Fred Sauceman's Foodservice Journey

Although most consumers only experience the components of foodservice operations directly involved in the serving process, foodservice industry careers encompass everything from equipment manufacturing and kitchen design to business management and menu creation. The process of growing, transporting, and preparing food is a complex, multifaceted endeavor that requires millions of people to fulfill a variety of roles, including some that take place far away from a busy commercial kitchen. In our article on Appalachian food culture, we spoke with Appalachian food and culture author Fred Sauceman.

With stories about friends reuniting over a pig roast, a German restaurant in Shenandoah Valley whose recipes go back more than a century, and million-dollar deviled eggs, Sauceman's writing is as interesting and unexpected as the various turns in his career.

The Voice of Greeneville

"I started in radio when I was 15 years old in Greeneville, Tennessee," says Sauceman. "My mother had to drive me to work. I hosted pop-rock shows on Saturday and Sunday evenings, but the first thing I had to do was to put together and deliver a local newscast at 6 p.m. That involved calling all three funeral homes in town so that they could dictate obituaries to me over the phone. It was the best job imaginable for a young person."

Sauceman's journey continued with two small-town AM radio stations, both deeply connected to the community.

"At the first station where I worked, before the coming of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), we read every hospital admission and discharge over the air, as well as every birth," says Sauceman. "We even read real estate transfers. Working weekend nights got old after a couple of years, so I took a job at another radio station in town where I could work during the daytime, primarily. In addition to doing news, coordinating election coverage, conducting remote broadcasts, and recording commercials, I was a country disc jockey there, and I kept that job through college, until right before I started graduate school, when I went into television, doing field reporting and anchor work for the ABC affiliate in Kingsport, WKPT-TV – another job I absolutely loved. I worked in television while I was taking a full load in graduate school and teaching two sections of English composition as a graduate assistant at East Tennessee State University."

Sauceman later took a part-time assignment in American Greetings' Plus Mark's art department at Greeneville. He worked on the company's catalogues, packaging for boxed cards, ribbons and bows, and wrote copy for the character Strawberry Shortcake and her friends. Sauceman has a Bachelor of Arts in English and History and a Master of Arts in English at ETSU, where he headed up the Alumni Office for several years and the University Relations Office for 25.

"With my mother being diagnosed with three different kinds of dementia and my wife in end-stage kidney disease, I 'retired' at the end of 2012 and came back to work seven days later, part-time," says Sauceman. "I'm still in that capacity today, working through my old office and doing news every day on public radio station WETS-FM, which I had supervised as head of the University Relations office. So I have come full-circle, back in radio."

A Life in Food Work

Although Sauceman enjoyed his job in higher education administration, something was missing.

"Writing news releases, speeches for other people, and anonymous copy for publications wasn't enough," says Sauceman. "I wanted to make a lasting contribution to a field of study, as my colleagues on the faculty were doing. I aspired, from my earliest days as a student at the University of Tennessee, to be a writer. I took Honors English Composition at UT the first quarter of my freshman year, plagued by doubt. But when I got my first essay back, my thinking began to change."

Sauceman's professor was Dr. F. DeWolfe Miller, someone he describes as "one of the grand old men of the Department of English." Miller gave Sauceman the confidence he needed by doing one simple thing: "In the margin of that first paper, he wrote: 'Sauce, man. A+.' I've never forgotten that."

In 1996, after working at ETSU for 11 years, Sauceman took "Creative Non-Fiction" course taught by a professor at Columbia University who loved the characters he described and the stories he told – many of them from his days in small-town AM radio.

"The very next year, I embarked on a three-year project to document food and stories from ETSU, and that culminated in 2000 with the publication of Home and Away: A University Brings Food to the Table, a 6-pound book that took the top award in the state the next year from the Tennessee College Public Relations Association," says Sauceman. "Meanwhile, in 1998, my wife and I signed up to attend the very first Southern Foodways Symposium, under the auspices of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. My involvement in that organization and eventual service on its board of directors did more for my food-writing 'career' than I could ever have imagined. I met dozens of like-minded people who understood the role of food in understanding culture. Through the SFA, I made contacts that resulted in my very first book contract, which turned into a three-book series, through Mercer University Press in Macon, Georgia."

This first volume of the series went up against some big-name schools and was nationally recognized among university presses. Sauceman, who has now published five books with Mercer, also does editorial work for them.

"Now I get to help other writers get published, just as so many helped me along the way," says Sauceman. "SFA asked me to edit a volume of its Cornbread Nation book series, which I did in 2010. And the assignments just kept on coming."

Sauceman and his wife currently have a column in every issue of Blue Ridge Country magazine, which is published in Roanoke, Virginia, while Sauceman additionally writes for Smoky Mountain Living magazine, published in Waynesville, North Carolina. Once a month, he does a column for the Kingsport Times-News and the Johnson City Press newspapers called "Potluck," and on the first Thursday of every month, he hosts "Food with Fred" on WJHL-TV in Johnson City.

In the fall of 2017, Sauceman created a series he produces weekly for WETS-FM in Johnson City and WDVX in Knoxville called "Potluck Radio," using audio from interviews he's done over the years.

"Along the way, I got interested in producing documentary films and have done eight of them, on subjects ranging from red hot dogs in Southwest Virginia to the soft drink Dr. Enuf," says Sauceman. "Several years ago, I stopped updating my standard resume and created one devoted solely to food work. It is now 92 pages long. In partial 'retirement,' I now have more deadlines than ever, and I wouldn't have it any other way."