Then they came for the foodies

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For years, people have been calling for John T. Edge to step down as head of the influential Southern Foodways Alliance.

They say he is a kingmaker. They say he is a white man — however charming — who has too much power over who tells the story of food in a region where so much of the cuisine was created by enslaved people.

For years, Mr. Edge has been listening, and remained in his position at the top....

Before there were biscuits all over Brooklyn and barbecue pit masters made the list of best American chefs, 50 cooks and writers shared a meal in Birmingham, Ala., in 1999 and created the Southern Foodways Alliance.

The idea was subversive. With food as a lens, the organization aimed to preserve the intricacies of the Southern table in a way that would both erase the nation’s cornpone concepts about the region’s food and help heal a tortured racist history....

a group of current and past staff members are renewing calls for Mr. Edge to step aside as director.

No racist images of the sort that led to the recent and speedy exit of Adam Rapoport as the editor in chief of Bon Appétit have surfaced. There are no homophobic texts or reports of sexual harassment. By many accounts, the work around the intersection of race and food that Mr. Edge, 57, has spent 20 years attending to has been crucial.

A chorus of voices is rising, though. Mr. Edge, they say, is a statue that needs to come down.

“I view him as a dear friend and a close ally, but principles don’t mean anything until they cost you something,” said the author Lolis Eric Elie, 57, a founder of the organization who has also written for The New York Times. “And John T. is a man of great principle who may end up paying a great price in this context.” (PH2000: Know where we have heard this before? Marat, Danton, A Tale of Two Cities)

“What we have is a middle-aged man who like so many progressive Southerners has wrestled with the demons of his white Southern past and used that to help build a better South,” said Marcie Cohen Ferris, 63, a former board president and a professor emeritus of American studies at the University of North Carolina. “The reconciliation stance is no longer going to work in this nation. It’s about economics and justice. This is it. This is the moment.”

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She is not calling for Mr. Edge’s dismissal, but she does support a thorough restructuring and the hiring of people of color for well-paid jobs at the top....

To many, the organization seems like a family, with Mr. Edge positioned as its beloved patriarch. He opened doors for countless writers, and became a regular commentator and writer on Southern food and culture, including in the pages of The Times and his ESPN show, “True South.” He led a charge to help rebuild a Black-owned New Orleans restaurant after Hurricane Katrina, and has honored important cooks who might otherwise have missed wide recognition

During his tenure, Mr. Edge has raised more than $13 million, including money for salaries, fellowships and an endowment aimed at paying the salary of the director who would succeed him, according to Melany Robinson, the organization’s publicist.

The match that ignited the current debate over Mr. Edge’s leadership was struck in a James Beard Foundation webinar on June 17, when the chef Tunde Wey asked him to step down.

The conversation was fed by the webinar, hosted by Jamila Robinson, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s food editor, in which Mr. Edge faced off against Mr. Wey for a reprise of a 2016 column they co-wrote in the Oxford American, titled “Who Owns Southern Food?” It was Mr. Edge’s column, and he shared it with Mr. Wey, who is Black, as a device to explore white privilege and its impact on Southern food culture.

In the column and more bluntly in the webinar, Mr. Wey asked Mr. Edge to step aside and give the power of his position to an African-American woman....

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