Appalachian Agriculture and Food Systems

Amanda Green

From the agricultural practices of the Shawnee and Cherokee to the contemporary field-to-fork operations of Appalachian farmers and chefs reclaiming their traditional foodways, Appalachian food and agriculture creates its own niche in American culture. Many forces have shaped Appalachian agriculture and food systems,^[1] including the people, mountains, valleys, waterways, and more-than-human worlds of Appalachia. Moreover, processes of colonization, immigration, globalization, and climate change have significantly impacted current agricultural practices and food systems. Appalachian agriculture and food systems include concepts from food studies, including horticulture, agriculture, agrobiodiversity, cultural memory, food sovereignty, food security, and food deserts.

Introduction to Anthropology

Cultural anthropology studies agriculture and food systems using anthropological field methods, including observation and interviewing. The ideal way to understand food cultures comes from ethnography, which is 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 about food systems, from the study of ramps and apples to food security in Appalachia.

What Is Appalachian Food?

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?”^[2] 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.^[3] Both processes generate change and inequalities, particularly in food systems.

Agricultural Transformations in Appalachia

In the contemporary social construction of Appalachia, agriculture is envisioned as the predominant way of life, characterizing Appalachians as “ancient” folks of the holler who live in harmony with nature.^[4] Historically, Appalachia was certainly an agrarian landscape, but by the year 2000, only 2% of Appalachian residents earned their primary income from agriculture, and less than 3% of households are classified as rural-farm. Simultaneously, Appalachian consumers spent more per capita in direct farm sales (purchasing directly from the farmer at a farm stand or farmers market) than the rest of the country, indicating that Appalachians continue to prize local agriculture.^[5]

Native Foodways, Food Foraging, Horticulture, and Agriculture 

The earliest documented people arrived in Appalachia around 8,000 years ago. They were likely food foragers, subsisting through fishing, hunting, and gathering plants and following animal and plant resources by season. Agricultural transformations began in southern Appalachia approximately 5,000 years ago. Horticulture, the cultivation of plants for subsistence largely through small garden plots, dates to about 2,300 years back, and by AD 800, distributed settlements were found in the region indicating the rise of agriculture. Agriculture, an intensive farming strategy where land is permanently cultivated and a surplus of food is created, took hold prior to European contact.^[6] Chenopod, little barley, maygrass, knotweed, gourds, squash, sunflower, sumpweed, and eventually tobacco as well as maize (corn) grew as crops in these regions. The Mississippian period (AD 1200-1450) is the first clear agriculture transition, spreading from the Central Mississippi Valley. This time period was characterized by forest clearings to convert land to use for agriculture and maize-growing and mound-building practices.

With the collapse of the mound-building and corn-growing cultures of the Mississippian period, the Cherokee emerged as the Appalachian region’s primary inhabitants. While the Cherokee likely have a 4,000-year cultural history in the region,^[7]  it was not until 1690 that the Cherokee became the principal group in Appalachia with a population of approximately 12,000 and a territory of 322,600 square miles that included what is now Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, South and North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia.^[8] 

The iconic garden meal of corn, beans, and squash is rooted in the Indigenous (specifically Haudenosaunee or Iroquois) tradition of planting these companion plants together. The cultivation of maize-beans-squash (commonly called “the Three Sisters”) would have been supplemented by hunting, fishing, and collecting of wild plants. Women played a significant role in these foodways. Women tended to farm large communal tracts and small garden plots, and they were also responsible for storage of communal foods and management of communal lands.^[9] They gathered raw materials, carried water, guarded crops, and prepared the food. Women would also transport hunted foods and butcher them. With the onset of European colonization of Appalachia in the 1600s, Cherokee culture blended with the emerging settler mountain culture of the English, Scottish, Irish, and Germans. The Cherokee shifted from a subsistence and hunting lifestyle to full-time agriculture, coming to rely on cattle introduced by Europeans. This culturally blended style of farming in the American Southeast lasted until 1838-1839, when the U.S. Government forced the Cherokee from their historic homelands with the Indian Removal Act.^[10] This forced removal, now referred to as the Trail of Tears, led to the establishment of the Eastern and Western Bands of Cherokee, with the eventual establishment of sovereign Cherokee territories in western North Carolina and Oklahoma. 

