Gravy
Gravy shares stories of the changing American South through the foods we eat. Gravy showcases a South that is constantly evolving, accommodating new immigrants, adopting new traditions, and lovingly maintaining old ones. It uses food as a means to explore all of that, to dig into lesser-known corners of the region, complicate stereotypes, document new dynamics, and give voice to the unsung folk who grow, cook, and serve our daily meals.
Episodes
June 18, 2025 • 26 mins
Few companies have inspired more fanatical devotion among Texans than the convenience chain Buc-ee’s. Described by the New York Times as both a “Disneyland of roadside capitalism” and the “through line of America’s second most sprawling state,” its iconic, buck-toothed beaver mascot has been spotted not just on billboards, but on wedding cakes and tattooed arms of its most loyal customers. Founded as a small-town gas station, today...
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June 4, 2025 • 27 mins
In “Oh, Snapper! Mislabeled Mississippi Seafood,” Gravy producer Boyce Upholt takes listeners to Biloxi, Mississippi—a town that has
long called itself the Seafood Capital of the World. But in May 2024, shocking news hit the community: Mary Mahoney's Old French House, an iconic restaurant, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to misbrand fish and wire fraud. For years, the iconic 60-year-old establishment had been selling cheap imported fi...
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May 21, 2025 • 33 mins
Gravy podcast is excited to share a special episode of a new podcast called Buzzkill, from our friends at FERN, the Food and Environmental Reporting Network. Buzzkill explores the dramatic decline of pollinators, including the American bumblebee, whose numbers have plummeted by 90% in just two decades. The series, hosted by Teresa Cotsilos, delves into how industrial monocultures, rampant chemical use, and unsustainable land practi...
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May 7, 2025 • 26 mins
The Cuban sandwich. If it’s made with ingredients different from someone else’s recipe, you might find yourself in an hours-long argument in the middle of Little Havana. In Miami and Tampa, Florida, restaurant owners, historians, and Cuban Americans recount their own memories of the Cuban sandwich, as well as the story of its origins. In this episode of Gravy, reporter Kayla Stewart explores the sandwich’s long-standing origin stor...
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April 23, 2025 • 23 mins
In “A Muddy Future for Louisiana Crawfish,” Gravy producer Eva Tesfaye traces the aftermath of the summer of 2023, when a severe drought in Louisiana devastated the 2024 crawfish season. The dry soil and extreme heat killed the crawfish while they were still burrowed underground, meaning when farmers flooded their fields in the fall, they found their harvest would be dismal for the spring. That caused both farmers and consumers to ...
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April 9, 2025 • 28 mins
In “Fruitcake in Space,” Gravy producer Bronwen Wyatt explores a bizarre footnote in the annals of human space travel. In 1968, a scientist at a military research facility developed a very unusual recipe: a nutritionally-fortified fruitcake designed as an emergency ration for astronauts. It might be easy to dismiss this fruitcake, but we’re here to argue that it’s part of a larger story—one that takes us from the early days of NASA...
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March 26, 2025 • 31 mins
In “Got (Raw) Milk? The Small Family Dairy Farms Behind a Big Controversy,” Gravy producer Bianca Garcia takes listeners to Milky Way Farm, the last dairy in Anderson County, South Carolina, where raw milk sales are keeping the Peeler family afloat.
Their neighbors have succumbed to the pressures that have defined a generation of farmers. Between 2003 and 2022, South Carolina—where the state beverage is a glass of cold milk—lost ...
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March 12, 2025 • 29 mins
In “What’s in Store for the Pawpaw Patch?” Gravy producer Anya Groner examines the pawpaw, a long-overlooked fruit that’s now being domesticated, making its way into farmers’ markets, restaurants, and even beer.
What plant has leaves that smell like green pepper, fruit that can taste like pineapple or turpentine, and bark that can be woven into baskets? Enter the poor man’s banana, also known as the pawpaw. Two decades ago, you’d ...
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February 26, 2025 • 22 mins
In “Flambéed! The Art & Theater of Bananas Foster,” Gravy producer Eve Troeh takes listeners to Brennan’s, the iconic restaurant in New Orleans’ French Quarter, where skilled servers pull off one sensational culinary feat, table after table and day after day—Bananas Foster, flambéed tableside.
Brennan’s opened its doors more than seventy years ago, and its early years coincided with a hot trend in fine dining at the time: tablesid...
