Appalachian Foodways

Amanda Green

Appalachian foodways are complex, constantly changing, reflective of global political and economic forces, and grounded in the histories of the different peoples that have graced this region. From the earliest foodways of the Shawnee and Cherokee to the contemporary field-to-fork operations of Appalachian farmers and chefs reclaiming their traditional foodways, Appalachian foodways create their own niche in American culture. Many forces have shaped Appalachian foodways, including the varied experiences of people as well as the mountains, valleys, waterways, and more-than-human worlds. Moreover, colonization, immigration, globalization, and climate change continue to reshape Appalachian foodways today. To understand those processes and Appalachian foodways, the field of food studies uses the concepts of foodways, food systems, food sovereignty, food security, and food justice.

Author’s Positionality

As the author of this chapter, I think it’s important for me to reveal my positionality, my relationship to Appalachia, because it informs my personal and academic perspective. I hail from Appalachia, but like many Appalachians, my roots are diverse. My mother immigrated to West Virginia from Sweden in the 1980s, while my father was raised in a small town in northern West Virginia. Generations before, my English ancestors settled in what was then called western Virginia, colonizing the region and usurping the land and resources from Indigenous peoples. I spent the first eighteen years of my life growing up in my father’s idyllic West Virginia town. Immigrants from Sicily and Spain settled this part of the Allegheny Plateau in the early 1900s, and they shaped the culinary heritage and appetite of my community.

My teenage self would have described Appalachian foodways as canned peppers, Abruzzino’s and Tomaro’s fresh loaves of Italian bread, pasta dishes, meatballs, and pepperoni rolls. Across Appalachia, the arrival of new immigrants to the region transformed the culture and foodways. I left Appalachia for college, but I always returned. I worked on a small organic farm in the foothills of western North Carolina, served wine and biscuits at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, and after receiving my Ph.D. in Anthropology, began teaching cultural anthropology at Eastern Kentucky University. Experiencing other parts of Appalachia made me realize that my childhood foodways were only one small corner of Appalachia, and I could spend a lifetime studying the food cultures of Appalachia.

Appalachian Foodways

The concept of foodways describes historic and contemporary food habits of a region or a group. It is “the study of what we eat, how we eat, and what it means.”^[1] The foodways of a given culture entail learning about the activities that surround food, including “the ways in which people think and talk about food” from how they procure, preserve, prepare, distribute, consume, and even clean up food.^[2] Determining a singular definition of Appalachian foodways is a fraught endeavor, existing on a continuum between people’s real, lived experiences and the stereotypes, images, and expectations that have built up around these experiences. Elizabeth Engelhardt argues that Appalachian foodways are built around the Appalachian Mountains, both the physical presence and ecology of the mountains as well as the cultural and symbolic meanings of the mountains. She elaborates that what can be grown, what can be raised, and what can be preserved is all determined in some relation to the mountains and hills of Appalachia. Furthermore, Engelhardt asserts, “What tastes good, what is emblematic, what is avoided and who gets a voice in deciding, all too develop with mountains in the discussion.”^[3]

On the other hand, Lucy Long argues that Appalachian foodways, those foodways based in British and German traditions of meat and starch, were not that different from most early settler American foodways.^[4] The milk-based sauces, pork and dairy products, fermentation and canning, and the Indigenous traditions of corn, beans, squash, and wild foods are present across early settler foodways. What makes Appalachian foodways unique in the 21st century, according to Long, is that these food traditions continue into the present thus making them seem exceptional, quaint, and perhaps a bit backwards to folks who don’t live in the region.

Appalachian cookbook writer Ronni Lundy rhetorically asks readers to consider this question: “How can you assert a purely Anglo-Saxon and profoundly isolated culture when you discover that those same shuck beans are a German creation and that the traditions of the region also include Italian, Swiss, African American, and Native American foodways?”^[5] In asking this question, Lundy emphasizes that Appalachia is not an isolated region and its foodways don’t reflect isolation. Instead, they reflect the ongoing processes of colonization and globalization. Globalization refers to the increased circulation of goods, capital, ideas, and people at greater and greater speeds through worldwide intensification of interactions, while colonization, including European colonization of North America, is the process by which states extend their power beyond their borders in order to secure access to raw materials, cheap labor, and markets. As a result of these forces, Appalachian foodways are both old and new, local and global, cheap and expensive.^[6]

Foodways, Stereotypes, and Tradition

If change is at the heart of Appalachian foodways, then what is traditional to Appalachia? Lundy pointedly asks, “Just when does tradition begin?”^[7] Tradition is defined as the transmission of customs and beliefs from one generation to the next, but often the beginnings of most traditions are more recent than generally expected. Any study of Appalachian foodways invites the readers to consider the foods they take as “traditional” to begin to contemplate what makes a tradition and when they begin.

