Table Talk: Southern Foodways Adapting to Climate Change
July 15 — Happy Tuesday, and welcome to the table!
In today’s “Family Meal,” I’m bringing you a sneak peek at what I’ve been working on with the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) over the last eight months. In addition to my duties at Rough Draft, I served as the guest editor for the summer issue of the Southern Foodways Alliance’s quarterly journal, “Gravy.”
The organization tells the stories of the region’s culinary traditions through deep-dive storytelling, oral histories, podcasts, and films. Each issue of “Gravy” features a collection of stories, illustrations, and photographs centered around a specific theme. As guest editor, I was asked to choose a theme for the issue and help select writers from around the South to tell those stories.
At the time SFA reached out to me last fall, the Southeast was still reeling from pecan crop devastation in Georgia and catastrophic flooding in Western North Carolina caused by Hurricane Helene.
⛈️♨️❄️ The region is continually plagued, year over year, by increasingly violent storms, Arctic blasts, rising temperatures, and rapidly eroding beaches. It’s become our new normal in the South. So, it was time to tell the stories of the region’s farmers, food producers, foragers, scientists, fishermen, and backyard gardeners who are adapting to climate change and finding ways to thrive.
I’m sharing my editor’s note for the issue below to give you a sense of the stories covered in Gravy this summer, as well as an excerpt from a story by one of two Atlanta writers who participated. Julia Skinner offers a personal essay on how wild temperature fluctuations and wetter summers over the last 20 years have changed the taste and textures of the vegetables she grows in her garden.
➕ But first, Rough Draft Dining Reporter Sarra Sedghi brings you a recipe for the smoked onion jam that tops the Once a Week (OAW) Smoked Burger at barbecue restaurant Owens & Hull.
One last programming note: Family Meal is on hiatus next Tues., July 22, while I’m on vacation. The newsletter returns July 29.
Cheers!
🍸 Beth
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Owens & Hull Smoked Onion Jam Recipe
By Sarra Sedghi
🧅 This week, we’re sharing Owens & Hull’s recipe for smoked onion jam. You may recognize it from the restaurant’s “Once a Week (OAW) Smoked Burger,” a 1/2-pound smoked ground brisket patty that also comes topped with American cheese and special sauce. But this jam is equally great in sandwiches, pasta, or as a condiment for a cheese board.
Co-owner Bryan Hull (Secret Pint BBQ) said the onion jam is based on smoked grilled onions he made at NFA Burger’s first Giving Kitchen benefit in 2023. He used that base technique to develop the onion jam for the restaurant’s burger.
While Owens & Hull uses oak chips to smoke meats, Hull said that pecan, hickory, or any fruit woods will grant a similar flavor. The smoking portion is also optional, so if you choose to forgo it, start by sautéing the onions in a cooking oil of your choice. Once the onions start caramelizing and sticking to the pan, transfer everything to the Dutch oven and proceed from there.
♨️ The key to this recipe is maintaining the onions, regardless of whether you smoke them at the beginning. You won’t need more than 1 to 2 tablespoons of water for each deglaze.
“Once the onions hit the pot, don’t leave them unattended and have water at the ready,” Hull said. “As the sugars start to cook out, they can burn really quick. You want to constantly be adding a little water to deglaze the bottom of the pan.”
Hull said that all ingredients can be sourced at a supermarket, as most Publix and Kroger locations now carry ancho chili powder.Ingredients
- 3 large sweet onions, cut into a medium dice
- 2 cups water
- 3/4 cup of apple cider vinegar
- 1 cup sugar
- 2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
- 1/4 cup honey
- 1 tbsp garlic powder
- 1 tbsp paprika
- 1 tbsp ancho chili powder
- 4 tbsp canola oil
- 1 aluminum baking pan (if smoking)
- Kosher salt to taste
Directions
Note: The smoked portion of this recipe is optional.
- Smoke the onions: If using a smoker (Big Green Egg, pellet grill, etc), get the temperature up to 250 degrees Fahrenheit using oak or pecan wood, chips, or pellets.
- Place onions in an aluminum pan. Toss with 2 tablespoons of canola oil and a hearty pinch of salt.
- Smoke for 1.5 to 2 hours, mixing onions every 30 minutes to make sure to get even color and/or smoke.