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February 12, 2025 • 29 mins
In “Conch: Queen of the Florida Keys,” Gravy producer Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong takes listeners to the Keys, where queen conch is plastered across menus: conch fritters, conch salad, even conch chowder. The shells are a visual icon in Key West, even gracing its (semi-joking) flag as a sovereign nation: The Conch Republic. Which is fascinating… because conch hasn’t been fished on the island in fifty years. So where is it coming from, wh...
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January 29, 2025 • 24 mins
In “South Asian Food Makes Northwest Arkansas Taste Like Home,” Gravy producer Mackenzie Martin heads back to Northwest Arkansas (NWA), where Walmart began, to look at the retail giant’s influence on the region’s demographics and culinary landscape—specifically, spurring a boom of South Asian restaurants and food shops.
Walmart is seen by some as the king of genericness. Most of the products it sells don’t have much of a regional...
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January 15, 2025 • 28 mins
In “Cultivating Mexico in Northwest Arkansas,” Gravy producer Mackenzie Martin digs into the story of Yeyo’s, a vibrant family-run Mexican restaurant in Northwest Arkansas.
Here, the once-rural Ozarks are now one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country. That’s partly thanks to major employers like Walmart, Tyson Foods, and J.B. Hunt, but there are also many amenities the region offers, like a surplus of hiking an...
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January 1, 2025 • 27 mins
The black-eyed pea is not your average bean. Like many staple foods of the African Diaspora, it’s become a powerful symbol of food sovereignty and survival. With the migration of the black-eyed pea from West Africa during the transatlantic slave trade came a superstition about good luck. This belief combines folklore from West Africa and Western Europe in the American South. Our episode follows the journey of the black-eyed pea, ti...
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December 18, 2024 • 26 mins
In “What Makes Gumbo...Gumbo?” Gravy producer Katie Carter King takes us all the way to Northern California to understand what folklorist John Lauden meant when he said, “Gumbo is not a word, it’s a syntax, a way of putting something together.”
Cooks and culinarians have long argued about gumbo. Is it Creole or Cajun in its roots and history? Is it a soup, a stew, or some mysterious third thing? But perhaps nothing gets Southerne...
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December 4, 2024 • 30 mins
In “The Joyful Black History of the Sweet Potato,” Kayla Stewart reports for Gravy on sweet potatoes, which Southern-born Black Americans have baked, roasted, fried, distilled—and long revered. Stewart takes listeners across the United States to learn how African Americans are finding new, interesting ways to enjoy sweet potatoes.
Harvey and Donna Williams own and operate Delta Dirt Distillery in Helena, Arkansas. Both grew up in ...
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November 20, 2024 • 26 mins
In “Eating at the End of the World,” Gravy producer Katie Jane Fernelius takes a close look at the culture of disaster prep, especially how people eat when disaster strikes. As it turns out, how people provision for disaster can differ wildly from how they actually feed themselves, and each other, once a storm blows through.
After living without power for almost two weeks following Hurricane Ida, Fernelius fell down a rabbit hole...
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November 6, 2024 • 27 mins
In “Where There's (Southern) Smoke, There's Help for Restaurant Workers,” Gravy producer Evan Stern introduces listeners to the Southern Smoke Foundation, a relief organization dedicated to providing a safety net for food and beverage workers.
As the pandemic reminded us, restaurants aren’t just places where people go to satisfy hunger. The best ones reflect, anchor, and at times help define the communities they serve. From diners...
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October 23, 2024 • 26 mins
In the episode “Catch of the Day: Why Alabama Loves Red Snapper,” Gravy producer Irina Zhorov takes listeners to the fisherman’s paradise of the Gulf of Mexico, where you’ll find tuna, amberjacks, mahi mahi, swordfish, and more. There’s a commercial fishery worth nearly $1 billion annually and the Gulf has the highest level of spending by recreational anglers, which includes charter trips, in the whole country: more than $5 billion...
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October 9, 2024 • 25 mins
Order a hot pastrami on rye at any delicatessen and you’ll taste the briny terroir of the Jewish Diaspora. Pastrami is an iconic cured meat that migrated with Eastern European Jews to America and became synonymous with the deli, a beloved third place for Jewish communities across the country. In Jackson, Mississippi, that place was the Olde Tyme Deli, which Judy and Irv Feldman owned and operated from 1961 until 2000. In this episo...
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September 25, 2024 • 28 mins
In “America’s Lost Peanut and the Price of Bringing it Back,” Gravy producer Otis Gray takes listeners on a journey through the history and revival of the Carolina African Runner Peanut, an heirloom crop thought to be extinct until 2013. Today, a contingency of heirloom enthusiasts and chefs are trying to bring the historic peanut back into the spotlight through farm-to-table dining. The question is: if not everyone can sit at the ...
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