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129 

Review of:  

Road Sides: An Illustrated Companion to Dining and Driving in the American 

South 

Emily Wallace. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2019. Pp. 175, sources, index 

of places, 100 color illustrations. 

 

Review by: Charley Camp 

 

Foodways scholars, I would wager, are more conscious than most when it comes 

to categories and criteria for membership. That may explain why there have been 

so few food-based guidebooks since the 1930s based upon or attentive to eating. 

Exceptions must include mile-by-mile guides for U.S. Routes 30 and 40, coast to 

coast, and a handful of local guidebooks devoted to a place, or better yet-a road. 

Alas, in these pandemic times, eateries close to reopen as laundromats; grand 

restaurants as carry-outs. 

 

Emily Wallace makes modest claims for Road Sides. For starters, most of what she 

writes and draws is roadside or drive-in food, a category food writers generally 

ignore. Yes, there are exceptions, including the Gaffney Peach-roadside, yes—

visible for about fifty miles—but discernibly inedible. After all, what is an 

“illustrated companion” that makes no claim to relative completeness? Or a 

volume devoted to “dining and driving” with neither a map nor driving directions 

to eateries visited and recommended? 

 

Two technical problems make matters worse: alphabetical listing, by topic (not 

eatery), and disrespect for the Mason-Dixon line. Yes, I know that no one, I mean 

no one, locates Baltimore in the American South. Is it simply my location and age 

that make this a prickly point? The distribution of eateries by state, by topic, and 

alphabetically (whew) seems otherwise fair, although Jane and Michael Stern had 

more to say about several of the same places in their much-missed Roadfood 

books. 

 

That’s where the heartache really begins. There’s no evidence that the author of 

Road Sides visited each and every eatery included in the companion, and not just 

because some of the places given mention aren’t eateries—such as the Lorraine 

Hotel in Memphis, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated (131), 

or the Cracker Barrel chain, nearby wherever you are. 

 

I will confess to admiration for the 100 color illustrations in the book (number 

100 is a nice drawing of the author), even though some of them have little to do 

with foods or food signs, but I can’t help wondering if author/illustrator Wallace 

might have better spent her time in the presence of the actual food purveyors 

included in the Companion. That’s because too many of the book’s brief 

descriptions of eateries are based upon Chamber-of-Commerce text instead of 



  Camp, Review, Road Sides     Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 8:1/2 (2021) 130 

taste buds. 

 

Finally, I cite a now-ancient authority for this criticism—the Society for the North 

American Cultural Survey (SNACS), which published a photocopied atlas in 1980 

that included foodways. SNACS received a significant number of criticisms for 

their prototype from folklorists and anthropologists who insisted that every 

entry for an ethnic restaurant must be backed up by a meal. The length of time to 

perform this task set the project back about two years, but the final foodways 

survey was based not just on the names of restaurants, but what their food tasted 

like. 

 

Why do I bring up this ancient anecdote? To make a difficult but necessary 

distinction. I think Road Sides is an interesting and unique book that summons 

the recollection of food and travel—Southern food in particular. I doubt that I will 

consult it before I next travel south, but I do like the pictures. 

 

 

 