Maize: Indigenous Knowledge and Origin Myths

The contributions of Native foods to Appalachian foodways have historically been erased from popular conceptions of Southern and Appalachian culture. Yet the Native South included a vast array of agricultural practices and technologies, such as the Three Sisters, that contributed to a varied and nutritious diet for both Indigenous peoples and settlers. According to Rayna Green, Indigenous communities of the Southeast shared many foodways skills with settlers, the most important perhaps being the combination of maize with beans for a protein and amino-rich diet based on hominy, cornbread, soups, and mushes such as grits and tamales.^[11] These dishes were prepared with limed corn or ash that contain Vitamin B3. This vitamin is essential to preventing niacin deficiency, a condition which can lead to pellagra, a disease causing skin inflammation, diarrhea, and dementia. Early Spanish settlers quickly adapted these culinary tricks, while early British colonists refused to recognize the value of these Native food technologies until pellagra was widespread in their populations.^[12]

Maize is sacred to many Indigenous peoples of the Americas, including the Cherokee. Selu, also called Grandmother Corn or the Corn Mother in Cherokee tradition, is credited as the originator of corn.^[13] Selu gave the first Cherokee instructions to gather the kernels that sprouted from the site where her body was buried.^[14] In the book Selu, Marilou Awiakta describes the Selu origin myth^[15] along with the Original Instructions^[16] that describe how to grow corn with the best agricultural practices for optimal nutritional and spiritual effects.^[17] Awiakta uses essays, stories, and poetry to convey the blend of science and Indigenous wisdom within the staple crop of corn.^[18] Corn, while sacred for Indigenous peoples, is also ubiquitous in American diets. In fact, renowned author Michael Pollan discovered that corn was in one quarter of U.S. grocery store food items, concluding that contemporary Americans are made of corn.^[19] From bags of popcorn to corn on the cob, bowls of cereal, shrimp and grits, or products sweetened with corn syrup (e.g., soda, energy drinks, candy, ketchup), many ordinary food products contain corn, but they have yet to contain the stories of Selu and the stories which reflect the Original Instructions.

Settler Foodways, Heirloom Varieties, and Agrobiodiversity

In addition to Indigenous foodways, the foodways of Appalachia are shaped by the original immigrants from Africa, England, Germany, Ireland, and Scotland, as well as later immigrants from Spain, Italy, and Mexico. The foodways associated with those first settlers are ones of scarcity and subsistence production, the food that fed the working classes of coal miners, factory workers, and millworkers. Seasonality shaped the first settler foodways as well. A hard winter would be followed by the first signs of spring: ramps and early greens like watercress (creasy greens), later by the first berries of spring and other forest products, such as the wild strawberry and nuts, as well as the morel mushroom. With summer’s bounty came corn, beans, squash, potatoes, and tomatoes. In the fall, apples, honey, and sorghum syrup were processed while beans and corn were dried. Along with these crops, livestock such as sheep, cattle, and hogs were raised on the hillsides.

Cherokee and early settlers produced their food in small-scale diversified farming operations, which Chris Baker argues allowed Appalachians in the 1800s and 1900s to adapt to the changing conditions of life over two centuries.^[20] These changes included large-scale deforestation, mining, and the development of hydroelectric projects. Along with Indigenous foodways, these small-scale ventures fostered Appalachia’s agrobiodiversity.

Agrobiodiversity (agricultural biodiversity) refers to the subset of biodiversity found in agriculture, the pool of genetic resources, and human agricultural, pastoral, and fishing systems that rely on and build that diversity in crops and animal species.^[21] Worldwide, higher agrobiodiversity levels are found in marginal areas and in marginalized groups.^[22] Similarly, in the Mountain South, scholars have found immense agrobiodiversity, perhaps making it the most diverse foodshed in North America.^[23] Agrobiodiversity erosion or loss is occurring at a rate of 1-2% per year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, and in Appalachia, this loss is also documented as genetic diversity is replaced by seed and livestock from industrial agriculture.^[24] Preserving agrobiodiversity is critical as it holds sources for new germplasm used to adapt to emerging pests, diseases, and extreme weather events associated with climate change. 

