The Southern Charm of Amanda Mull
The Southern Charm of Amanda Mull
The Atlantic reporter on growing up in Georgia, southern delicacies and loving logistics
VANCOUVER – For a brief moment, before he graduated, before he really knew what he wanted to do for a living, my university roommate Mikey briefly flirted with the idea of going into supply-chain management. Exactly what that meant, I had no idea, but Mikey said there was money to be made. In hindsight, he might’ve been onto something. While the very idea of a supply chain makes my eyes heavier than a double-shot of ZzzQuil, the pandemic underscored the importance of both the supply chain and logistics in general, as everything from cars to microchips became backlogged. Nobody tracked these disruptions with quite the same fervor as Amanda Mull. Though technically a Health Reporter for The Atlantic, Amanda’s work far exceeds the beat’s typical boundaries, spanning everything from COVID-induced supply shortages to the hard truth about hard seltzers (spoiler: they are bad), and why it’s so hard to find a chic floor lamp. Seriously, this is service journalism at its finest. I’ve been keen to chat with Amanda for a while and I was so happy when she agreed to my request. I could’ve chatted with her for at least another hour but am happy to leave it with our robust conversation which touched on: majoring in magazines, the imposition of consumerism, growing up in the great state of Georgia, what TikTok gets wrong about Appalachia and an in-depth discussion of southern delicacies.
ES: I didn’t realize The Atlantic divides things between news and ideas…
AM: We have a lot of different verticals. Technically, I’m a health writer and I work on the Science, Tech, and Health desk. But we have Politics, we have Culture… and there are divisions within those larger desks. Science, Tech, and Health are all theoretically three different desks. And then we have an Ideas section where what’s done is more opinion-oriented, and less reported… It gets difficult to parse these things once you get into magazines. At a publication like ours, everything will be idea-driven, and point-of-view-driven. Keeping those two things separate, especially when we’re on similar stories, is a feat of administration.
ES: My friend Michelle once tweeted “Retweet if you hate logistics” and it's become somewhat of a guiding principle in our lives. We hate logistics and yet they are unavoidable.
AM: Logistics is one of my favourite things to write about because it’s a topic that sounds dry but undergirds everything in our lives… I think that people are generally hungry for information that helps them understand the way they experience life… Commuting to work, or keeping a home, raising kids, whatever… If you can help people figure out themselves better and their existence within that system better, then I think there’s a huge audience waiting for you... Because we live in a consumer system and it’s not frequently discussed as such. Our politics is discussed, our economy is discussed, our culture is discussed. But underneath all that, there is the consumer system, which is how we orient so much of our lives.
ES: That reminds me of [Succession patriarch] Logan Roy’s speech about “What is a market?” and that he basically sees humans as market points.
AM: I’m a big Succession fan and, in that scene, you get a reminder of how all the people who make decisions about the products and services we interact with every day sort of think of us.
ES: It goes back to a central tenet of journalism - speaking truth to power. And economic systems are some of the most powerful systems we have.
AM: A big thing for me is that consumerism is inherently individualistic. It seeks to make every individual’s decisions around how they live their lives a transaction, whether it’s with companies, or with markets. Seeing that as a system imposed on us, and not the natural order of things, might make us less individualistic, and more community-minded... Are you capable of solving all of your own problems with only the current constellation of products and services available to you? Or are there other ways of solving these problems?
ES: It’s really interesting that you’re technically a health reporter, especially given how COVID increased demand for those types of files.
AM: When I got recruited to The Atlantic five years ago Paul Bisceglio, who’s my current editor, reached out to me and… I remember thinking “I’m not a health reporter.” I had worked in the fashion industry for 10 years, it was basically my entire professional background at that point. I didn’t know if it would be a good fit… I didn’t want to write a bunch of hard and fast science stories. But I talked to Paul and his idea was that health is a capacious topic. There are a lot of things that influence human health and well-being, and how we conceptualize those two ideas.
For the first year and a bit, I did some hard health stories. I had to learn how to read scientific studies, I had to learn how to find academic and scientific sources because it wasn’t my background. I also did a lot of ‘softer’ health stuff. Then the pandemic hit and everyone was forced to become a hard-fast health writer… I did that for a while because it was a crisis and we needed a lot of stories written about the different aspects of what was happening during the pandemic. But I was really relieved to step away from that when the need was a bit less.
ES: Were there any specific stories you wrote during that period of the pandemic that felt like ‘Oh, this is allowing me to shift away from hard-fast health?’
