Southerners love to cook. Â Especially we love those community gatherings where everyone brings their favorite dish and we all sample “just a bite” of everyone’s. Â My earliest memories of this
I have such  wonderful memories of that food – and no matter how many times I try recreating their recipes, they just don’t come
Miss Ethel’s peach cobbler, Aunt Minnie’s
Eventually we graduated to folding tables and chairs and finally to a real Fellowship Hall equipped with all the modern conveniences. Â Much more comfortable but in nostalgic moods, I wonder if we were better off in those days. Â We were blissfully unaware of the dangers of sugar, gluten, lactose, saturated fat, cholesterol, and vegetarians were, well, just weird. Â There was no guilt associated with a hamburger and a coke for lunch.
We had no idea the trouble we were in.
My rational self remembers  how it was  to lose relatives to diet-related disease, especially  heart disease and  diabetes.  These could be  devastating for a family, since health insurance  was essentially non-existent in those days; health care  was pay-as-you-go.
Southerners will always  love our  community food get-togethers, although today we make at least a token effort to prepare healthful food .  However, if  the occasional slice of coconut cake happened  to sneak in, well.. just a bite couldn’t hurt.