Emily Wallace Hits the Road

By: The Local Palate

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On the Road

For Emily Wallace, the road is about possibility. It presents the chance to discover something new around every bend, be it a country store stocked with Little Debbies and BC Powder or the “Guaranteed Worst in Town” peanuts. A born and bred North Carolinian and the art director and deputy editor for quarterly journal Southern Cultures, she canonizes the foods of the Southern road, in all their kitschy, diverse, delicious glory, in her first book, Road Sides. Organized alphabetically from A to Z and filled with Wallace’s trademark cheeky illustrations, it’s got a little something for everyone—an iconic New Orleans po’ boy, the ties between NASCAR and moonshine, the real story of Harland (better known as Colonel) Sanders. It’s not intended as a state-by-state guidebook—she figures plenty of those exist already—but rather an all-you-can-eat sampling of the myriad stories hiding in the everyday. Still, it serves as a handy resource for anyone eager to get a taste of the gems that dot Southern roads. Here, she shares a few of them.