AM: I wrote some things about the logistics industry and labour amid a crisis, a pandemic, and situations in which workers are in dire straits, and those felt like a return to my central beat, as I see it. My editor and I talk about how, if you’re writing about consumerism and consumer culture, there are “front-of-house” stories and “back-of-house” stories. Front-of-house is going to be about how an individual consumer experiences a trend or type of business, some phenomenon that is happening within the consumer-facing industry. Back-of-house stories are how the hidden parts of the consumer industry function. Retail workers, logistics workers, people in warehouses, and people in overseas manufacturing. What are the hidden systems that create these front-of-house experiences?
There was one story I did, where the upshot was that the supply chain is fucked up because the supply chain is made of people, and people are having a hard time with COVID. They’re working under insane constraints and a series of different national laws across the supply chain… Being able to write about the pandemic through that lens felt like I was getting back onto familiar ground.
ES: Does it feel like that sort of pandemic-driven journalism is winding down? You just wrote about the resurgence of old handbags, which is a bit of a shift in tone.
AM: All of the stories I write right now have some element of “This trend or phenomenon is accelerated or galvanized by the pandemic.” I wrote an article recently about super-cushy comfortable shoes as an enduring trend. There was an element in that, where I think the pandemic was the set of circumstances that turned a lot of people towards those types of shoes. They had been trendy for a while but there was a phenomenon in the pandemic that a lot of people suddenly changed their levels of physical activity, whether that was suddenly staying at home and not walking around as much and not going to the gym, or being stuck at home and starting a new exercise routine, or simply being stuck at home and spending all their time in bare feet on hard floors.
ES: We must remember that Americans love wearing shoes indoors.
AM: Which is a weird thing.
ES: So weird! I’m on board with a lot of American culture but that one has always been a sticking point.
AM: It strikes me as really strange too. I’m a no-shoes-in-the-house person, I think the rest of the world is correct on that and we have it wrong.
ES: Did you always want to be a journalist? You mentioned that you’ve had a somewhat non-linear path.
AM: I wouldn’t say I always necessarily wanted to be a journalist. I have always wanted to be a writer… Journalism started to make sense to me as I became aware of the realities of writing when I was a teenager, a lot of journalists come from wealthy families and my family is average. I’m from suburban Atlanta. It wasn’t a situation where I wanted to do some heady, high-minded thing, even if I couldn’t make a living off of it. Like, no, I need to pay a bill. All of them, actually. Laughs. There’s no generational wealth safety net to catch me if I get sick of freelancing one month or something. I realized that journalist is a job, there were places I could get hired to do it and draw a paycheque. It’s not a great paycheque but there is a system of normal employment that exists…
ES: It’s a profession.
AM: Yeah, whereas if you’re going to be a novelist that’s a whole different set of professional circumstances, especially when you’re starting out. There’s no novelist job you can get hired for and still get health insurance… I did go to journalism school. I have a Magazine Journalism degree which is hilarious.
ES: I didn’t know that was an option but that’s great.
AM: I went to the University of Georgia and they have a huge journalism school. They give out the Peabody Awards.
ES: Was university a non-negotiable for you? Like did your parents expect you to do it?
AM: It felt sort of natural, sort of non-negotiable. Both of my parents went to college, my dad went to Georgia and my mom went to Auburn. It was what you did.
I grew up in an area that was middle-class but affluent. Most people’s parents had gone to college and were lawyers or worked at IBM or Coca-Cola… So it was expected that all of us would go to college. A really high percentage of kids I went to high school with did. I think my dad held out hope that I would be a lawyer. I was on debate team in high school and I was good at stuff like that.
ES: Was your dad a lawyer?
AM: No, both of my parents worked for social security their entire careers. They worked in the social safety net which is probably not unrelated to my general disposition about things.
My family history is sort of interesting. My parents’ parents, and their grandparents, were very working-class Southerners. One grandpa sold menswear door-to-door, another was a baker. My maternal grandmother worked for the railroad. She was in the Brotherhood of Railroad Clerks and had a union job. Very sort of normal, working-class mid-century Southern jobs. My parent’s families were able to put both of them into public colleges. And I think it was the expectation that “We have pulled ourselves up, as a family, to a certain extent, and we are supposed to maintain that now.” Hold onto it as hard as we can. I think my dad would’ve seen me becoming a lawyer or getting a graduate degree as a continuation of that trajectory but I just didn’t want to go to law school. Laughs.
ES: Sorry dad, we’re stopping at Magazine Journalism.
AM: And don’t get me wrong, my dad was extremely proud of the career that I’ve built for myself.
ES: My parents never put much pressure or thought into what I was going to do for a career. The best advice they gave me was don’t go into journalism and I clearly ignored that.
Does your family have deep roots in the Atlanta area? Or is it all across the South?
