Studying Southern Identity: Meet John Shelton Reed https://t.co/Te3sWKuoNN

— Barbecue Bros (@BarbecueBros) May 10, 2017

In honor of our Book Club post on John Shelton Reed’s Barbecue cookbook earlier this week, here’s a link to a podcast interview of the man from WUNC’s “The State of Things” podcast recorded last year. The barbecue-specific portion begins at 25:47.

John Shelton Reed did not think of himself as a southerner until his classmates at MIT pointed it out.

The Tennessee native was going to school in the northeast just as the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s took off. It was the beginning of a career dedicated to the study of southern culture.

He came to it as a kind of outsider in his own home but quickly returned to his roots, helped create the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC-Chapel Hill, and has become one of the preeminent voices on the “correct” way to make North Carolina barbecue.