I'm Josephine — I'll Take You Through Charleston's Low Country Food and the History Behind It

My name is Josephine and I grew up on the coast outside Charleston. Low Country food is one of the most historically significant food traditions in America — it is the cuisine that grew directly from the rice plantation culture of the South Carolina coast and the West African food knowledge that enslaved people brought with them. Shrimp and grits, she-crab soup, Hoppin' John, benne wafers — these are dishes with a 300-year lineage and most of the restaurants that serve them in Charleston's tourist district have not thought seriously about where they came from. I take groups through the French Quarter and the market district: a she-crab soup tasting, a lunch at a Low Country restaurant that takes the history seriously, and a walk through the Old Slave Mart and the Gullah-Geechee cultural sites that explain the food's origins.