To Live and Dine in Dixie, which should win a prize for the best book title of the year, analyzes food and segregation in the American South since the Civil War. Adding food to the wider examination of Jim Crow, Angela Jill Cooley asks why southern whites have considered it “acceptable to eat food that had been prepared and served by black hands, but inappropriate to eat that same food sitting beside black diners” (4). Observing that “the act of consuming food has always been political” (147), Cooley examines food itself and the venues in which it was consumed between Reconstruction and the end of the civil rights movement. Her discussion is rooted in several assumptions: the southern taboos of interracial sex and eating together, the complexity of eateries as both public and private spaces, the expansion of consumerism and the desire by African Americans to participate in consumer culture, and the overall determination of white southerners to use food to enforce white supremacy. In the ongoing efforts of African Americans for equality and of white southerners to deny it, food reinforced patterns of exclusion and became a flash point for contestation.

Cooley divides her work chronologically. The first section, from Reconstruction to the Great Depression, examines public influences on private spaces, particularly in the case of African American domestic workers and white employers, who grappled for power within southern homes. In the South, the quest for scientific cooking supported racial and class hierarchies, with white employers rationalizing the work of their employees. The phenomenon of eating out increased dramatically in the urbanizing South, and cafes quickly became contested urban spaces. Eating establishments of all kinds flourished even as white reformers conflated lower-end eateries with illicit sex and alcohol, worrying about African Americans both as consumers and as entrepreneurs. Eating spots brought together public and private concerns, as the acts of cooking and eating, previously done mostly at home, became part of the urban landscape. Theoretically, cafes enabled African Americans to eat equally with whites. Unable to prevent African Americans from eating in public, legislators enacted laws designed to keep them literally in their place. In 1914, Birmingham, for example, included racial segregation for eateries in its public health code. Food purity laws equaled racial purity in the Progressive Era South.

The section from the Great Depression through 1959 discusses the growth of southern-based food chains such as Hardee's and the movement of a national food culture into the South. The first food chains in the region were probably in the five-and-ten-cent stores, but even ubiquitous national institutions such as McDonald's maintained discriminatory practices, following local custom and normalizing whiteness. The final part of the book, from 1960 to 1975, engages African Americans' recognition that consumerism was linked with equality and looks at their desire to become fully fledged eaters of food in desegregated public places. African Americans fought for the right to be served in public eateries through sit-ins, boycotts, and private negotiations. White southerners responded with massive resistance, coercion, and violence. It took Supreme Court decisions such as Katzenbach v. McClung, which ruled against a white-owned barbecue restaurant in Birmingham, Alabama, to end legal segregation. While restaurant owners argued that they had the right to run their businesses as extensions of their homes, the US government responded that the businesses engaged in interstate commerce and were hence subject to federal antidiscrimination law. Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 further broke open Jim Crow restaurants. Yet even as de jure segregation disappeared from the US, de facto discrimination continued. Cooley concludes by analyzing Cracker Barrel restaurants, designed in the 1960s to appeal to white southerners and exclude blacks, not through overt rules but rather through a hostile atmosphere. Cracker Barrel finally settled a lawsuit brought by the NAACP in 2004.

Cooley contributes significantly to the discussion of food as social capital and the rules of segregation. Her discussions of food in public places are sure-handed, and are sometimes unevenly tied to the politics of cooking in private. The book would benefit from some theoretical discussion of commensality, or what happens when people sit down to eat together and why that action is so laden with meaning. Overall, however, Cooley successfully establishes food and food cultures as crucial components in racial oppression and the liberation struggle.