In the spring of 2009, John Currence — recent James Beard Award winner for Best Chef: Southern Region and chef/owner of four Oxford, Mississippi-based restaurants — opened Snackbar, a small-plate raw bar that specializes in oysters. It seems he took a look around Oxford – a town with a population of 19,000 and a local restaurant market that was already saturated before the national economy imploded — and thought, “You know what I bet the people of Oxford are hungry for? Merman snot.” Go to Snackbar any night of the week and you’ll see that he was right. Then go anywhere else in Oxford, Mississippi, and see the ways in which Currence’s being right flew in the face of all pre-existing logic.
Jonathon Swift once said, “It was a brave man who first ate an oyster.” A brave man who should have won the goddamn Nobel Prize, he failed to add. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) the raw oyster’s reputation as an aphrodisiac and possessing the taste and consistency of oral sex, they are one of nature’s most perfect foods. If a fine brandy melting down the back of your throat or going down on a supermodel aren’t for you, then neither are oysters. For me, when fresh, they do more for a waterfront vacation than the subtext of an entire Jimmy Buffett box set. In many coastal states, oysters are to local culture what Islam is to the Middle East.
But Snackbar’s success in Oxford has nothing to do with Mississippi’s being a coastal state. In fact, Mississippi is a coastal state in much the same way miniature golf is golf: It doesn’t eat like a coastal state, and it thinks like one only when someone’s handing out Katrina money. And, despite a lighthouse being the most prominent feature of the Mississippi license plate, it has more Sonic Fast Food joints than it does coastal miles. Besides, those coastal miles are at Mississippi’s southern-most reaches, and if Oxford were any more north-Mississippi, it’d be Tennessee. Which is to say that, in this land-locked town, seafood used to begin and end with deep-fried catfish, a tasteless, ugly son of a bitch plucked from the bottom of a pond.
So what happened? Is it because of Oxford’s progressive nature? Its reckless abandon in attitude toward new things? Well, that’s complicated: Short answer, no. Long answer, also no. If you want progressive, don’t set foot on the University of Mississippi’s campus in Oxford, where the Trent Lott Leadership Institute is a proud institution. Or the town square (known as the Square), where you’ll see a statue of a Confederate soldier standing atop a mighty Doric phallus with the lines The sons of veterans unite in this justification of their fathers’ faith inscribed on the shaft. The courthouse that it was, uh, erected in front of is painted so white — so ridiculously and achingly white — that when the sun hits it in just the right way, you can see through the walls and at the black people being denied justice inside.
Okay, Okay: those are all cheap shots at Oxford’s old guard. And that old guard is old. Snackbar wasn’t and isn’t for these people. These people voted for George W. Bush. Twice. Three times, if you count ballots cast for the former governor of Alaska and that creepy old guy who kept standing next to her. When they’re hungry, these Oxonians prefer the old-fashioned simplicity of gorging themselves on a singular and oversized plate overloaded with fried and gravied everything. What they don’t want they take home to feed the dogs. In the 1980s this was called trickle-down economics: the few eating themselves to death while the many starved.
Snackbar feeds the face of a new kind if southerner. A face so new it does not yet recognize itself but does recognize that we are currently experiencing one of those stretches of world history people are going to remember, to study, to write books about and teach courses on. This is not going to be one of those gray, useless decades that disappears in retrospect, like a mediocre employee in a vast conglomerate. The new-look southerner is self-aware and it is a self-awareness that is not defined exclusively by the past but by how tomorrow will define today. “Don’t blame us,” the new South says at this crossroads. “Our state’s on the wrong side of history, but look: We’re eating weird food off tiny plates.”
I admire this attitude even though it smacks of self-congratulatory liberalism. In fact, 82% of liberalism is, in and of itself, self-congratulatory. And I’ll take an Oxford liberal over a Seattle liberal any day of the week. One finds a reason to drink Rumplemintz on a Tuesday while the other won’t burn me the new Wilco album because “I dunno, man. I just can’t justify putting another CD out into the ether that’s just going to wind up in some landfill somewhere.” Oxford liberals support the cause; they just don’t attend the meetings. Seattle liberals assume every moment of their lives is the meeting.
Mississippi is both the fattest and the poorest state in the nation. It eats too much and it starves. Here, where the vivid contrast between wealth (a lavish antebellum spread) and poverty (a real shotgun home) seems more tangible than anywhere else in the United States, Snackbar sits somewhere in between (inside the world’s most unassuming strip mall). I found myself at the bar one evening asking the bartender what he’d learned about the human condition while serving Oxonians raw seafood. We were downing Oyster Shooters (The Oyster Shooter: Cocktail sauce. One jigger of vodka. One oyster. One shot glass.), not Rumplemintz. Though it may have been a Tuesday.
