At this time of year, when I was a kid and my school had let our for the summer, me and my dad would visit his hometown: Dunn, North Carolina. It's a little town, so even North Carolinians will ask, "Where's that?" and when I answer, "Harnett County," heads will nod and someone will say, "Ahh. Tobacco and Klan country."

Whenever we visited, we'd all go out to "Kim's All-You-Can-Eat BBQ," a one room, low-rent, boiling hot, "family style" restaurant that specialized in fried clams and the eponymous Bar-B-Q. That's what I ordered. I doubt anyone not from that part of the South would be familiar with the technique of diffing a six food deep pit, burning firewood in there until it's smoldering charcoal, tossing in a whole pig and burying it to cook for 24 hours, diffing it up, and finely shredding it with vinegar and hot sauce. I'd eat myself sick on the stuff...my sordid past.

Today's menu is an homage to Kim's All-You-Can-Eat BBQ , and to the founding on this date in 1934 of the key part of the labor movements that work so that we can enjoy food grown by family farmers instead of corporations and farm workers who aren't being poisoned by pesticides and herbicides. Back in the day, in its zeal to implement New Deal farm programs, the Roosevelt Administration caused the eviction of thousand of southern sharecropper families. Thus incensed, a handful of black and white farmers met in a schoolhouse in Arkansas and formed the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU). This union, which eventually folded in the SFL and then the CIO, was to become a powerful force in American labor, and would eventually be a prototype for Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers of America.