The concept of foodways is inextricable from culture, which is a system of knowledge, beliefs, behaviors, as well as material artifacts. It is a system that is created, learned, shared, and contested by a group of people.^[8] Thus, while culture is shared by a group of people, it doesn’t mean that everyone agrees on everything. For example, there are competing definitions of Appalachian food culture. Culture is always changing as well, which means that knowledge, beliefs, and practices around food are always changing such as the introduction of Italian and Spanish foodways to central Appalachia.

Culture is also taught and learned. As members of cultural groups, individuals are enculturated from birth by the people and the institutions that surround them. Enculturation is the process by which individuals are socialized into culture, including the systems of knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors appropriate for their society. This enculturation includes taste preferences—people are socialized into enjoying particular tastes, smells, and textures by their families, teachers, friends, community members, and the organizations around them, including religious and school institutions. Cultural anthropologists study these processes using anthropological field methods, including observation and interviewing with the goal to understand culture, including foodways, by using ethnography. Unlike a biography that uses sources to construct a book about an individual person’s life, ethnography involves living and interacting with a community of people over an extended period of time, intentionally participating in their lives, and using observations and interviews to learn more.

In addition to the newness of traditions, an “exotic Appalachia” stereotype persists, which imagines Appalachian foodways as full of poverty (the classic Mountain Dew trope) and full of wilderness (hunting possum and bear for our meat).^[9] These stereotypes are problematic because they ignore other narratives of the region. Food anthropologist Richard Wilk commented, “It is an anthropological truism that food is both substance and symbol, providing physical nourishment and a key mode of communication that carries many kinds of meaning.”^[10]

Cornbread, Biscuits, and Beans

Cornbread and biscuits in Appalachia illustrate Wilk’s point, as both operate as nutritional sustenance and symbols, standing for or representing personal and group identities in Appalachia. Cornbread was the traditional form of sustenance in the Mountain South, as corn was easily grown and processed in the region. Wheat flour, on the other hand, was introduced by people from outside of Appalachia. Engelhardt, a native of Appalachia, recounts a story of learning to make biscuits from her grandmother as part of her own enculturation. In the process she shares that at the turn of the 20th century, biscuits became a symbol of being a “good” woman in the South. On the other hand, baking cornbread symbolized “ignorance, disease, and poverty.” Through the distinctions between biscuits and cornbread, food operates as nutritional sustenance, as a vehicle for the transmission of culture, as well as a symbol of class and gendered identities. Engelhardt writes that “A social history of class, race, and gender hides in the different recipes and uses of cornbread and biscuits.”^[11] A family’s choice between cornbread or biscuits or between sweet cornbread or cornbread with no sugar added represents not only personal taste, but also is symbolic of a person’s culture and their communities.

Another distinction between cornbread and biscuits is the time of day. Usually, cornbread accompanies supper (the evening meal), and biscuits are certain at breakfast–both allowing for exceptions, especially when there are leftovers from a previous meal. Both can also serve as a snack when paired with other staples, such as older Appalachians’ evening treat of cornbread and buttermilk in a drinking glass, eaten with a spoon. Biscuits split in half and spread with homemade jam, local honey, or sorghum can give the quick boost of energy needed in the afternoon or after a school day.