He told me about how people had been going crazy for oysters — men and women on dates, large parties, rebels, yankees — but, for whatever reason, many were going uneaten. People would order a second dozen after openly not finishing their first. My new bartender friend threw back an Oyster Shooter and banged the shot glass down onto the bar top. Then he leaned towards me, secretively, and said how one of the perks of his job was that he got to finish all of the oysters that were otherwise dumpster-bound.
I generally don’t eat garbage, but something about that made sense to me. I realized then what oysters represented at this particular moment, in this particular restaurant, in this particular corner of old-money Mississippi.
Such is the advance of food socialism.
Really: Just as the Marxist insists in the beauty of a classless society, everything about Snackbar’s philosophy and architecture wants you to share your dining experience with those around you. A long, large table runs parallel to, and spans the length of, the bar. Next to this table, lining the wall, is a series of roomy booths that could easily seat eight if they had to, and often do have to. On any given night, new and old couples pack the long table and, together, look more like a casual dinner party than a bunch of sardined strangers. Groups of six, seven, eight jam the booths, their faces ruddy with laughter, elbows knocking as hands reach for the ice-chilled Joeys, Washingtons, Apalachicolas, the steamed jumbo gulf shrimp, and the marinated blue crab claws that cover the tabletop and belong to everyone. Even the solitary diners aren’t solitary. They sit at the bar, side by side with others who take their food as seriously as they do, preferring to appreciate it with a holy reverence, like a congregation worshiping at the altar of food, their mouths moving not so much to chew but in silent prayer.
This is food socialism. A lot of people these days think this is a better way to eat. They also seem to think it’s a better way to live.
Shared food, after all, isn’t new everywhere. Many an Al Gore voter (or would-be voter, had they voted) went on a gloomy, conciliatory bender in or just down the street from their favorite tapas bar on Tuesday night, September November 7, 2000 — a night on which Currence would have been insane to seriously contemplate opening a small-plate raw bar in Oxford.
Still, despite the then-leader of the free world, things were changing down South. Currence understood this thanks to the years he’d spent building menus from the ground up, based not on what Oxford has always been hungry for, but on what it’s going to be hungry for next. Which led him to Snackbar, the reactive inversion to the plank-floored catfish house, just as Barack Obama represents, in many ways, the reactive inversion to the past eight years.
By this I’m not saying Currence is a genius or a madman (though he might be). What I am saying is that if there is a connection between what a community is eating and what a community is thinking, then Currence is a socio-cultural barometer. It’s also not that he’s ahead of the curve (which, again, he might be). It’s that he just really knows where Oxford’s curve happens to be at any given moment. It probably went something like this: On Election Day ’08, the dial tuned to CNN, Currence saw John King break down the results, county by county, on his magic view screen, and, when even the reddest of red republican strongholds turned blue, thought, it’s time, and immediately started shucking.
Is it a coincidence that raw bars and tapas restaurants — the bellweathers of the food socialist movement — are doing so well right now?
The thing of it is, personally, I’m a huge fan of capitalism and the protestant work ethic that teams up with it so well on this side of the pond. But a part of that image is the reality that many of those solitary American dreamers, despite their better mousetraps and their calloused hands, fail miserably. And that just flat-out sucks Then-candidate Barack Obama took time to talk about how much that just flat-out sucks when he accepted his nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Denver:
“For over two decades, [John McCain’s] subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy — give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is — you’re on your own. Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps — even if you don’t have boots. You’re on your own.”
And he was saying this to the America that was ready to give a shit about the person standing next to them. When the rest of America listens to Glenn Beck and then use the word socialism like a cudgel, what they’re trying to do is turn empathy into a dirty word. And empathy is exactly what we’re talking about here. It’s a mentality that half the country was ready to buy into and was already manifesting itself, in microcosm form, in restaurants all over the country. Barack Obama became the single most powerful man on the planet because he was able to tap into this need in us to satiate our malnourished senses of empathy. What men like Currence are doing with restaurants like Snackbar is satisfying a physical manifestation of that same psychological and emotional want.
Today, Snackbar’s patrons are going home happy and the help is going home full on the leftovers. It’s important not to forget that a raw bar in Oxford is as precarious an experiment as liberalism in Oxford. It’s new. Uncertain. Unpredictable. Oxford likes the idea of the shared-food experience as enjoyed from a raw bar, but the reality of what they’re putting into their bodies sometimes makes them wriggle. Just as these people liked voting for Barack Obama in ’08, knowing full well that their state was going to go very, very red and wouldn’t have to feel as though they themselves actually contributed to his victory. What they did not know — and what is still unknowable—is how they’re going to feel if, after four years, they’re convinced that all they’ve done all this time was feed the help.
But they’re giving shared food a try in Oxford, Mississippi. That’s something. That’s quite a bit, actually. And what’s going to come of it is hard to say. When the time comes, I suppose I’ll ask John Currence. He probably already knows.