Georgia Mountains Foodways Alliance

Welcome to the Georgia Mountains Foodways Alliance (GMFA)

We are a statewide non-profit organization dedicated to the celebration, promotion and preservation of the authentic food culture of the Georgia Mountains. We are an organization of farmers, producers, vintners, inquisitive eaters, good cooks, culinary historians, chefs, food journalists, restaurateurs, culinary tourists, artisans and manufacturers.

Our alliance encompasses a field to table spectrum from agriculture to fine dining, with emphasis on all the specialty foods, farm markets, diners and hands-on restaurants in between that are so dear to the hearts of southerners who love fresh and local food.

The Georgia Mountains Foodways Alliance is dedicated to the development and promotion of the local food culture and small businesses from field to table. The Alliance identifies and nurtures Georgia's varied community culinary heritages through education, networking, public relations, regional cooperation and the sponsoring and promotion of local food and local wine events.

Georgia Foodways, Fresh and Local Foods

The mission of the Foodways Alliance is to:

• Serve as a conduit for communities, towns, businesses, residents and visitors in pursuit of authentic dining experiences that enhance the understanding of local cultural heritages of the North Georgia Mountains
• Seek out and promote information and events related to these experiences
• Encourage private and public support for educational and promotional activities which benefit local communities by creating vibrant culinary tourism
• Encourage, at all times, the use of local ingredients and products, the preservation of local food culture identity and the search for excellence in culinary pursuits.
• Encourage the use of sustainable, organic and environmentally practices

Georgia Moonshiners

What are Local and Regional Foodways?

Just how is it that particular foods become associated with particular geographic locations -- communities, regions, sections of the country, states? What is the relationship between foodways and locales? By speaking of "foodways" rather than "cuisine," we place more emphasis on those restaurants and cooks who focus on tradition rather than innovation. This is the culinary aspect of everyday culture. We also mean by "foodways" not only food, but the entire complex of ideas and behaviors centered on its preparation, serving, and consumption.

Georgia Foodways, and in particular the Foodways of the Georgia mountains, are the product of gradual development; passing food fads at a particular place and time are not regional foodways. Regional foodways are accepted by the people in that region as the natural way of food. Often regional foodways have heavy symbolic meaning and are important in marking off the social boundaries between one group of people who live (and eat) here and that other group of people who live (and eat) there.

There is nothing that all Georgians eat in common and that only they eat - or drink. Rather, Georgia foods are those of the many communities -- ethnic, occupational , local -- that constitute Georgia. What's more, state boundaries never conform to cultural boundaries. People don't stop eating grits or making Moonshine at the South Carolina border. And, no matter how closely we may associate the Georgia Mountains with Moonshine, it is really a part of the subculture of the Southern Appalachian Mountain region that extends into parts of North Carolina and South Carolina.