South can welcome new cultural symbol

Forget about the rebel flag. The states of the old Confederacy now have a striking new cultural symbol to which we can pay obeisance: Lay’s Southern Biscuits and Gravy Potato Chips.

Lay’s has produced a variety of new seasonings for its chips designed to reflect different regions of the country as part of its Do Us A Flavor contest. Customers are asked to sample and vote on the four finalists: The aforementioned Biscuits and Gravy; Kettle Cooked Greektown Gyro; New York Reuben; and Wavy West Coast Truffle Fries.

The winner will join other standard flavors on the shelves.

The biscuit-and-gravy chips bear a jarring resemblance to the real thing. You get a distinct taste of sage and sausage gravy as you chomp down on a chip, followed by the floury essence of a biscuit.

Make no mistake, this is down-home cooking as it might be conceived by NASA. These chips are Aunt Bessie’s famous biscuits reconfigured for a mission to Mars, strictly space food, like lasagna in a tube.

Yet in the midst of the discussion about Southern symbols – flags, memorials, statues, college buildings, street names and highway interchanges – perhaps we should focus more on potato chips, specifically ones that are supposed to taste like those melt-in-the-mouth discs of heaven your mama used to make. That seems to be where the whole Southern heritage thing is going.

While the dyed-in-butternut-wool Southerners have been wringing their hands about the the possible razing of statues of Confederate heroes and other Civil War memorabilia, they have neglected the more pervasive corrosion of Southern culture brought about by air conditioning, Wal-Mart, Fox News, the Internet and the traditional restlessness of Americans that compels them to pull up stakes and move somewhere new. Except for the weather and the landscape, America’s regional distinctions are fading away.

The South no longer even has a corner on bigotry. Rednecks now are abundant in every part of the country. (Maybe they always were but stayed in the closet.)

The Southern “way of life” has not entirely vanished. Many Southerners still talk differently from many Northerners. The South is home base for the tea party. And the South still boasts its unique regional cuisine, although the rest of the country is unabashedly pillaging it.

Southerners still love football, but now, so does everybody. Country music is omnipresent.

What’s left? Bass fishing? NASCAR? Barbecue? Everybody else is into those things too!

That leaves flags, statues of Southern generals and university buildings named after white supremacists. And in some circles, there’s still a nostalgia for that imaginary fairyland where everyone lived on big plantations, slaves were happy, women wore hoop skirts and the night air was perfumed by magnolias.

By the mid-1970s, even the largely agrarian, small-town South of the early 20th century has mostly disappeared. With each passing day we become more culturally homogeneous.

That helps explain why some Southerners cling so desperately to their symbols. Sadly, though, Southern culture has been sanitized, corporatized and universalized, just another interchangeable lifestyle option.

So, need a new symbol? No worry, Frito-Lay has your back.

This story was originally published July 30, 2015 at 3:35 PM with the headline "South can welcome new cultural symbol."