James Veteto has spent his career working with communities who preserve the agrobiodiversity of Appalachia, from the orchardists of western Carolina to Cherokee and settler seed keepers^[25] across Appalachia and the Ozarks. Veteto’s and others’ mission to save and disseminate heirloom seeds fits under the framework of food sovereignty^[26] because it focuses on local and regional control over seeds within the food system. By the end of his research on heirloom seeds in the Appalachian South, Veteto identified 1,756 distinct varieties, which makes Appalachia the region with the highest known levels of agrobiodiversity in the U.S., Canada, and northern Mexico.^[27] A later inventory by RAFT (Renewing America’s Food Traditions) found 1,412 varietals for southern Appalachia, including 667 varieties of apple and 485 varieties of bean grown in the region.^[28] Veteto found that heirloom varieties remain important in regional culinary traditions, family histories, and cultural memory. Moreover, the Eastern Band of Cherokee peoples are the originators of much knowledge, particularly with butter bean and squash varieties, and have worked to protect that knowledge. 

Bill Best is also an honored seed keeper.^[29] With roots in Haywood County, North Carolina, Best’s family passed knowledge of seeds and gardening from generation to generation, from his grandmother to his mother to himself. Best’s research brings attention to the importance of everyday bean seed keepers as they migrate away from Appalachia, including contemporary Appalachians who leave for urban centers as well as the Trail of Tears Bean taken by the Cherokee when they were forcibly removed from Appalachia to Indian Territory.^[30] Southern Appalachia may be the world’s secondary center of bean diversity, only after Rwanda, a country located in sub-Saharan Africa.

Figure 1: Bill Best, pictured here, speaks at the University of Kentucky Food Connection on April 6, 2018. Best is the founder and co-director of the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center in Berea, Kentucky. Photo by UK College of Agriculture (CC-NC-ND).

Best maintains an heirloom seed bank of over 200 green bean varieties of the Mountain South. He began selling his heirloom beans at the Lexington Farmers Market in the 1970s, and continues to sell them at the Berea Farmers Market in the 2020s.^[31] For decades, Best supplied eastern Kentucky transplants with the beans they grew up eating with their families. After a feature article about his beans appeared in the Rural Kentuckian (now Kentucky Living) in 1988, Best and collaborators became well-known for growing heirloom beans and folks started sending and trading seeds with him. Best’s personal narrative emphasizes that food activism, efforts to change the food system to be more sustainable and more equitable, has been ongoing since the moment the industrial food system came into being. In considering why his beans became so popular, Best reflected that he had tapped into “widespread unhappiness with the state of the modern food supply” in the 1980s.^[32] Together with his son Michael Best, the two created the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center to create a seed bank for heirloom beans and other vegetables from Appalachia. From across the country, people send him seeds and stories or seek out seed varieties that were once grown in their families. Organizations like the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center and the Southern Seed Legacy Project (founded by Robert Rhoades and Virginia Nazarea, and now run by Veteto) support Appalachian agrobiodiversity.

Apples, Cultural Memory, Agrobiodiversity, and Climate Change

Apples (Malus domestica) and apple trees flourished in American settler histories as they met the needs of early subsistence life. Although crab apples (Malus sylvestris) have long proliferated in North America, Malus domestica was imported to the colonies through English and French colonists. Early homesteaders and tenant farmers were often required to plant orchards to sustain the new population. Seedlings from excellent apple trees were shared between families and communities allowing the names, stories, and memories of particular trees to be passed along with seedlings from the trees. Thousands of apple varieties existed in early American history, and by the mid-1800s, apple nurseries were established throughout the eastern United States. Commercial nursery catalogs from the end of the 20th century include at least 1,469 apple tree varieties.^[33]

Apple diversity occupied the cultural memories of most early American settlers. Cultural memories are different from individuals’ memories as they “provide people with a sense of belonging and a feeling of broader membership in a real or imagined community.”^[34] Cultivating, sharing, remembering, and exchanging fruits and stories became the medium for transmission of cultural memories. Like ramps, apples connected people to place—through the very rootedness of an apple tree in the earth as well as the memories people associate with specific trees, places, and people. According to Susannah Chapman and Tom Brown, continuing to cultivate and remember old apple varieties in contemporary times is a memorial practice, a practice that is personal, social, and cultural.^[35]

Figure 2: Over 450 apple varieties have been documented in western North Carolina. For example, Lindsey Deal apples (pictured here) were developed relatively recently (1954) in the region. Photo by Amanda Green (CC-BY-NC-ND).

