The North Carolina food sisterhood stretches out beyond restaurants, into pig farming, flour milling and pickling. Women run the state’s pre-eminent pasture-raised meat and organic produce distribution businesses and preside over its farmers’ markets. They influence food policy and lead the state’s academic food studies. And each fall, the state hosts the nation’s only retreat for women in the meat business. Because North Carolina doesn’t have a long-established high-end restaurant culture, female chefs didn’t have to fight through classic male-dominated, military-style kitchens, said Marcie Cohen Ferris, a professor of Southern and food studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and the author of “The Edible South,” which chronicles in part the role of women and feminism in Southern food. “They are not beleaguered by how they will move up through the system,” she said, “because they are the ones who are inventing it.” READ MORE…
