Carolina QuotesVivian Howard
North Carolina · connectedBorn 1978
American chef
- Studied at North Carolina State University
Quotations with a citation
When I left here when I was 14, I was certain that I would never move back, and moving back would have meant failure because I wanted to live in a city. I thought all success happened in cities. So when I came back, I felt like I had lost the opportunity to be successful and to do quality work. But what I learned after being here for a while, was that I probably couldn't do what I wanted to do anywhere else, and being back home, surrounded by the food and the people of my youth, really inspired me.
One of the things people get wrong about Southern food is they think that it's all about fried chicken and pork chops, and really, historically in the South, people would only have a big piece of meat at the center of the plate, maybe on Sunday afternoon after church. The rest of the time meat would have been treated as a condiment, and so in that way, we are more like everywhere else in the world than not.
[M]y goal is to show Southerners, at least the people around me, as the kind of multidimensional people that they are. They're not mystical fairies who live a slower pace life, and they're also not bumbling idiots. We're all somewhere in between, and I believe that people who live in rural America have a different type of wisdom than people who live in urban America.
We are important parts of Kinston and Lenoir County. Our voices matter, our story matters. I feel like my kids matter in the community, and that's important to me.
I've learned that place does not have to determine the quality and the reach of your work. We move so often for work and let that dictate where we settle. Maybe we should move for love and surround ourselves with the people we care about. I'm not rooted to the soil of Deep Run. I'm rooted to the people around me.
It was so beautiful to really understand how our food traditions that we bring with us to wherever we land are shaped by where we land, and how that place where we land and settle is then shaped by those food traditions.