Known as “the poor people’s sweetener,”^[12] sorghum, or sorghum molasses, is a natural delicacy on Appalachian tables, especially when slathered onto biscuits, baked into cakes and cookies, or plopped into a cup of coffee to offset the bitter taste.^[13] Appalachian sorghum originates from African peoples who came to the Americas as chattel slaves, and many generations later, families throughout rural Appalachia–multiple generations of descendents of enslaved people as well as “white poor mountain and Southern people”–consider sorghum a family tradition.^[14] Historically, a family saved seeds from the annual crop of sorghum cane, planted them near a creek, and waited for their growth into thick stalks and leaves like corn. In late fall, farmers engaged in a labor-intensive process that required close attention due to the high likelihood of accidents, burns, or smoke exposure. The harvesting process required trimming the seed pods from the top of the plant; stripping the leaves from the stalks, bundling the leaves, and feeding them to the livestock; and using the stalks to create the sorghum. They bundled and cut the stalks, then fed sections into the grinder of a sorghum mill. A long pole extending from the grinder functioned as a dual rotary press and led to a harness for one or two mules, who walked around the grinder, pressing the cane into a juice-like substance and funneling it into a barrel. From that point, up to four people worked in a coordinated manner to convert the juice into thick, syrupy sorghum. One worker siphoned the juice into a pot placed above a wood fire, while another worker stirred the juice until it was foamy. Yet another worker skimmed the green foam and sent it through the whole process again; from start to finish, the process produced little to no waste. One of the workers captured the thick, sweet syrup into quart- or gallon-sized glass jars, and the family kept some jars for use throughout the year and also took some jars into town to sell or to trade for groceries.^[15] Until 2008, Kentucky led the nation in sorghum making, but as farming decreased as an economically viable occupation and became a largely mechanized industry, the popularity of sorghum making moved from family farms in central Appalachia to the Midwest.^[16] Still, some Mennonite families in Kentucky maintain sorghum operations in the traditional manner.^[17] 

Another staple in Appalachian foodways that is paired with cornbread is soup beans. Bill Best explains that Appalachian families often pass down a seed stock of beans for generations, and as in his family’s case, over 150 years. Best indicates that beans and their widespread use throughout Appalachia originate from Cherokee peoples who married into settlers’ families and shared their foodways.^[18] Soup beans–also called brown beans, beans and cornbread, or simply “beans”–are quite versatile, serving as either a main or side dish at suppertime. A single stock pot of beans could feed a family for several days, offering nutritional benefits in protein and fiber as well as providing an inexpensive, tasty alternative to meat, with or without a ham hock added to the pot as seasoning during cooking. Similar to the pronunciation of “Appalachia” as a marker of a person’s location in the U.S., soup beans offer an important cultural distinction: namely, a bowl of soup beans (an Appalachian moniker) is not the same as a bowl of bean soup (non-Appalachian areas).

Ramps: Place, Culture, and Indigenous Food Sovereignty

Food creates and maintains social relationships; it produces and reproduces who belongs to a group and the boundaries around that group.^[19] To members of Appalachian communities, collecting ramps, eating ramps, and talking about ramps creates these group boundaries and reinforces unique community and Appalachian identities.^[20] A staple in Appalachian foodways, the ramp (Allium tricoccum) is a wild onion or leek species found throughout the eastern United States. Ramps are a perennial plant with a large bulb, like a spring onion. Ramps have become a symbol of Appalachian identity, usually associated with poverty because they are gathered for free in the forests and they smell pungently of onions. This wild-grown plant lends itself well as a symbol and ethnic boundary marker.^[21] First, the physical act of collecting ramps is time-consuming and arduous. Ramps grow in mountainous and forested areas, which often require effort to reach. Ramps are also seasonal, emerging at the end of winter. Each spring, the ramps emerge with sword-like leaves that grow to approximately twelve inches. By June, the leaves die off and an off-white flower emerges that releases its seeds. Usually in mid-March, Appalachian residents check known ramp spots, tucked deep into the forest hillsides and coves, their eyes straining to spot the small patches of green where the leaves have emerged. By April, a small ramp harvest could supply the first taste. Harvesting requires gently loosening the soil around a patch and tugging them from the ground. Because ramp patches can be over-harvested, residents usually take only a small amount, leaving most in the ground to reproduce the next year’s crops. When a new generation learns about ramps, they experience a process of enculturation, the learning of culture, through harvesting wild foods on the land. Gathering ramps connects people to the land, both physically and metaphorically, as ramps “are physically rooted in the mountains and rooted in the thoughts and memories of those living there,” reflecting so perfectly the earlier argument that Appalachian foodways are built around the Appalachian Mountains.^[22]

Figure 1: Ramps carpet a forest floor in northern West Virginia. Photo by Amanda Green.

Historically, ramps have contributed to survival as one of the first nutritious plants to emerge after winter, thus supplementing dwindling winter rations. Ramps were gathered by the Cherokee in the spring. Cherokee folklore held that the ramp held therapeutic properties, including the ability to thin and cleanse the blood.^[23] Indeed, ramps are high in Vitamin C and fatty acids. Despite the known nutritional benefits, eating ramps for Cherokee and early settlers  was stigmatized by other communities. Stories have circulated about children sent home from school because they smelled too much of ramps.^[24] In modern times, remembering this important survival role and stigma is also part of the creation of Appalachian identity by noting the boundary created between those who eat and those who do not eat ramps.

