I was raised in a world without pizza. Or pho or tacos or sushi.

However, it wasn’t until I was grown and became acquainted with all of the above that I realize that I had come from as rich a culinary tradition as could be found anywhere. I was raised on southern cooking. And, if the American Nutrition Association is to be believed, I probably shouldn’t have lived beyond about age 15. Our five major food groups were salt, grease, sugar, caffeine, and cornbread.

And we didn’t do lunch.

When I was growing up, the three meals of the day were breakfast, dinner, and supper, and often supper was what was left over from dinner. I was introduced to the concept of lunch by Mrs. Bailey when I was in the fourth grade. She explained to us that dinner was the largest meal of the day and could be taken at noon or in the evening. I think most of us filed that information under “things we didn’t have to worry about.”

Measured by today’s standard, there were two things wrong with southern cooking: it had too much of the things we thought made it so good, and we ate too much of it.

Still, strangely, a lot of people lived into adulthood and some even lived to old age. In fact, one of my grandmothers was told that if she didn’t quit eating all that pork she was going to have a stroke. She did. At age 75. She still had black hair and all of her teeth, and until the stoke, she could still outwork any of her five daughters. And probably any of her five sons.

Under the heading of “everything old is new again,” a number of the trendier restaurants around here are promoting “local sourcing.” That was pretty much all we knew. Granddaddy killed two hogs every year, and the hams and shoulders hung so thick in the smokehouse that you couldn’t walk between them. Beside the smokehouse was a chicken yard with a single, very cranky rooster and a bunch of hens. Almost everybody had a garden for fresh vegetables in season and canned ones in the winter. No matter how scarce other things might be, we were never short of food.

The root of most southern flavor was the pig. Things were cooked with lard, seasoned with pork, accompanied by country ham (salt and pork), corned ham (salt and pork), pork chops (just pork) or roast pork (also just pork). Barbeque was a special case; it wasn’t something the southern housewife did, but it was more pork. A typical dinner might be pork chops, very thin and crisp, peas and butterbeans, corn, sliced tomatoes, baked corn bread (also very thin and crisp, iced tea (very strong and very sweet), and some sort of dessert. Because the vegetables were seasoned with pork, about the only thing that today’s nutrition Nazis would bless here would be the sliced tomatoes.

(Some foodstuffs made from pig such as souse meat, chitterlings or chit’lin’s, and liver stew aren’t mentioned above because I’ve always done my best to forget them.)

Then there was chicken, usually fried. After I was grown and left Benson I encountered the term “southern fried chicken.” We didn’t call it that, probably because we weren’t aware of any other kind. This southern fried chicken was in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in downtown Atlanta, but the memory of my family’s fried chicken was enough to pull me in. This chicken had breading made of concrete encasing mostly raw and possibly poisonous chicken meat and was probably cooked by a Yankee.

Another mark of southern cooking was that things were cooked, not generally raw or steamed. Green beans, for instance, were cooked to death and had an oil slick on top, courtesy of the pork used to season them. The concept of al dente was totally foreign to our family. My dad and his brothers would have probably figured that Al was the brother of Blackie Dente (who played for the Red Sox, the Browns, the Senators, the White Sox, and the Indians, all in eight years).

Another nutritional problem—even though we didn’t consider it a problem—was the amount of food we packed away.

Which brings me to one of my fondest food memories. When I cropped tobacco, I worked one day a week for Mr. Cleo Lee. Because Mr. Lee was a friend of Daddy’s, I was invited to eat in the house with them instead of bringing my lunch, which was a work benefit then much like medical insurance is today. On the days when they barned tobacco, Mrs. Lee would get up very early and cook what we called dinner — the midday meal. It was usually one or two meats, two or three vegetables, biscuits and/or cornbread, and a cake or a pie. She’d leave the barn at 11:30 to go to the house to get it on the table. When Mr. Lee and I got there at noon, it was ready. Mr. and Mrs. Lee had both passed “robust” some years back and would have been given serious warnings by a doctor today. But in those days they just had good food and were glad of it. Mr. Lee worried, though, about the fact that I was built like a Popsicle stick. I can still hear him, after I had finished the first overloaded plate of food.

“Take out, boy. Take out. You’re going to be poor.”

So I took out. And enjoyed every bite of it.

There is a nearby restaurant that specializes in southern cooking. It’s cafeteria style, and on most days the lines are out the door and down the block. Almost none of the servers are from the southern United States; they are mostly Hispanic, but I’m betting that the cooks are from around here. The food is pretty much as I remember it from years ago.

But I don’t go there for lunch. The doctor says that I have to watch my salt.