Get It While It's Hot: Gas Station, Roadside, and Convenience Cuisine in the U.S. South

This essay collection examines the culture of roadside eating across the American South, focusing on the food found in gas stations, convenience stores, roadside stands, and improvised kitchens, none of which are conventional restaurants. Bringing together scholars, journalists, photographers, and food writers, the book considers these spaces not simply as places to eat, but as sites of community, labor, identity, and regional expression. 

The contributors explore the social role of roadside cuisine through a range of perspectives, from Southern literature and food media to questions of race, class, surveillance, and food access. Alongside discussions of fried chicken counters, barbecue trailers, and convenience-store cooking are interviews and firsthand accounts that document how these businesses operate within local economies and cultural traditions. 

The three editors are all professors of English at public universities in the South and they include essays from writers who range from folklorists and oral historians to farmers and a baker.

More cultural study than restaurant guide, the book offers a nuanced portrait of a largely overlooked food landscape and the communities that sustain it. 

Paperback.