Gravy

In "The Piggly Wiggly Way: A Memphis Story, "Gravy reporter Mackenzie Martin visits the Pink Palace Museum in Memphis to understand how Piggly Wiggly changed grocery shopping forever.

Meal kits. Instacart. Door Dash. At the turn of the 20th century, we didn’t have all of these options. You mostly showed up at a counter and told a clerk what you wanted, and they’d gather all the necessary items and package them up for you. And there wasn’t much in the way of competing brands, either.

Then everything started to change in a big way 110 years ago this year, when the most influential self-service grocery store opened in Memphis, Tennessee. Founder Clarence Saunders called it “The Piggly Wiggly Self-Serving System,” and he had several patents for everything: the layout, the price tag system, and even the way he incorporated refrigeration. “You could go in and do your own shopping, and all you needed was one stocker and one clerk,” says Steve Masler, the former curator of exhibits at the Pink Palace Museum.

It’s unknown why Saunders named the chain what he did, but the mystery intrigued people. In September 1916, he ran one of the first of many bizarre newspaper ads to announce its opening: “The Piggly Wiggly will establish a new fashion,” it read. “Don’t come, though, unless you mean business and want to buy something.”

The idea of choosing your own items at a grocery store seems commonplace now, but it was revolutionary at the time. Suddenly, after years of going to a general store and handing a list to a friendly clerk, customers were expected to wander the aisles on their own and carry items in a wooden shopping basket.

Historian Lisa C. Tolbert, author of Beyond Piggly Wiggly: Inventing the American Self-Service Store, says one of the most radical things about the design of Piggly Wiggly is that the traffic only went one direction. That forced customers to walk by and inspect every product in the store, which increased spontaneous purchases and overall sales. “It’s like a vending machine you’re walking through,” she says.

In 1922, less than a decade after the opening of the first store, there were 1,200 Piggly Wiggly stores in the United States. Then more grocery store chains followed Piggly Wiggly’s lead and adopted self service models of their own, and Piggly Wiggly transitioned to the more traditional supermarket model we’re all familiar with.

Today, there are just under 500 Piggly Wigglys in the U.S. They are in 17 states, partially in the Midwest, but overwhelmingly in the South. It’s an outlier in the grocery store industry in the sense that it’s managed by individual franchisees across the country and perceived as more local than other nationally known grocery store chains. It’s the kind of place where baggers often carry groceries to customers’ cars, and you can get a soda for 50 cents. “It’s the Piggly Wiggly Way,” said one employee.
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In “Making Groceries,” New Orleans-based Gravy journalist Katie Jane Fernelius travels to the frontlines of food insecurity in Louisiana—from the bustling warehouse floor of Second Harvest Food Bank in south Louisiana to a grocery aisle in rural Evangeline Parish—to examine the place of food stamps in fighting hunger.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, is a federal food-assistance program that helps low-income households buy groceries. It has consistently been shown to reduce food insecurity and poverty, especially among children.

But SNAP has also been at the center of policy fights for decades, as legislators at both the state and federal level debate not only who should be eligible to receive benefits, but what they can spend those benefits on. While some legislators may emphasize the impact of SNAP on state and federal budgets, moms like Dafnee Chatman experience the importance of SNAP in their personal budgets, knowing the crucial role that food stamps can play in feeding her family of five.

In this episode of Gravy, Fernelius follows Chatman through a grocery store as she does the math of a weekly shop on SNAP benefits. She also speaks with John Sillers and Lindsay Hendrix of the Second Harvest Food Bank of Greater New Orleans and Acadiana about how families struggling with food insecurity fill their pantries. Fernelius looks at hunger in Louisiana from a wider angle: not as a single crisis, but as a system of support, strain, and political choices that shapes how everyday families eat.

***

Acknowledgements:

Thank you to scholars Tracy Roof and Laurie Green for their illuminating conversations about the history of food stamps.

