Participation Type
Paper
Session Title
Session 1.12 Food, Culture, and Representation in Appalachia
Presentation #1 Title
“'Our blood must have been briny as the Dead Sea:' Reclaiming Mountain Taste in Michael McFee’s Poetry”
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
This paper examines how Appalachian poet Michael McFee captures the intimacy and shared understanding of food in a social context. In many ways the kinds of food that particular groups consume comes to represent that group, sending important messages about class and one’s place in the hierarchy that defines the elusive concept of “good taste.” Since the turn of the century Appalachian people have been associated with “lowly” foods like leather britches, creasy greens, and ramps. In recent years, mountain dishes have been venerated by foodies across the country, including Martha Stewart. But before this newfound interest in what was once considered the food of heathen hillbillies, mountain writers were exonerating Appalachian cuisine in their fiction and poetry from the mid-twentieth century onward. In Michael McFee’s contemporary poetry, the food he depicts is far more modern than the food illustrated in mid-century texts, yet the approach he takes is a similar one. For example, instead of lamenting the fact that his family ate saltine crackers and picnicked at a roadside table, he celebrates it, as when the speaker of “Roadside Table” explains that “Tourists driving by us might have laughed / at this simple mountain clan ... but they’d have been wrong; it was pure holiday / to linger in that place, in public privacy.” Read in this way, McFee’s food poems comment on how culinary choices—and the communal acts that surround those choices—simultaneously acknowledge and disrupt lingering judgments about mountain people and the food that they eat.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Dr. Erica Abrams Locklear is an associate professor of Literature and Language at UNC Asheville and is working on a project that considers representations of mountain food in Appalachian literature. In 2011 Ohio University Press published her book, Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment: Appalachian Women’s Literacies, as part of their Series on Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Appalachia.
“'Our blood must have been briny as the Dead Sea:' Reclaiming Mountain Taste in Michael McFee’s Poetry”
Drinko Library 402
This paper examines how Appalachian poet Michael McFee captures the intimacy and shared understanding of food in a social context. In many ways the kinds of food that particular groups consume comes to represent that group, sending important messages about class and one’s place in the hierarchy that defines the elusive concept of “good taste.” Since the turn of the century Appalachian people have been associated with “lowly” foods like leather britches, creasy greens, and ramps. In recent years, mountain dishes have been venerated by foodies across the country, including Martha Stewart. But before this newfound interest in what was once considered the food of heathen hillbillies, mountain writers were exonerating Appalachian cuisine in their fiction and poetry from the mid-twentieth century onward. In Michael McFee’s contemporary poetry, the food he depicts is far more modern than the food illustrated in mid-century texts, yet the approach he takes is a similar one. For example, instead of lamenting the fact that his family ate saltine crackers and picnicked at a roadside table, he celebrates it, as when the speaker of “Roadside Table” explains that “Tourists driving by us might have laughed / at this simple mountain clan ... but they’d have been wrong; it was pure holiday / to linger in that place, in public privacy.” Read in this way, McFee’s food poems comment on how culinary choices—and the communal acts that surround those choices—simultaneously acknowledge and disrupt lingering judgments about mountain people and the food that they eat.
