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PAUL:

She walked into Cat Head Distillery expecting a gin tasting and left convinced she'd witnessed something Mississippi had quietly been doing all along — using blues, soul, and shared history to dissolve the distance between people. Hey, it's Paul Wolf with the front row seat to conversations on culture from Jackson, Mississippi. We call our podcast Soul Sessions. It's the people, places, and events that make the City With Soul shine. Our guest today is a chef, farmer, and writer who covers food and Southern culture for Local Palate magazine out of Charleston. On today's show, Jasmine Michel brings an outsider's eyes to Jackson — fresh off the JXN Food & Wine Festival — and what she found here quietly challenged everything her nervous system had been trained to expect from the Deep South. She came in as an East Coast girl with East Coast assumptions, and left with a list of Mississippi cities she was already planning to come back for. I'll be honest — I had no idea just how deep her roots in food actually went. Turns out, I was only scratching the surface.

I don't guess I realized that you were a chef as well.

JASMINE:

Yeah, yep, yep. went to school. I went to the French Culinary Institute before they were, well, I think right at the cusp of when they turned into the International Culinary Center. But now the school doesn't even exist anymore, but that was in New York. And I fell in love with French baking and pastry. And then I fell in love with farming. And then I transitioned to being a full farm to table chef and sort writing my experiences out that didn't feel necessarily a part of the standard in food. It was kind of before this awakening and reconciling and recognition that Black and brown women in food are currently having.

I was talking to Chef Hunter Evans, who is one of the keynote chefs at this past Jackson Food and Wine Festival. And one of the questions I asked him was, what do you think about the, how has women in food impacted food culture? Because I've just been so curious about, you know, there's just been so many women that just blew my mind that I met in Mississippi who are such hard workers and who work in the industry and who work in labor. And his answer was so endearing. He was just like, I don't think women get enough credit in the food industry, specifically black women. And he shouted out his own chef at the Mayflower, Quineeka, and I got to visit her and when I asked her what her favorite Southern ingredient is, she said, cook with a lot of soul. And I was just like, that is Mississippi in a nutshell if I ever said that.

PAUL:

You were here this past weekend in Jackson, Mississippi for Jackson food and wine with the local palette, who is an amazing presenter of these festivals all over the country. We're so fortunate. Local palette is a part of our festival here too. And you and I had a conversation on that Sunday at brunch and the conversation really moved me so much that I thought we've got to have you on. We've got to have you talk more about your passion and what you saw and what you learned, but, first of all, Jackson food and wine briefly. What did you think?

JASMINE:

It was insane. I mean, I'm coming off of the Charleston Food and Wine Festival, which is massive and huge and spectacular. And so I think I was telling myself that I was gonna come to a much smaller event and, you know, try to bring that big festival event energy as if I was bringing it to Jackson and Jackson showed me out. Jackson, Jackson just showed up and then some. It was overwhelming. It was beautiful. Just there was a general sense of intimacy kind of floating around amongst attendees and chefs and everyone pouring wine and kind of just, I don't know, wasn't, know, festivals can sometimes feel manic and it was just so relaxed and so

fun and energized and that feeling I realized was like a little look into kind of the culture I think of Mississippi. I'm like, this isn't something that's isolated. This isn't something that's like special to this weekend. I think it's something that occurs often amongst Mississippi communities.

PAUL:

And I think that was one of the points of our conversation. The conversation that really moved me is that you as an outsider from Durham, North Carolina, is that right? Yeah. You saw that you just as a visitor to Jackson for the first time over a couple of days time, experience what we hope that everyone experiences when they come here. And frankly, what we hope people who live here can experience in their daily lives. You've said you didn't necessarily expect a certain thing and you were, you were wowed. So unpack that a little for me and tell me more about what you indeed found when you came to Jackson, Mississippi.

JASMINE:

Well, I should say that I'm such an East Coast girl. when you are a diehard East, at a certain point it's laziness. Like at a certain point we remain on the East Coast, cause it's just easy. But my knowledge of the South can be very limited to the archetypes that live in the Carolinas and.

JASMINE:

I'm also a Florida girl. I was born and raised in Southern Florida. you know, there's an appreciation for the different kinds of cultural hubs that exist in the South. But when it comes to the deep South, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, I had no experience outside of what the general population receives in education, I mean, cheapens personality and the spirit that Mississippi is. there's no surprise or shock that the South can be depicted in a particular way. And the South is healing from a lot of wounds, and the South is also just the biggest hub of culture for the nation, but also like globally. And so I just, didn't go in with any expectation and no assumption about anything, but maybe some assumption that it could have been stereotypical. But as soon as I landed, there's definitely a warmth and a presence that you feel. I think it's something that I thought again was isolated to the person and it was just amongst everybody.

It was amongst white folks and black folks, chefs, creatives, the people attending the festival, the people I got to meet around the festival, workers. yeah, I think, and when I spoke to people individually, just kind of talking story, everyone said relatively the same thing that Mississippi is known for its hospitality and its soul. And the first couple of times I heard it, again, I kind of just filtered it through general conversation years, but as my days went on, it was definitely deepening. It was definitely being seen more and more. It's just, I don't know. the South, we strike up conversations so particular, like in a particular way. And, everyone, every area has this kind of colder parts and Mississippi is just a warmer part. It's a warmer part of those. And it's funny because my standard is that my standard is you can walk up to a woman you don't know when she's your auntie. You walk up to an uncle you don't know and he's your uncle. You, can kind of strike up conversation. That's kind of my standard of, connecting to people and relating to people. I was just shocked that I almost, I received like such a different dialect. And it was like a dialect of a language I know, but like a dialect I didn't even know existed sort of thing. And so I think that was really charming and pleasant and happy. And everyone kind of said, again, relatively the same thing of that we're known for our hospitality. And a lot of people probably have really harsh stereotypes about the South.

