When I lived in Tampa, Fla., for a year in the late 1980s, I found and fell in love with the PoFolks restaurant chain.

The food and atmosphere are much like what you’ll find at Bob Evans, Cracker Barrel or similar chains — simple country cookin’ for a reasonable price, served in a place that feels like home. It’s the kind of place where the “poor folks” used to eat on special occasions, if they had some disposable income.

I loved PoFolks so much that I chose it as my dining spot a few years ago in Greensboro, N.C., even though I was there for work and could have used my expense account to eat much higher on the hog.

My mind drifted to PoFolks just now as I read a story at National Public Radio that mentioned swamp cabbage. It’s one of those dishes, like mudbugs in my wife’s home state of Louisiana, that poor Americans ate to survive but that the rich lately have embraced as their own. The rich just give their foods highfalutin names like hearts of palm or arugula, which is a fancy word for the leafy green dish most Southerners used to know as rocket.

To hear NPR tell it, we all may be rocket eaters again soon. Floridians are leading the way with a return to their swamp-cabbage roots.

That’s not a bad thing, if you ask me. Too many Americans, the ones in our household included, have been spoiled over the past several decades. Our sins of consumerism are many.

We eat out regularly — and at places that serve steak and lobster instead of hamburgers and fish sticks. We live in homes that stretch our budgets to the last penny and own two cars per family, and we worship before altars to electronics in our homes and our cars.

We pay small monthly fortunes to surf the Internet, watch television, and talk/text on the phone. We hire music tutors for our kids. We entertain ourselves at movie theaters and don’t even flinch when asked to pay their outrageous prices for tickets and refreshments. We take multiple vacations per year and charge them to our credit cards. And we don’t save money.

That list is off the top of my head and mostly from personal experience. It could easily be twice as long. The point is that we have forgotten what it means to live within our means. Put another way, we have forgotten what it really means to be a redneck.

“Redneck is not a bad thing, like most people think it is,” one man told NPR. “Rednecks are people who are hard-working people. They go out and bust their butts to do their job, and on the weekends, they go party.” And by “party” he means eating swamp cabbage at the local festival.

That is redneck enlightenment, and all of us need more of it.