By the early 20th century, the food system shifted as people were more likely to purchase their food at grocery stores, which significantly impacted apple diversity in the U.S. by the mid-century. Apples, such as the Red Delicious, kept well, didn’t bruise easily, and had a nice appearance. Thus, they were cultivated for wholesale to these grocers. Other apple varieties could no longer compete with the varieties that shipped well and were shelf stable. In addition, contemporary Americans prefer crisp apples for eating rather than other varieties that might store better or function better for canning or for making pies and other desserts.^[36] These consumer shifts accompanied the growth of large orchards and the reduction in small-scale and subsistence orchards. Today, approximately ninety apple cultivars are grown for commercial wholesale fruit production.^[37] Further reducing diversity, the American ethos of landscaping shifted by the 1950s to focus on a sterile backyard landscape, leading people to plant fewer apple trees outside their own front doors. 

Veteto and Stephen Carlson documented contemporary apple biodiversity in western North Carolina.^[38] They identified 450 apple varieties in the 22 orchards they visited. Significantly, most of the apple biodiversity was located in the smallest orchards. The largest orchards they visited had the least variety, which indicates that a small number of people is responsible for maintaining the vast majority of apple biodiversity. Apple biodiversity is critical to adapting to climate change; milder winters will cause apples (and other fruiting trees) to bloom earlier, putting the trees at risk for a later spring frost that will freeze the buds and effectively destroy the apple crop for that season. In 2020, a late spring frost killed nearly the entire apple harvest for central and eastern Kentucky, destroying a source of food and annual income for many farmers. Later-blooming apple varieties are especially useful because these may avoid the crop-killing frosts.

Losing these crops represents not only the loss of agrobiodiversity that allows humans to adapt to changing environments, but it also leads to the “loss of cultural knowledge, memories, and histories associated with crop diversity.”^[39] Still, restoring these varieties is possible. Contemporary apple diversity remains “in the margins”, maintained by a nebulous network of home gardeners, farmers for local markets, small commercial seed and nursery companies, and those working at historic preservation sites.^[40] Together, they seek out and maintain well-known rare cultivars as well as “yard” cultivars that are kept in people’s backyards and homesteads. 

Food Foraging and Non-Timber Forest Products in Appalachia

The forests, trees, and plants of Appalachia have been used for food as well as for medicine. These are collectively referred to as non-timber forest products (NTFPs)—products made from plant materials that include food, medicines, floral decoratives, specialty wood products, and landscaping materials. The Cherokee and other Native peoples harvested nuts from chestnut, hickory, oak, and walnut trees as well as fruits from wild cherries, plums, pawpaw, mulberry, serviceberry, and persimmon. Ramps as well as native botanicals such as bloodroot, goldenseal, ginseng, and blue cohosh contributed to medicine practices. With colonization beginning in the 1700s, settlers began to commercially sell ginseng but also used ramps, wild ginger, chestnut, hazelnut, and black walnut—all of which had corollaries in Europe—as well as sassafras, slippery elm, and may apple, for medicinal purposes.^[41]

In Appalachia today, NTFPs provide livelihood opportunities, allowing people to provision for themselves or to earn supplemental income, while also allowing people to connect with the land in sustainable ways.^[42] Given the reduction in employment in major industries like coal and timber, such economic opportunities are critical to Appalachian economies. People in Appalachia harvest NTFPs for multiple reasons, primarily to diversify their income for themselves and their community, but also to connect with nature including to increase sustainability or take advantage of forest resources, to find personal fulfillment whether through new learning or enjoying the outdoors, and finally to connect with community members. Among current NTFP harvesters, there is worry that younger generations will rely less directly on NTFPs as they in general rely less on the land, thus leading to loss of this harvesting knowledge as older generations age. 

Ginseng

One particularly well-known forest medicine is ginseng (Panax sp.). Ginseng is one of the world’s most popular health supplements. In Chinese medicine, ginseng is thought to stimulate the flow of chi, or life energy. Ginseng demonstrates how Appalachian foodways are part of globalization. Ko Shing Street in Hong Kong is the world’s main market for American ginseng. Kristin Johansson reported that over 300 tons of American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius), primarily from Midwestern farms and Appalachian hollers, were sold there in 2000.^[43] While ginseng was historically valued by Indigenous and European settlers, it is its global value to Japanese, Korean, and Chinese markets that make it “Green Gold,” fetching between $200-$500 per pound or even $1000 for an especially perfect root. 

