Jerry Attkisson's "soul nouveau" includes greens and beans cooked in chicken broth and thin wedges of cornbread made with fat-free milk.
Here I am at age 64 about 15 pounds overweight taking medication for high cholesterol and blood pressure. Fortunately, unlike so many baby boomers who are beginning to turn 60 this year, I have never been a fan of fast food.
My problems come largely from having grown up Southern. The first third of my life was spent consuming traditional foods heavy in fat and salt, usually fried.
Before I was a teenager, my older brother and I asked Santa Claus for a deep-fat fryer. Nearly every day we made French fries, working from a 10-pound sack of potatoes. The best part was the peelings we fried at the end. I cannot remember if we used lard or Crisco, probably lard.
One of our favorite snacks as kids was a bag of penny hush puppies consumed along with a Pepsi that expanded in our stomachs, leaving us satisfied for at least an hour.
My very earliest childhood memory is when we lived in a tourist court in Columbia, S.C., while my father went through basic training at Fort Jackson. This was in 1944, when I was three years old. It was an exciting time, but what I remember most were some raisin cookies my mother bought me.
At an early age, my brother and I graduated from the traditional Easter basket, replacing it with a box of 24 Baby Ruths, Snickers, Hershey’s with almonds, or Milky Way candy bars – our choice – from my grandfather’s store. Typically, they would not last a week.
For my 16th birthday, I used my birthday money to buy my very own electric frying pan for frying country ham.
To this day, my favorite breakfast is salt-cured herring soaked overnight in water, rolled in cornmeal, then fried crisp.
When I was a kid, the fish were a penny each and came from a wooden cask in my grandfather’s store. This dish is served with "spoon bread" – a soufflÈ made with cornmeal, eggs, butter and milk and baked to a crispy edge, then slathered in butter.
Other mornings, I ate eggs, bacon, bread, butter and milk, with the admonition to eat everything on my plate and to be thankful I wasn’t among the starving children in other parts of the world.
The first time I had Sunday dinner with my wife’s family, I ate more than the four of them together. They eat to live, while I live to eat. I like to shop for, prepare and eat food. I end one meal thinking about the next and often find myself staring blankly into the refrigerator.
My wife says I have total recall of every meal I’ve ever eaten. When others learn of this lifetime obsession with food, they think I must be a gourmand. Actually, I am more of an omnivore.
Once in a fit of inspired commitment, I gave my wife a 25-pound tub of lard for Christmas to signify my resolve to lose that much weight in the coming year. I never lost the pounds, but carrying around the pig grease drove home how much effort it took to transport this weight and how much lighter I felt when I put it down.
For years, the basic rationale for my diet was that stress is a much greater health hazard than what we eat. And that, in fact, eating this "comfort" food from my youth was a way of dealing with stress and, therefore, healthy.
The other two-thirds of my life – to date – have been marked by my wife’s efforts to undo those early habits and preferences, hoping I might make it beyond age 64. After 40 years, her encouragement and prodding have begun to get through to me.
But I don’t respond well to dieting. My approach is not to give up Southern food but to prepare it without the fat and salt. Some call this "soul nouveau."
I am learning to cook old-fashioned Southern foods in healthier ways – greens and beans in chicken broth seasoned with smoked turkey wings and hot chow-chow.
But that’s about as far as I have gotten, and I am getting tired of beans and greens.
This is where you come in. Please e-mail me your thoughts on other ways to eat Southern and live to tell about it. I hope you have some ideas, or many of us are in big trouble.