The removal of Indigenous peoples like the Cherokee from their original homelands in Appalachia destroyed their food sovereignty, as their foodways were uprooted and land stolen. In the past decade, the right to harvest Native foods on Native lands has become a means for Indigenous peoples of North America to promote their food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is “The right of peoples, communities and countries to define their own agricultural, labor, fishing, food and land policies which are ecologically, socially, economically and culturally appropriate to their unique circumstances. It includes the true right to food and to produce food, which means that all people have the right to safe, nutritious and culturally appropriate food and to food-producing resources and the ability to sustain themselves and societies.” This definition, called the Nyéléni Declaration, was crafted at the 2007 Forum for Food Sovereignty, the first global food sovereignty summit connecting peasant and Indigenous peoples from across the globe.^[25] The example of Cherokee ramp harvesting and the growing recognition, celebration, and protection of Cherokee foodways illustrate the increasing strength of food sovereignty across the globe.

In 1934, the National Park Service (NPS) established the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a large portion of which is adjacent to lands belonging to the Eastern Band of Cherokee (EBCI). The agency quietly agreed through handshakes and meetings to allow Cherokee and other residents of the region to continue harvesting ramps, but no formal agreement or contract was signed. By the 2000s, the NPS closed the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to ramp harvesting, though many communities had harvested there for generations. In 2009, four members of the EBCI, including George Burgess, were charged with illegally harvesting ramps in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Burgess stood trial in November 2009, and Courtney Lewis, also a member of the EBCI, described the case as “a touchstone for the continuation of Native Peoples' rights and the willingness of the federal government to acknowledge those rights.”^[26] At the trial, Burgess’s defense argued that the ramp is not only nutrition for the Cherokee but also an entire cultural process from gathering, harvesting, processing, and celebrating to uses as food and medicine for the Cherokee people. Burgess received a guilty verdict during his trial, but NPS personnel and the courtroom judge all appeared reluctant given the circumstances: Cherokee had practiced ramp harvesting in this region for thousands of years, their harvesting practices were sustainable (taking 10% and leaving the roots of the plant), and they harvested in a remote location that was historically part of Cherokee territory. Following the trial, the NPS and the EBCI came together to discuss how to ensure Cherokee rights to harvest from their lands.

In the past two decades, the popularity of ramps has grown immensely. An increasing number of ramp festivals have emerged in Appalachia as local communities seek to both celebrate and profit from the popularity of the ramp and its tourism potential (for example, see Richwood, West Virginia, the self-declared “Ramp Capital of the World,” and their annual ramp festival). Festivals provide an occasion for the community to gather, clean, prepare, and celebrate ramps, a cultural activity that also reinforces community and Appalachian identities.^[27] Ramps are also highly sought after by “foodies” outside the region. Ecologists and some local communities worry that it threatens ramp yields as ramps are dug up at greater rates for the commodity market.^[28] Similarly, some scholars and community members worry that it dilutes the cultural meaning of ramps as they are co-opted outside of Appalachian culture and as the emphasis is placed on the cooking and consumption of ramps rather than the gathering and processing of ramps in the community, in the mountains and hollers of Appalachia.^[29] 

Foodways and Environmental Justice 

In the 1900s, coal companies sought a docile mining workforce and so they recruited immigrants. Italian immigrants, primarily from the Calabria region, arrived. One of the vestiges of this migration was the mixing of foodways and the emergence of Italian-American foodways specific to West Virginia. The most popular food to emerge from this melting pot was the pepperoni roll, a yeast-raised roll stuffed with thinly sliced pepperoni or sticks of pepperoni. Mountaineers grow up on these pepperoni rolls, whether served hot and fresh at the Johnson Elementary School cafeteria, eaten during a snack break from skiing, or grabbed at the gas station or the pool snack bar. The origins of the pepperoni roll likely involved some combination of freshly baked bread and slices of salumi. Today, Tomaro’s Bakery in Clarksburg, West Virginia, is a multi-generational business started in 1914 by Anthony Tomaro. It and other bakeries like Abruzzino’s continue to thrive through sales of pepperoni rolls and loaves of Italian bread. 