- Make the jam: When onions are coming off the smoker, heat up a heavy-duty Dutch oven or pot and add in the remaining canola oil. Raise the temperature to medium heat (250 – 350 degrees Fahrenheit).
- Once the oil is heated, add the onions, stirring constantly. When onions begin to sweat, add Worcestershire sauce and continue stirring.
- As the onions begin sticking to the bottom of the pot, add just enough water to deglaze. Add in garlic, paprika, and ancho chili powder.
- The deglazed onions and water will begin to reduce. Continue adding water to deglaze as onions start to stick to the bottom. Continue this process until the onions have a deep golden brown color.
- Add sugar and stir until sugar melts into the onions. Add in the apple cider vinegar and honey, reduce heat to medium low, and continue to reduce until the mixture reaches a semi-thick, jammy texture.
- Serve immediately or refrigerate for later use.
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Climate Change and Southern Foodways
🌡️ “What’s the temperature?”
During visits to my Granny’s house in Oxford, Alabama, answering this question meant stepping out onto the front stoop to peer down at the bank on the corner of Dodson Street and South Quintard Avenue. The bank had a digital time-and-temperature display, and when the numbers lit up, it looked a little like a vintage high-school stadium scoreboard.
We visited Granny every July, a summer ritual bookended by a meandering two-day road trip to and from our home on the coast of Connecticut. Spending the month in Alabama allowed my mother to see her mother, siblings, and other relatives who were scattered around the state.
Granny’s front yard was flat and mostly shaded, perfect for playing Wiffle ball and badminton with our cousins. The sun-soaked back steps behind the house provided a place to sit and shuck corn, shell beans, or eat slices of salted watermelon. In the evenings after dinner, we’d set out to chase fireflies. When it rained, we played on the front porch.
☀️ July always brought sweltering heat to Alabama, and our mother insisted my sister and I spend the hours between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.
indoors to avoid sunburn and heat exhaustion.
I was seven years old in July 1980, but I remember the incredible heat of that summer in Alabama. It was one of the worst heat waves in US history, scorching most of the Midwest to the southern plains, south to Texas and Georgia.
Over eight days, from July 9 to July 17, midday temperatures throughout Alabama topped 100 degrees. One afternoon, my mother stepped onto the front stoop at Granny’s to check the temperature at the bank: 105. Shades were drawn, lights were turned off, and we were sequestered in the house until the sun went down. Thankfully, my Granddaddy, who built the house in the 1950s, installed central air conditioning.
Thunderstorms would break the 100-degree heat streak on the ninth day, but not before 80 percent of Alabama reached hellishly hot temperatures on July 17. The Birmingham suburb of Bessemer registered a record high of 108 degrees that day.
🌽 It’s estimated that farmers across Alabama lost 200,000 chickens and half of the state’s corn crop that summer because of the fiery temperatures. It was the first billion-dollar disaster in the country, hitting the agricultural industry the hardest. The unrelenting heat was directly linked to the deaths of more than 1,200 people, including 123 people in Alabama.
According to the National Centers for Environmental Information, the 1980 heat wave may have indirectly caused the deaths of close to 10,000 people.
Living in the South, we’re accustomed to memorable weather events. People gauge how old you are by which storms you remember. For my mother’s generation, it was hurricanes Camille (1969) and Frederic (1979). For my Gen X and millennial cousins and me, it was hurricanes Ivan (2004) and Katrina (2005).
But heat waves, the silent killers of the weather world, don’t blow in like a big storm, leaving chaos in their wake. They’re ruthless, oppressive, and invisible, pushing down hard upon the land with such suffocating intensity it’s hard to move and even harder to breathe.
Fast forward forty-five years from that scorching summer in Alabama, and we are still talking about the weather in the South. Except today, events that used to be described as once-in-a-lifetime storms, generational heat waves, and 1,000-year floods occur more frequently and with more severity.
Even so, the persistence of environmental activists and decades of work by scientists is paying off, at least in terms of awareness. And while some climate change skeptics question why our planet is warming, sea levels are rising, and storms are getting more ferocious, climate research continues to prove that the cumulative actions of human beings have profoundly affected the Earth and altered the weather in life-threatening ways.
