TravelCent

Congealed Salad and Nashville Culture

Living in the moment like I do, I never give much thought to cultural shifts until they are so plainly apparent that I have to admit that we live in a curious place at a curious time. The place I refer to here is any place, really, because this is a global phenomenon, it seems, and there is a strange sense of the uncanny everywhere. It seems like it happened just yesterday, where the local and the retro that characterized my parents’ childhoods became the stock and trade of our realities right now.

But it has earlier origins, I’m sure. Spending a little time in cities such as Nashville, where the Nashville hotels speak to a generous hospitality that you can only find in the south, gives a little bit of sense to the notion that this is a recycling time. The old brands here that some of us remember very clearly from other days are suddenly everywhere again, and there’s even interest in the things we thought we might have left behind.

There are places like the Elliston Place Soda Shop that continue to offer the taste of earlier times, when no one really cared what cholesterol was. Not that it has to matter right now, because a vacation is a vacation, after all, and the south is what it is. It’s really rather spectacular to find that some of the most basic Southern cooking has its origins in Africa, and so what we get to sample here is a variation of a diasporic tradition, one that continues before our eyes.

Then there is even more reason to try not to blink, because Elliston , as it turns out, is actually one of the coolest neighborhoods in the city. Visitors wondering what to do when the usual tours are over might like venturing out here, to see how alternative culture is starting to gather more steam and focus. Conscious, examined lives participate in a race of human constructions, and somehow the thought that if we know more about the food, we’ll wake up and start to see clearly, seems sometimes immanent.

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