Figure 2: Abruzzino’s Italian Bakery in Gypsy, West Virginia, has been producing pepperoni rolls (pictured here) since 1985 when Chris Abruzzino, at 21 years old, started the bakery to insure an income for his family. Photo by Amanda Green.

Similar to Italian-American foodways, another set of foodways appears in Appalachia via the Spanish immigrants of Asturias. While Italian immigrants arrived to work in West Virginia’s coal mines, more than 1500 Spanish immigrants, particularly from the region of Asturias in northern Spain, were recruited to work in the state’s zinc factory in Spelter, West Virginia. The mix of Anglo, Italian, and Spanish immigrant families led to racial tensions that still exist today, and food has been one of the tools used to create ethnic boundary markers, or the symbols used to demarcate the created boundaries between different groups. Suronda Gonzalez, also a native of Harrison County, West Virginia, recounts that Asturian families would comment that their poor White neighbors ate cornflakes for dinner, put ketchup on their chorizo, and had no hospitality.^[30] According to Gonzalez, one of the only things that united these groups was their reliance on growing their own food to supplement their diets. These foodways brought her West Virginia-born mother and Asturian mother-in-law together as they learned the special dishes of Spain, including tortilla Espanola (a traditional omelet with potatoes, eggs, and onions) and empanadas. Working together in the kitchen, Gonzalez’s mother acquired the knowledge of Spanish foods and became the bearer of the Asturian food tradition as well as her own Appalachian traditions. 

The zinc factory in Spelter closed in 2001, and in 2010 the Dupont Company agreed to a settlement of $150 million: it included a thirty-year medical testing program for the area’s residents ($80 million) and $70 million toward clean-up and payouts to residents. It turned out Spelter had become a toxic waste site, and in 2011, Spelter was awarded millions to clean up the heavy metals contamination. The immigrant and Appalachian gardens surrounding Spelter were likely filled with toxins, like the bodies of those who worked there. The toxicity of the water, land, plants, and human bodies represents a case of environmental justice and food justice. Environmental justice began as a social movement in the 1980s that demanded equitable or fair distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. Residents of Appalachia have often borne a greater share of environmental burdens through exposure to heavy metals and toxins in factories, mines, as well as polluted waterways and soils. Similarly, food justice is a movement to build a more equitable and racially just food system ensuring universal access to nutritious, healthy, and culturally appropriate food, safety for food producers, and local control in the food system. The historic gardens of Spelter’s Asturian immigrant community were a source of healthy, nutritious food while simultaneously the soils and plants were also enriched with toxins. Many Appalachians today face similar circumstances as their waterways and soils are impacted by mining and factory runoff that potentially pollute their food system.^[31] 

Raising the Status of Appalachian Foodways and Cuisine

According to Lucy Long, a new Appalachian cuisine is being generated in Asheville and other Appalachian tourist destinations as part of the process of culinary tourism. Cuisine, Long explains, is “a publicly articulated set of dishes, ingredients, styles, aesthetics, and mind-sets that are felt to represent a group’s identity through food.”^[32] Cuisine is what is presented to the public by chefs, cookbook writers, tourism operators, and many more as part of the growth of culinary tourism. Culinary tourism is an industry initiative focused on exploratory eating as a basis for the tourism experience. Profit is the primary goal of culinary tourism, and the focus tends to be on gourmet and high-priced products. It’s a new medium of economic development through restaurants and the hospitality sector, as well as through small farmers and those interested in environmental and social justice issues. Long argues that the new Appalachian cuisine moves away from stereotypes (e.g., canned possum and squirrel) to focus on producing and eating from the land.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, a small group of chefs, writers, scholars, and farmers has expressly sought to raise the profile of Appalachian cuisine through multiple organizations and mediums. In the literary world, authors have extended the success of the original Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery.^[33] Other notable books and authors include world-renowned author Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle, a memoir profiling her family’s year of eating local foods from the hills of western Virginia.^[34] Cookbook author Ronni Lundy won two James Beard awards for her book Victuals, described as “a love-letter to Appalachia.”^[35] Smoke, Mountain, Roots, Harvest is Lauren Angelucci McDuffie’s cookbook and reflection on growing up in western Virginia, built from her well-regarded blog Harvest and Honey.^[36] Crystal Wilkinson’s Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts serves as a collection of foodways across five generations of Black women in her family, the stories told in their kitchens, hand-written recipes passed down, and photographs shared from her own cherished albums and collected from her relatives.^[37] 

