Our common nature is a musical journey with Yo-Yo Ma and me, Ana Gonzalez, through this complicated country.

We go into caves, onto boats, and up mountain trails to meet people, hear their stories, their poetry, and of course, play some music, all to reconnect to nature and get closer to the things we're missing.

Listen to Our Common Nature from WNYC wherever you get podcasts.

Hey, it's Frances Lamb.

Thanks for downloading this week's podcast, and we're bringing you more of the conversation I have with my friend, the Southern food historian John T. Edge. We talked about the

secret history of Tennessee hippies and tofu on the regular show, but here, John T. tells a tale

of two different fried chicken empires from a bitter Colonel Sanders and a glorified Mahalia

Jackson.

Enjoy.

So hey, Janty. Thanks for coming back in.

I'm happy to be back, Francis.

All right, so the last time we talked, we were talking about hippies in the South

and the surprising ingenuity of them in those communities where they invented soy ice cream and started making tofu commercially.

But I want to talk to you about a different kind of Southern ingenuity that I think was

happening at the same time. Fast food is the product in the law of our minds of California

and Illinois, talking about the McDonald's brothers and Ray Crock.

But you argue in your book that the South had a lot to do with it.

Tell me about the South's role in the development of fast food.

Well, if you think about an iconic American figure like Colonel Sanders

who rose to fame in Kentucky,

the interesting thing for me about Sanders is Sanders, with his pressure-fried chicken, took this hyper-traditional southern food, this farm-grounded southern food, fried chicken.

And by way of that pressure cooker, by way of selling his stick and his kind of plantation mean to the masses,

...