🗣️ The South would like a word.
In the summer 2025 issue of Gravy, you’ll read stories on Southern farmers, foragers, seed-savers, soil scientists, and oystermen who not only work within the challenges of the South’s ever-changing climate but find ways to adapt and thrive.
Illustrations document the destructive force of water and the resilience of farmers, captured in intimate vignettes of eight flash floods endured by one family over twenty-five years that swept through their 200-acre farm in central Kentucky.
Another story explores how the region’s seed savers are securing the future of what’s grown in the South by preserving traditional seed varieties and creating extreme weather–tolerant hybrids.
Still another story has you tagging along with an Atlanta writer as she learns to reconnect with the land, her community, and her ancestors on a foraging journey from Arabia Mountain to Buford Highway to yards in the city’s southeastern neighborhoods.
The stories in this issue neither sensationalize nor trivialize the real threats climate change poses to our foodways in the South. But through humor and self-reflection, tenacious reporting and storytelling, and breathtaking visuals, this issue of Gravy offers frank perspectives, some solutions, and, most importantly, hope.
➡️ Click here to purchase the summer issue of Gravy ($12).
In My Garden:
Adapting Taste to the Changing Climate
By Julia Skinner
This piece first appeared in the summer 2025 issue of Gravy quarterly from the Southern Foodways Alliance.
👩🌾 In my garden, a patch of collards has grown consistently for years, dying in the spring and coming back with vigor each fall. These are Georgia yellow cabbage collards, and every autumn, I wait with anticipation for the weather to cool and the greens to sweeten just a bit, turning from a slightly harsh bite to a smooth, mellow flavor so gentle I barely even need to add anything to make them perfect.
Over the last decade, I’ve noticed our Atlanta summers have begun to feel a bit more intense. They swing between wet and hot or dry and hot—but it’s always hot. Our winters feel warmer, too. I wonder what changes the next decade will bring to my collards: Will milder winters mean less-sweet greens? Or will the rainfall and increased flooding alter them in other, unforeseen ways?
When I first moved to the South, I grew Cherokee purple tomatoes religiously each summer. Plump, productive, delicious, and full of summer tomato flavor, my tomatoes always rode the line between sweet and tart, juicy and firm, never veering too far in any direction.
In the last few years, however, I’ve switched to cherry tomatoes. They’re delicious and tangy, yet their size is far from ideal for a tomato sandwich. (One of my favorite summer staples.) But they grow quickly enough to ripen before their skins split from the summer rains that flood my yard, thanks to nearby development close to my home in southeast Atlanta.
🍅The seasons in the South used to be more predictable. Recent shifts in climate mean shifts in ingredient availability. My okra, for example, comes in later than it used to and isn’t always ready to harvest when my tomatoes are. So those first batches of okra and tomatoes don’t grace my stove together until the tomatoes have already been producing fruit for a while. And cooking with cherry tomatoes lends a slightly different texture to the finished dish. There are more bits of skin, sometimes more seeds, and depending on the varieties I use, I might get tartness from lemony yellow cherry tomatoes, or thicker skins from okra pods hardened in the summer heat.
Dr. Mehmet Öztan, cofounder of Two Seeds in a Pod and director of community engagement at the RIDER Center at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, says that changing growing conditions are reflected in recent shifts in USDA growing zones. This results in changes in the size and shape of tomatoes. Dry conditions can cause fruit to become mealy. And depending on the variety, excessive rain can either intensify or dilute their flavor. For instance, thin-skinned tomato varieties become watery and split easily, losing their balance of texture and flavor.
🧑🍳 Steven Satterfield, chef and co-owner of Miller Union and Madeira Park in Atlanta, has built his career on local ingredients and on the rhythms of seasonal eating in the South. He currently divides the seasons into subseasons, each two months long: short winter, short spring, early summer, midsummer, late summer, and short autumn. As the climate changes, this helps Satterfield anticipate what will be ready when, and then he plans accordingly.
➡️ Read the rest of Julia’s essay here.
Dr. Julia Skinner is a food writer and the founder of the Culinary Curiosity School, Root, and Roots and Branches Writing Coaching. She lives between Atlanta and Cork, Ireland.
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