Thank you to Second Harvest Food Bank in New Orleans and Dafnee Chatman, for their helpful, impassioned participation in this episode.
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In “Spilling the Tea in the Mississippi Pine Belt” Gravy reporter Georgia Sparling explores the tea farms popping up in Mississippi’s Pine Belt, where the tannic soil is perfect for growing tea.

While many think of strong, syrupy sweet, ice-cold tea as quintessentially Southern, the only thing truly Southern about this ubiquitous beverage is how we drink it. Almost every tea leaf we consume in the United States comes from somewhere else.



Tea has been cultivated for more than 5,000 years, first in China and now in India, Nepal, Kenya, and even Argentina. Mississippi, though, seemed unlikely. The tea plant, Chinese camellia, tends to thrive in inhospitable places, such as mountains and hillsides. While the Pine Belt can certainly be inhospitable with its three-digit-degree summers, tornadoes, and dry spells, it’s a wildly different climate than where most tea is grown. The soil, however, was just right for the acid-loving plants, which are known to adapt to their circumstances.



Still, much was unknown when The Great Mississippi Tea Company in Brookhaven and the Longleaf Tea Company in Laurel planted their first crops in 2011 and 2018, respectively. Tea is a long-term investment. It takes three to five years for the plants to become established and ready for harvest. After that, they can live for a century or more—that is, if they survive. Both farms experienced heavy losses during their first seasons of planting. Great Mississippi lost all four acres of their initial crop, while Longleaf lost 300 of their first 1,000 saplings.



But they replanted, and today these small but mighty farms have not only taken root but they are thriving. Great Mississippi and Longleaf are finding that not only do tea plants have a taste for Mississippi soil, but Mississippians (and beyond) have a taste for the delicate and complex flavors of Southern grown tea. Georgia Sparling visits these farms and learns what it takes to grow a perfect cup of tea.
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In “Tasting Haiti in New Orleans,” Gravy reporter Eva Tesfaye gives listeners a taste of Haitian cuisine—and history—in New Orleans.

For Haitians living in the Big Easy, many things remind them of home, from Second Line parades to the architecture to the food. Red beans and rice, boudin, jambalaya… all these iconic Louisiana dishes have connections to Haiti.

That’s because Haitian migrants profoundly shaped New Orleans culture. At the turn of the nineteenth century, enslaved people on the island of St. Domingue broke free from their chains. Led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, they snatched their freedom from the French. They renamed the country Ayiti, the Indigenous Taino name for the land.

This not only sparked the fire of freedom and Black liberation movements around the world, but also had huge consequences for other French territories. White people fleeing Haiti found familiarity in Louisiana’s French culture and the plantation economy. Large groups of Black people, enslaved and free, also arrived with them, boosting Louisiana’s sugarcane economy. New Orleans became one of the Blackest cities in the country.

 

“63% of Crescent City inhabitants were now Black. Among the nation's major cities, only Charleston, with the 53% majority, was comparable,” said Zella Palmer, a food historian at Dillard University.

 

The influx dramatically transformed New Orleans’ culture and especially its food, giving it a Haitian twist that you can still taste today.

 

“Haitian cuisine is the most underrated and unappreciated cuisine in the Western Hemisphere,” said Palmer.

 

In this episode, Tesfaye gives Haitian cuisine its flowers. She takes us through the history of how Haiti helped shaped New Orleans’ iconic cuisine and introduces us to the modern chefs in the city who are bringing Haitian food back to the forefront.
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Martin Padgett wrote the feature essay “Object Permanence” for the fall 2025 issue of Gravy Quarterly, our sister publication. In the piece, he catalogs the objects we live with actively, those we tolerate like inanimate roommates, and those we give away, sometimes to make room for the new. We liked it so much that we asked them to read it for Gravy podcast listeners.

To read other engaging essays in Gravy, have it shipped to your mailbox by becoming an SFA member at southernfoodways.org, or sign up for a subscription at Hub City Book Shop.
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