A meat-and-three is one meat, three vegetables, cornbread and tea, priced so somebody working nearby can eat there every day. It is specific to this part of the South and it is disappearing, and the reasons are boring rather than tragic. That is why they do not get written about.
Commercial rent is the first reason. The second is structural: the model runs on volume at thin margin, and volume requires a lunch crowd that works within a few blocks. A meaningful share of that crowd now works somewhere else, or at a kitchen table, and has since 2020.
What survives tends to survive because the family owns the building outright, or because somebody is working for considerably less than their labor is worth and has decided that is an acceptable trade. Both of those are finite.
The cooking itself deserves better attention than it usually gets. The vegetable side of a meat-and-three steam table is doing something technically real: holding twelve preparations at temperature for three hours without any of them collapsing. That is harder than most restaurant cooking and it gets none of the credit. Turnip greens that have not gone gray. Corn that has not gone to sugar water. Somebody is making judgment calls all morning.
There is also a version of this story that is about who cooked this food first and who gets credited for it now, and I do not intend to write around it.
This piece starts with the places that have closed in the last five years, because the closings tell you what the survivors are up against.