2023 John Egerton Prize Winner: Sadé Meeks
The Southern Foodways Alliance is pleased to award Sadé Meeks the 2023 John Egerton Prize.
Sadé Meeks is a registered dietitian working to bridge the gap between nutrition and culture for vulnerable populations living in the South. She wants her work to empower underserved populations to manage their health proactively with education and good food, particularly the people in her home community of Jackson, Mississippi.
Inspired by her grandmother, who had eight children and grew everything she needed to feed them in her home garden, Meeks began to rethink the traditional food narratives she’d been taught. She realized her grandmother’s fond memories of growing food could be a means of communicating information about health and nutrition in a positive way, through memory and story. Meeks founded a nonprofit, Growing Resilience in the South (GRITS), to do just that.
She started teaching nutrition using community narratives and has found it an effective way to educate. GRITS is not only a nutrition and food advocacy organization, but it also provides affordable and free access to counseling services from registered dietitians. Additionally, they host a popular book club. Their first group read was Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America by Psyche A. Williams-Forson. The book won the 2023 James Beard Foundation Book Award in Food Issues & Advocacy.
The John Egerton Prize, endowed by SFA member contributions, awards $5,000 each year. To share the story of the Egerton Prize winner, SFA also produces a film. The 2023 film, Sadé Meeks, directed by Brittny Miller, premiered on October 22 via a partnership with the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tennessee. (John Egerton, a founder of the SFA, was also a founder of the Southern Festival of Books.) The film’s second public screening was at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Meeks’ home community of Jackson, Mississippi.
John Egerton Prize winners live or work in the American South, exhibit exceptional creativity, apply the rubric of food and drink to their work, and show the potential to make a genuine difference in one or more fields.
Photo credit: Drew Dempsey/Tell Agency