Many chefs have also returned to their Appalachian homes, recognizing that the foodways of Appalachia also represent a valuable cuisine. Chef Graham House grew up outside of Asheville and expressed his youthful desire to leave the region in order to work in more celebrated culinary destinations like Italy and California. Then, when he recognized that Asheville had become a food destination, he told a New York Times reporter: “I didn’t respect it as much as I should have. I’d talk about the morels and chanterelles of California; when I got home, I pulled into the driveway and found 10 pounds of black trumpet mushrooms.”^[38] Chef Sean Brock from southwestern Virginia has also opened two restaurants, Red Bird and Audrey, in East Nashville dedicated to exploring Appalachian cuisine.^[39]

Black chefs are now leaving a mark on Appalachian foodways, bringing to public consciousness the contributions of the Black community into Appalachian cuisine. Also, major foodie organizations are beginning to recognize the ongoing work of chefs. For example, Chef Hanaan Shabazz, who opened her own establishment, Shabazz Restaurant, in the 1970s in Asheville, North Carolina, was the recipient of the 2020 Ruth Fertel Keeper of the Flame Award, an honor presented by the Southern Foodways Alliance.^[40]  The award recognizes the unsung work of culinary tradition bearers like Shabazz who also worked at Asheville’s Southside Kitchen, a project to train, support, and connect marginalized communities to sustainable employment pathways. 

At Benne on Eagle in Asheville, North Carolina, Chef de cuisines Ashleigh Shanti (from 2018 to 2020) and Malcolm McMillian (from 2020 to the present) manage a kitchen that pays homage to the Black influence on Appalachian foodways in the historically Black neighborhood called the Block. Shanti made the shortlist on the James Beard Rising Star Chef of the Year award in 2020. Shanti, featured in a New York Times profile in 2019, explained that she wanted to cook in ways that celebrated her heritage as a Black woman from the South.^[41] For example, to make hummus, she replaced garbanzo beans with black-eyed peas and used fermented benne seeds (an African staple) for tahini. 

In the northern part of West Virginia, Chef Michael Costello and farm manager Amy Dawson have integrated Appalachian traditions at their co-owned restaurant, Lost Creek Farm.^[42] Dawson and Costello use recipes and heritage foods to tell the story of West Virginia, of exploitation by industries like coal and logging that destroyed fishing traditions, of the concentration of the seed industry into the hands of four large corporations and the coinciding loss of agrobiodiversity, and of newer exploitation of ramp over-harvesting by new food crazes.^[43] The duo pulls from the heritage of Spanish immigrants by creating empañadas and integrates varieties of corn cultivated by the Osage and Shawnee before settlers forced them from their homelands. Costello and Dawson further seek to instill pride in West Virginia foods by reclaiming vinegar pie (also known as desperation pie), which uses apple cider vinegar and nutmeg to mimic lemon. Costello explained to a group of schoolchildren the significance and pride they should have in heritage foodways: “Say you want a lemon pie, but you don’t have any lemons?” he said. “You do a very creative thing, a very Appalachian thing. You figure it out.” 

Organizations dedicated to Appalachian cuisine, agriculture, and foraging are diverse. In 2014, the Appalachian Food Summit started at Hindman Settlement School in southeastern Kentucky. The goal is to celebrate and support a sustainable future for Appalachian food and people. The Southern Seed Legacy Project, in Burnsville, North Carolina, strives to protect genetic diversity and cultural knowledge in the American South through seed-saving networks and a seed and cultural memory bank. The Center for Cherokee Plants and Cherokee Nation Seed Bank, located on Cherokee lands in North Carolina and Oklahoma, provide seeds to tribal citizens to celebrate and pass on Cherokee agricultural knowledge. Grow Appalachia, established at Berea College in 2009, has set a mission to increase access to fresh fruits and vegetables by building the capacity of home and community gardens. This is only a snapshot of the myriad number of organizations investing in Appalachian foodways.

Conclusion

As Appalachian foods are revalued in the marketplace, so too are they revalued by Appalachian families. For many, gathering morels and ramps in the early spring, sowing seeds and harvesting corn, beans, and squash in the summer, and hunting deer in the late fall, form the rhythms of life. But for others, like my own family, our growing awareness of the bounty of Appalachia leads us deeper into the woods to seek out the tasty morsels and bring a growing sense of gratitude and belonging to the mountains. 

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