Southern

I'm from Michigan. I came to this food through the Marine Corps, through Tennessee and South Carolina, and then through years of driving around eating in places I had no claim on — and the longer I did it, the less I believed in "Southern food" as a single thing. A bag of boiled peanuts changes every hundred miles between Beaufort and Louisiana, and nobody puts up a sign. So this section is about gradients rather than borders. It's also about three cases where the story everyone tells credits character or technique, and the evidence points at an ingredient that quietly changed underneath everybody: the cornmeal, the flour, and the peanut itself.