the Redneck roll? Is the California roll still called that there?" To my surprise, since the Nissan execs roam this biodome, stay in the hotels, and invariably have to eat, there is actually a small cluster of Japanese restaurants that I found up to par or better. The influx of Japanese investment meant also that an Asian boy wandering around town attracted attention. Hotel managers would greet me with a cheery "こんにちは" and Japanese restaurants would bring out their staff to greet me, along with a free appetizer. I wasn't about to tell them that I was in fact in town on behalf of the union!

For one of the weekends, two UAW international interns and I piled into a car to drive to New Orleans. 

India House was the hostel I settled on and it turned out to have a lot of character, even if I was plagued by mosquitoes all night. It was a tad far from Bourbon street, but the cost ($16 a night, I believe) was the selling point.

And yes, we got up early before our bayou tour to pick up breakfast at Cafe du Monde. Honestly? Not quite impressed, but this is totally due to my bias for 牛脷酥 and 沙翁, which are airier and fluffier.

The bayou tour kept making me think of Jurassic Park since there were these giant bitey lizards who seemed to appear whenever marshmallows and hot dogs appeared. These things are massive, and whenever one surfaced, we'd all rush from one side of the boat to another. We had brief looks at the destruction from Katrina, and I learned that bananas are bad juju for ships?

The Garden District was one of my favorite parts of this trip, simply because it was a perfectly sunny day, just muggy enough to make you relaxed and sleepy. But the most important part was that all the sweet olive trees were making the whole neighborhood smell like THE BEST THING EVER. I don't know why I didn't think about buying a local candle or something that carries the scent, but we definitely ran around looking for patches where the trees were showering it down.

And then there was the gay area (not that New Orleans as a whole doesn't feel like a Big Gay City). It was amusing to have people from work warn me against this particular area "because that's where there are a lot of men *wink." I did a brief barhop of the offerings here, and got caught up in a conversation with local gays about how the New Orleans gay scene was better than SF's. Since we were on the second-floor patio overlooking all the Bourbon St. festivities and random people were buying me drinks (hello, only Asian for miles), I was almost inclined to be a traitor and agree.

Merman is a cute twink until you realize he's holding an axe bigger than his chest and a skull. Wait, it's a (mer)manpurse. 

And we saw a lot of graveyards. Gorgeous and maze-like, nothing much more to add except that you need to see some of these monuments people built for themselves to live in after they die.

My second stop was in Tennessee, where I actually ended up spending the most time. Lebanon, TN is known for having the first Cracker Barrel ever. That's all. But it's close enough to Nashville and to the plant in Smyrna.

I did take some time to do some hiking. Trails are definitely not as clearly marked or paved as in California, which was a good and bad thing. On the plus side, I definitely felt like I was IN NATURE, but the downside was that I kept getting sidetracked on animal paths. The specific features in Cedars of Lebanon also led me to believe that the sinkholes and small pockmarks in the rocks would spawn small legions of goblins. I ran into another hiker and we both screamed briefly before we agreed to walk together so as to not freak each other out with breaking twigs.

Cedars of Lebanon State Park in Lebanon, Tennessee

And one of the last trips I did with the UAW was to a conference in Chicago to discuss precarious work in China. It was a good way to wrap up my year, and I realized how much international policy work I'd ended up soaking up. 

Obligatory Cloud Gate pictures. Everyone calls it the Bean and it amused me to no end that the artist Anish Kapoor responded to that nickname as "completely stupid."