Mode of Program Participation
Academic Scholarship
Participation Type
Panel
Session Title
Eating and Drinking in Appalachia
Session Abstract or Summary
With the recent publication and success of books like Ronni Lundy’s Victuals (2016) and Joan Aller’s Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly (2010), it is safe to say that Appalachian culinary traditions are not only being revitalized in the region but are also beginning to get some of the serious national attention they deserve. No longer the stuff of jokes about poverty-stricken hillbillies, Appalachian foodways are now being celebrated throughout the culinary world. The Washington Post, for example, glowingly, if a bit hyperbolically, declared Appalachia’s cucina povera the “next big thing in regional cooking.” Appalachian wine and spirits are also now being heralded both in the region and beyond. Between 2015 and 2016, the number of breweries, wineries, and distilleries in Western North Carolina grew by 45% and Jancis Robinson, one of the world’s foremost wine critics and author of the Oxford Companion to Wine, declares contemporary Virginian wines as worthy of the world wine map. Alongside the revitalization of the region’s eating and drinking cultures, Appalachia’s literary and artistic engagements with culinary traditions, both old and new, are increasingly garnering popular and scholarly attention. From problematic Local Color depictions dating to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to more contemporary representations that celebrate those same foods while also interrogating the social landscape in which they operate, Appalachian writers have written often and even obsessively about the food of the region, demonstrating the heterogeneous makeup of Appalachia’s cultures and foods. Exploring the various cultural contributions to Appalachian food and drink—Native American, African American, Scotch-Irish, English, German, Hungarian, French, Swiss, and Italian—highlights the diversity of Appalachian peoples and the traditions that make the region the social and culinary melting pot that it has always been and remains today.
Presentation #1 Title
A Careful Resurrection: Depicting Beauty and Hardship in Appalachian Foodways
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
As this panel description explains, Appalachian food is finally garnering positive attention nationwide. These accolades are certainly overdue: for well over a century the region, its people, and its cuisine have been criticized by a number of different groups, from Local Color writers to travel writers to missionaries to reality television stars. Yet such universal praise of mountain food has the perhaps unintended effect of rendering complex culinary narratives one-dimensional, when in fact they are quite nuanced. Analyzing fictional representations of food in Appalachia gives us one way to explore that complexity. Using texts by James Still, Julia Franks, and Ron Rash, this paper investigates how these authors depict the culinary shift from subsistence farming to another way of life, whether prompted by industrialization via mining (Still), reliance on a cash crop like tobacco (Franks), or industrialization via textile mills (Rash). In Still’s River of Earth the Baldridge family enjoys a surplus of food when Brack goes to work in the mines, but the goods are bought on store credit and Still’s description emphasizes imported items. Given the difficulty Brack has maintaining a paid position, it seems unlikely that the family can continue to purchase such luxuries. In Julia Franks’s Over the Plain Houses the narrator makes clear that protagonist Irenie laments the shift away from growing food to tobacco, explaining that it was “as if all the growing world had put its energy into this one lurid [tobacco] plant.” Both Still and Franks implicitly romanticize subsistence farming, echoing current obsessions with mountain foods, but Rash’s poetry offers important reminders that the farming life was difficult, as illustrated in poems like “Drought” and “Spring Fever” from Eureka Mill. Considered together, these texts remind us that while positive, contemporary veneration of mountain foodways also needs to recognize inherent hardships associated with subsistence farming.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Erica Abrams Locklear is an associate professor in the English department at UNC Asheville. Her book, Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment: Appalachian Women's Literacies was published by Ohio University Press in 2011. She has also published in The Southern Literary Journal, Appalachian Heritage, North Carolina Folklore Journal, and various essay collections. She is currently at work on a project that explores representations of Appalachian food in multiple outlets, from missionary publications to fiction to poetry to cookbooks.
Presentation #2 Title
Mountain Whisk(e)y-Ways and The World’s Regions
Presentation #2 Abstract or Summary
Freedom and whisky gang thegither.
-Robert Burns, “The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer”
Whiskey is not just strong drink; it is a political, economic and cultural phenomenon with intriguing international parallels. Of particular interest is the long-standing association between whiskey making and narratives of political rebellion, from nationalist struggles to anti-taxation campaigns. This paper examines the history of resistance in Irish, Scottish, and Appalachian whiskey-ways, highlighting how each of these allegedly non-metropolitan places has been figured as either a “nation’s region” (Leigh Anne Duck) or an “Other’s Other” (Rodger Cunningham) in their own geopolitical arrangements. But such a transnational nexus also reveals each as somewhat less exceptional than identity-based formulations allege, as each space has been historically associated with agriculture, separatism, and anti-establishment politics, and are often imagined as marginal, clannish, and backward. Such a comparative approach serves to historicize the recent renaissance of Appalachian whiskey making as well as explain its bifurcated marketing as both “lowbrow” indigenous quaff and prestigious luxury product.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #2
Jessica Martell is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Appalachian State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in four edited volumes on literature and film, as well as Modernist Cultures, Nineteenth-Century Literature, the Journal of Modern Literature, and Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies. She teaches courses on modern British, Irish, American, and World Literatures, Global and Postcolonial Cinemas, Food Studies, and Rhetoric and Composition.
