Is southern food too lowbrow?

“Just because I’m a farmer doesn’t mean I spend all my time feeding pigs,” said Mr. DeFelice, a natty, voluble fellow who raises 200 pigs here at Caw Caw Creek Farm in the softly forested hills north of Charleston, S.C. “That’s an absurd proposition.”…

Pork is still the definitive ingredient of Southern cooking, past and present. But the “lardcore” trend has now become a bigger movement embracing the entire Southern pantry.

“As an obsessive person, you realize that there is a better version of everything out there,” said Sean Brock, the Charleston chef whose restaurant Husk serves only food produced south of the Mason-Dixon line, from Georgia olive oil to Tennessee chocolate to capers made from locally foraged elderberries. Many Southern chefs are working along similar lines — Frank Stitt, Mike Lata, Andrea Reusing and Linton Hopkins are just a few — but Mr. Brock’s rigor has redefined what it means to cook like a Southerner today. Young chefs are joining in, learning butchery and fermentation, putting up chowchow and piccalilli, experimenting with wood ash to make their own hominy…

Today, purists believe, Southern cooking is too often represented by its worst elements: feedlot hams, cheap fried chicken and chains like Cracker Barrel.

“My mother didn’t cook like that, and my grandmother didn’t cook like that,” Mr. DeFelice said. “And if you want to come down here and talk about shrimp and grits, well, we’re tired of that, too. Southern cooking is a lot more interesting than people think.”