It was great to experience.

PAUL:

And a lot of times those of us who live here and who have lived here our whole lives, we don't necessarily see it from an outsider's perspective, that outsider looking in and telling us who we are. And I think what I hear you saying is we're, we're pretty darn fantastic.

JASMINE:

Yeah, yeah, Mississippi is a fantastic place to visit. And again, I was just in Jackson, so I could just imagine other areas too below Oxford, like by the end of my time there, I knew more cities than I would typically when you visit one city or like lodged in there. Like I left with plenty of stories and plenty of areas to go and visit.

PAUL

Well, I'll ask you to put on a little bit of a sociology psychology hat here. I don't want to put any pressure on you, but why is it that you think we sometimes can't see that ourselves? What is it about it? What's the block?

JASMINE:

Yeah. I think in general, one, we are our nervous system and typically our nervous system reflects our environment. And two, those nervous systems that we have and function off of create our belief system. And our belief system can be something that we refuse to walk without. It makes us more judgmental and not as tolerant to curiosity and others because that difference will be met with fear it's sad when you see how simple it is to connect to other people. And when you see how easy it is, like the food festival, like talking, like sharing, like eating. And when you see that it has become so hard, it reiterates kind of how lodged we are in our own belief systems and our own survival, head spaces. And yeah, I think it's a bit outdated and it's so pleasant to be kind of I think that's the I think that's the feeling ⁓ as well that I got is that it is overwhelmingly like pleasant to receive that being lifted from you that you don't have to fight to connect that you don't have to feel burdensome and it's you're not it's not going to kill you to connect and to disconnect from other things.

PAUL:

You shared an anecdote with me about coming into the tasting at Cathead Distillery on Friday and just the way that, that Austin and Richard and Maeve and Jen presented to you. wish you would share that with our listeners and recount how you felt and the experience that you had there at Cathead.

JASMINE:

If I can remember correctly, I think I was talking about that. I typically don't frequent distilleries and I don't know. I've never, it's never been a place that I often saw black people or aspects of culture or in a way that intersects, outside of dominant culture and

I think that was another thing that was surprising because everyone at Cathead was so, like I said, just passionate and soulful and a try hard either, like something that everyone was raised with and whoever raised them was raised with it as well. Yeah, it was just so fun. Everyone was just talking about the blues and talking about soulful things I think it brought a feeling of warmth that it's an experience that I see people in Mississippi have with each other that I think a lot of places in the south lack. It's that soul and that music and that spirit that tethers everybody to even if it's a painful history, we're upholding it together. Like it's a way of like respecting it, acknowledging it, uplifting it, empowering it. And it's refreshing to see more white people do that. And I didn't expect that in Mississippi. Hopefully I was not expecting white people to be calling out the blues and calling out such spirited and deep and soulful stories and connection to not just being raised in a state, but being raised by the land and the law of the land and the law of the people. And yeah, somewhere in that race becomes less systemic and more together, deconstructed in a more healing way that I can see if other places in the South who might not be there yet got there, that collective healing of the South would take place. So yeah, all of that from a little gin taste. Yeah.

PAUL:

That's actually that's beautiful. That's really beautiful. Jasmine, if you're telling the story of Jackson, what is your takeaway? What is the story you're going to tell?

JASMINE:

Jackson has its stuff together. Jackson has really great things to offer. And I think that could be said for a lot of places, like a great restaurant to go to or a great hotel to stay at, but Jackson isn't just that. There's, it's just, it's something deeper. It's something that is happening in the circuits underground where every place I visited, somebody else was talking about the other place I just went to as if they were family. And I was like, I'm talking, and it was just, and again, that also stems from the food industry too and the agricultural history. And Mississippi has a way of, intacting all of them together and in a really beautiful and seamless way that others might find hard to do because again, we're just like lodged in our belief systems.

So if I had to tell somebody about Jackson, I think it would, I would have to say a very long-winded explanation. It's, it's, and I also don't think that people would realize that it runs with the big dogs like Louisiana and NOLA, it runs with places like that, like the deep places in Texas that you go there for culture, you go there for storytelling, you go there for lore, you go there for food. And yeah, I was surprised that Mississippi just served me that and then some. I've loved the conversation that we had. It's just such a true perspective of somebody visiting there's land, there's low country, there's the Delta and it's to understand those areas more by experience just brings so much togetherness, I think, to my overall belief system, dare I say, of the South. So now I can't imagine it without Mississippi and Jackson.

PAUL:

That is Jasmine Michel, whose story is about what happens when you let curiosity override your nervous system — when you stop filtering the world through what you already believe and let a place actually land on you. She came to Jackson with the honesty to admit she had assumptions, and left with something she called a dialect of a language she already knew. Her writing on food, farming, and Southern culture appears regularly in Local Palate magazine, where she covers the stories and people shaping how the South eats and who gets credit for it. We'll have links in our show notes to Local Palate at visitjackson.com/soulsessions.

This podcast is produced by Visit Jackson, the destination organization for Mississippi's capital city. Our executive producers are Jonathan Pettus and Dr. Ricky Thigpen, and I'm our managing editor. There's always something great going on in Jackson, and we keep up with it at visitjackson.com.

I'm Paul Wolf, and you've been listening to Soul Sessions.

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