Presentation #3 Title
The Other Source of Southern Food: Sean Brock and the Appalachian Culinary Tradition
Presentation #3 Abstract or Summary
One of the most intense recent controversies surrounding southern food has been about, to use the title of a co-authored article by John T. Edge and Tunde Wey, “Who Owns Southern Food?” This debate, which Edge and Wey scrutinized in the Oxford American last summer, has occurred largely in response to a March 2016 article by Hillary Dixler in the online food-centric publication Eater. Dixler’s article, entitled “How Gullah Cuisine Has Transformed Charleston Dining: Exploring the Line Between Shared History and Appropriation,” examines how and why Charleston, South Carolina has become one of the best culinary destinations in the United States, with its restaurants and restaurateurs winning an array of prestigious awards, as well as being featured in top magazines and TV shows. Dixler ultimately takes Charleston’s food scene to task because of its lack of diversity; the city’s culinary accolades, for example, are rarely, if ever, given to African Americans. This becomes particularly surprising when one realizes how many of Charleston’s culinary traditions are derived from African American, and more specifically Gullah, foodways. The chef most routinely called out for the appropriation and commodification of African American culinary traditions is Sean Brock, owner of Charleston’s popular restaurant Husk. While many of the critiques against white, male chefs like Brock are valid, one aspect of this issue that has not been discussed is the fact that Brock, a native of southwest Virginia, draws much of his culinary inspiration from Appalachia. To be clear, this paper does not seek to exonerate Brock of the critiques recently leveled against him; rather I want to argue that Appalachia needs to be a part of this important conversation, because even for coastal restaurants like Husk, the roots of the so-called “New Southern Cuisine” often stretch back to the mountains.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #3
Zackary Vernon is an Assistant Professor of English at Appalachian State University. His teaching and writing focus on American literature, film, and environmental studies, and he has an abiding interest in the material and cultural histories of Appalachia and the American South. Vernon's research has appeared in a range of scholarly books and journals, and he is a co-editor of and contributor to Summoning the Dead: Critical Essays on Ron Rash (forthcoming with the University of South Carolina Press).
Presentation #4 Title
The Humble Table: Vitis Vinifera and Haute Cuisine
Presentation #4 Abstract or Summary
Currently, over four hundred and fifty wineries and vineyards speckle the Appalachian landscape, resulting in a viticultural reinvention concurrent with the region’s gastronomic renaissance. As the region’s wines gain distinction, winemakers look to provincial cuisine to help construct a comprehensive, premium-priced, culinary experience to draw tourists to the Appalachian table. Together, food and wine are reframing the region through narratives that simultaneously reify and reinvent commodified notions of place and hegemonic aesthetic appeals. As such, restaurateurs are leveraging cultural rhetorics and aesthetics of the ‘Appalachian kitchen’ as they set menus that correlate with the highbrow and lowbrow tensions of the farm-to-table movement, and this movement is drawing great attention and affluence back to the ‘traditional’ cuisine—or what is often branded as “humble Appalachia.” Yet the culturally narrated and classed-based hierarchy of terroir often leaves Appalachian wine ‘off the table.’ Seeking to locate the vineyard in the region’s farm-to-table movement, this paper responds to site visits and interviews with vintners, executive chefs, and sommeliers from over fifty of Appalachia’s vineyards, wineries, and farm-to-fork restaurants. Through the rhetorics of wine and food, this paper explores the selective commodification of the rural, the romanticization of the bucolic, and the appropriation and simulation of the ‘humble table’— semiotic expressions that trace to a bourgeois sentimentalism for Old World aesthetics and that both essentialize and glorify Appalachian cultural rhetorics.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #4
Jessie Blackburn is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition and affiliate faculty in Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University. Her teaching and writing focus on cultural, regional, digital, and feminist rhetorics; Appalachian studies; and composition theory and pedagogy. Blackburn's current research project is Appalachian Terroir: A Stylistic Approach to a New Landscape (under contract with the University Press of Kentucky).
A Careful Resurrection: Depicting Beauty and Hardship in Appalachian Foodways
As this panel description explains, Appalachian food is finally garnering positive attention nationwide. These accolades are certainly overdue: for well over a century the region, its people, and its cuisine have been criticized by a number of different groups, from Local Color writers to travel writers to missionaries to reality television stars. Yet such universal praise of mountain food has the perhaps unintended effect of rendering complex culinary narratives one-dimensional, when in fact they are quite nuanced. Analyzing fictional representations of food in Appalachia gives us one way to explore that complexity. Using texts by James Still, Julia Franks, and Ron Rash, this paper investigates how these authors depict the culinary shift from subsistence farming to another way of life, whether prompted by industrialization via mining (Still), reliance on a cash crop like tobacco (Franks), or industrialization via textile mills (Rash). In Still’s River of Earth the Baldridge family enjoys a surplus of food when Brack goes to work in the mines, but the goods are bought on store credit and Still’s description emphasizes imported items. Given the difficulty Brack has maintaining a paid position, it seems unlikely that the family can continue to purchase such luxuries. In Julia Franks’s Over the Plain Houses the narrator makes clear that protagonist Irenie laments the shift away from growing food to tobacco, explaining that it was “as if all the growing world had put its energy into this one lurid [tobacco] plant.” Both Still and Franks implicitly romanticize subsistence farming, echoing current obsessions with mountain foods, but Rash’s poetry offers important reminders that the farming life was difficult, as illustrated in poems like “Drought” and “Spring Fever” from Eureka Mill. Considered together, these texts remind us that while positive, contemporary veneration of mountain foodways also needs to recognize inherent hardships associated with subsistence farming.
