Beaufort County Community College student Rhett Alligood admits he doesn’t like to eat oysters but he does appreciate their importance to eastern North Carolina.

That’s why Alligood along with fellow students Sharon Equils and Rebecca Hudson chose to write about oysters in the 2014 edition of Life on the Pamlico, BCCC’s annual, online cultural history magazine.

The magazine is a project of BCCC’s Cultural Studies class under the direction of English Instructor Suzanne Stotesbury with video and design by Academic Support Center Director James Casey.

“When you think about eastern North Carolina, you think about oysters,” Alligood said. “Just like barbecue, oysters provide the background for social gatherings and harvesting oysters is a way of life for many people in the region.”

Oysters are one of the traditional eastern North Carolina foods featured in this year’s edition of Life on the Pamlico, recently published on the BCCC website. The magazine also includes articles about wild game, barbecue and pick pickin’s. Students also tapped their family and friends to provide detailed recipes for molasses, cheese biscuits, bread pudding, glazed ham, deviled eggs, chicken and pastry and other eastern North Carolina favorites.

“Food is a defining quality in the southeastern part of the United States,” Stotesbury said. “Traditions, family and food all go hand-in-hand in eastern North Carolina.”

Students in Stotesbury’s class spent Spring 2014 Semester learning research and interviewing skills. They contributed stories of local cultural interest to the magazine by incorporating multiple interviews and article-writing methods learned over the course of the semester, according to Stotesbury.

And in the process, the students and their instructor also enjoyed their research, she said.

“By focusing on food for the 2014 edition, we had the best time,” Stotesbury said. “All we did was talk about food, look at food and taste food and we learned a lot of things we hadn’t known before.”

The 2014 edition of Life on the Pamlico includes an expanded selection of videos, edited by Casey, that were first incorporated into the publication last year.

“There are more videos this year with more interviews,” Stotesbury said. “And we’re looking forward to that getting better in the future.”

Viewers can watch cheese biscuits, collards, molasses, pound cake and shrimp and grits being made as well as a discussion of the proper way to barbecue a pig by Charles Baker of Washington’s Boss Hog’s restaurant.

To read the 2014 edition of Life on the Pamlico, visit ciranceast.beaufortccc.edu/BCCC/lifeonpamlico.htm. From there, readers can link to the videos that accompany the magazine.