AM: I was born and raised in Marietta, GA which is a big suburb of Atlanta. My dad was technically born in Tennessee, which gives you a good idea of my family’s trajectory, honestly. He was born in Copper Hill, TN, in the infirmary of the Tennessee Copper Company. His family lived in extreme north Georgia at the time. Very rural. Blue Ridge Mountains, the Foothills of the Appalachian-type area. The closest medical facility that could birth a baby was the company town infirmary, so that’s how he was born in Tennessee.
My dad passed away in December but the trajectory of his life is fascinating. He was born in 1947. That’s a very particular way to start life.
ES: Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.
AM: Thank you. He grew up in Macon, GA, which is sort of the dead center of the state, in a suburban house. He went to high school and college. I don’t think either of his parents went to college. And my mom is from Kentucky. She moved to Atlanta when she was 8 because her dad died suddenly. She and my grandmother moved in with my grandmother’s sister, who had married well and was building a big house in Buckhead, which is a very swanky part of Atlanta… Aunt Ginny and her husband changed the plans of the house and built a little apartment in it for my mom and grandmother because grandpa had been the breadwinner and they didn’t know what to do at that point, so they moved in.
This is a long way to say both of my parents grew up in Georgia, I guess.
ES: I appreciate that you have a good understanding of your family’s history, as someone who has a lot of question marks around family. Do you like living in the South? I know you were just back there.
AM: Yeah, especially over the past couple of months after my dad passed. I feel extremely lucky to have the relationship with my family that I do. And I’ve always felt lucky but this sort of underlined it, I think, for me.
There are things I definitely miss about it. I love Atlanta, I love Georgia, I love the South. I think those are places that are misunderstood by a lot of people. And of course, places that are highly complicated. Highly fractious places. But I think the South is very American in a way that people from other parts of the country are uncomfortable with because the acknowledgment of the South as incredibly American requires people from other parts of the country to reckon with the things they would prefer to believe are inherently Southern and don’t happen anywhere else.
ES: It would require them to change the way they conceptualize America on the whole.
AM: And their role in it, and the role that people around them have. It requires them to feel implicated in things they believe were the province of other people. I think that’s a truer way to view the country and to view the South. But it’s a way that makes people from other parts of the country uncomfortable. Especially white people from other parts of the country, let’s be specific.
ES: Have you had a boiled peanut? This is the main reason I want to go to the South.
AM: Laughs. I have had boiled peanuts. I’m not really into them but a lot of people love them. Have you ever had one?
ES: No, I read about them once and have pretty much been chasing the dream of them ever since. I don’t know if I would even like it, but I need to find out.
AM: They’re interesting. I haven’t had one since I was a kid because I decided I didn’t like them and never went back. I’d be interested to try one now, I bet I would like it better. You really understand why people say “Peanuts are not nuts, they are legumes,” when you boil that shit, it really brings out the legume-ness of peanuts…
I remember we used to get boiled peanuts on the drive out to Athens, GA, which is where the University of Georgia is. It’s an hour and a half, two hours from Atlanta depending on which part you’re coming from. We would drive out there for football games. The drive is monotonous, it’s all mostly on one road, and I remember there would be a guy…
ES: I like that this is beginning with a guy.
AM: A lot of stories in the South start with a guy by the side of the road. But.. there was a guy with an old pickup truck, who used to have this big handpainted sign. BOILED PEANUTS. And you could stop and buy a sack of boiled peanuts from him… That’s sort of the inherent way to consume boiled peanuts. You need to buy them from Some Guy. They’re not a thing that exists in more structured dining experiences. Laughs. You buy them in the gas station parking lot or on the side of the road. It’s a really Southern experience, the informal economy of it all.
ES: Were you someone who did peanuts in Coca-Cola?
AM: Peanuts in Coca-Cola is really good. If you want to do it right you need to put it in RC Cola… I don’t know if that exists in Canada.
ES: Canada has RC Cola, but mostly in the east. Not where I live.
AM: The super traditional way is to get a sleeve of roasted salted peanuts at the gas station, and a bottle or can of your select soft drink. Drink some of the soda off and then dump the peanuts in there. It’s like a really good, salty-sweet type of thing. It really works, in a way that it shouldn’t. It’s more than the sum of its parts. One of the things that’s fascinating about it for me is that it works on a functional level for the time it became popular. Cars then didn’t have cup holders, they didn’t have a lot of space to sit things or hold stuff. Basically, if you were going to have a drink and a snack it all needed to go in one hand.
ES: Once again logistics enters the chat.
AM: People innovate according to their circumstances, you know? If you’re hungry and in transit, you don’t have time to stop. Put it all in one hand.
ES: What would you say is your favourite Southern delicacy?
AM: Man, this is so hard… my favourite is really good pulled pork with a really sharp vinegary sauce on it. I remember my first week at college, in Athens, I was rooming with a girl who I went to high school with. She was from Metro Atlanta but her family was from New York and some of them lived in Colorado. She was Jewish and had grown up in Metro Atlanta but her family was not culturally Southern. She did not have the Southern background that I did, and that was pretty common. I grew up with a lot of people whose parents were from New Jersey or Michigan.
ES: They came down for work or whatever.
AM: Yeah, Atlanta doubled in population in the 90s because so many people moved in. Nice weather, lower taxes. A lot of corporate entities moved their North American headquarters there.
ES: Was a lot of that after the Olympics?
AM: It started before the Olympics. The census that goes from the early 90s to the end of the decade shows Atlanta literally doubled in population. So you get a lot of people from outside the region, who were mostly raised there, or maybe even born there, but their family doesn’t have the Southern food traditions.
Anyways, my roommate and I were up at college. And there’s an outpost there of a small Georgia chain called Fresh Air Barbecue that I’m familiar with because there’s one in Macon. So I said, “Why don’t we go up there, and get some dinner?” I had been wanting to go since we moved. Fresh Air Babecue’s pulled pork is fine, but their sauce is mouth-puckering. It has so much vinegar, it is so sharp. It cuts the fat of the pulled pork. To me, it is perfect. I am constantly in search of a barbecue that is that inhospitable to your mouth…
I took her out there and told her to get the pulled pork. I wasn’t really thinking about it. I was 18 years old and had only been there with my family. She took one bite and I thought she was going to fall off of her chair. I was like “What’s wrong?” And she said, “What the fuck is this sauce?” Laughs. You can get a bit of vinegary sauce up here in New York City, it’s more common than when I moved here.
ES: Is that something you’d buy at a specialty store?
AM: I don’t know if you can buy it bottled. You have to go to a barbecue place. The interesting thing is, barbecue is very common in the South but not everyone makes it… It is very much a thing that, for a lot of people, you go buy. It’s such a work and time-intensive process. It is not prepared in all homes.
ES: You’re right. I always equate it with home cooking because it’s a labour of love…
AM: It is a labour of love for a lot of people. Usually, if there’s a barbecue spot, it’s powered by whoever the pit master is. Like, there are a lot of places that are Some-Guy’s-Name Barbecue. My favourite place back home was, for a long time, called Sam & Dave’s Barbecue. But then Sam and Dave had a falling out. Dave went and started his own place and Sam started his own.
ES: Welcome to Sam and not Dave’s.
AM: Dave is no longer affiliated. But that’s a very classic way for this type of market to happen. It’s just a guy who has spent time in his own backyard learning how to do this. And then he opens a business and it’s just a one-off. There aren’t a lot of huge chains or regional chains. The good places are hard to franchise because you just need the guy. It’s an inherently self-contained thing… Which I think is part of its pleasure. To me, it’s closely related to understanding what you’re eating.
ES: You mentioned the Appalachians. TikTok tells me I need to be afraid of any noises I might hear out there.
AM: It depends on where you are. Like, there are a lot of animals out there… It’s one of the wilder parts of America. I think part of it is Deliverance-esque stereotypes. Southerners being unpredictable or violent, sub-human… The labour history of Appalachia is interesting to me because you see how these stereotypes are created because it’s beneficial for corporate interests that own mining or manufacturing companies in Appalachia to paint people there as savages or inherently dangerous and in need of oversight. I think a lot of stereotypes about the region come from that extractive period… But then it’s the wilderness in parts, and the wildness is inherently terrifying in several ways. Life there is sort of responsive to a different set of rules than places that are densely packed with humans.
ES: Do you see yourself moving back to the South at some point?
AM: I go back and forth about that. I’ve lived in New York City for 12 years, and I feel really at home here. I’ve been lucky to end up with a good support structure, a good circle of friends, a good life here. But the South is home for me. There’s the idea that if you’ve lived in New York for ten years you’re a New Yorker. I can’t see myself subscribing to that. I live in New York, I love New York, but I’m a Southerner… That is a part of my identity that I don’t see ever becoming subordinate to other options… It would be impossible for me to live in all the places that I love because I have found so many. One of them is always going to have to be where I don’t live.
ES: Again, a matter of logistics.
AM: Yeah. I wish I could be in both places at once.
Amanda Mull is a reporter for The Atlantic and a big fan of the Georgia Bulldogs. She lives in New York City.