Figure 3. Immature ginseng flowers in a forest in north-central West Virginia. Ginseng, a popular health supplement, is valued as a non-timber forest product in parts of Appalachia. Due to loss of mature forests as well as opportunistic harvesting, ginseng populations are in decline. Photo by Amanda Green (CC-BY-NC-ND).

Ginseng is the most valuable non-timber forest product in the world, and it brings in $24 million in American exports each year.^[44] Ginseng harvesting became regulated in 1983 with fines and imprisonment threatened to those who harvest out of season. Ginseng is incredibly difficult to cultivate; it sprouts from seed a year and a half after falling to the ground, and it grows slowly over several years before it can be harvested. It also requires a particular ecology to succeed: forty days of below-freezing temperatures and soil that is moist and well-drained. Strip mining operations in Appalachia over the past decades have destroyed thousands of acres of wild ginseng habitat, contributing significantly to the lack of ginseng available for harvest. According to Mary Hufford, this loss of habitat through large industrial strip mining operations erases from public awareness the environmental pressures that also destroy ginseng habitat and instead blames ginseng harvesters for the decline.^[45]

Food Insecurity in Appalachia

In Appalachian states, food insecurity occurs at a higher rate than the 2022 U.S. national average of 17.3%.^[46] Food insecurity occurs at two levels. Low food security occurs when an individual reports reduced quality, variety, or desirability in their diet. Very low food security, or hunger, occurs when an individual reports reduced food intake as well as reduced weight.^[47] Food insecurity in the U.S. often requires households to make trade-offs between important basic needs, such as housing or medical bills, and purchasing nutritionally adequate foods. Many food advocates argue that the food security concept should be replaced with the food sovereignty or food justice concepts to focus on equity and restoration of local control and access over the food system rather than just provisioning emergency food. 

Appalachian Kentucky has the highest rate of poverty of all states in Appalachia at 25.6%. Accompanying that poverty, in eastern Kentucky counties, food insecurity rates range between 15-25% with Harlan, Pike, Bell, Martin, and other counties hovering around 24%.^[48] In 2018, West Virginia ranked eleventh in food insecurity and ninth in poverty in the nation. Those West Virginia counties bordering eastern Kentucky also experience higher rates of food insecurity, between 14% to 22.5% in Mingo and McDowell Counties. In western Virginia, those counties bordering eastern Kentucky and West Virginia also experience higher food insecurity rates at 17-18%. Similarly, in Tennessee, food insecurity rates are higher in the Appalachian region at 15-17%.^[49] Health indicators across the U.S., including rates of cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and diabetes, are higher in Appalachian counties than elsewhere. Food access is one contributor to these poor health outcomes, as only 19% of Appalachian residents eat the daily recommended intake of fruits and vegetables (compared with 23.4% of Americans nationwide).^[50]

At the structural level, the food environment creates barriers to healthy food access for many Appalachian residents. These forces include the decline in family farms, the closure of many local grocery stores, the distance to grocery stores and other providers of fresh produce, the prevalence of fast-food outlets and convenience stores as opposed to full-service groceries, as well as low population density, geographic isolation, and persistent poverty. Combined, all of these variables create what is known as a food desert. Interpersonal influences also impact diet, as the norms and attitudes of a community and community organizations (such as churches) can influence eating habits. Moreover, media and advertising have a documented impact on food choices, particularly with children. To rebuild a healthier food environment, many food justice advocates argue that the region should return to its Appalachian traditions of farming and gardening. The long history of small farms and home gardens is a cultural value in much of Appalachia and may represent one way to increase access to fresh fruits and vegetables.^[51]

The school nutrition environment strongly influences children’s nutritional status. Children may consume up to one third of their daily food intake at school, and schools serve as a strong source of learning about nutrition and diet through classroom instruction and peers. Deborah Crooks researched the nutrition environment at an eastern Kentucky elementary school in the 1990s where 76% of the children qualified for free or reduced price meals.^[52] At one elementary school, the largest income-generating activity (approximately $7000-$8000 dollars annually) was the sale of snack foods from the “snack room” with shelves filled with mostly candy and chips as well as crackers and granola bars and a soft drink machine. School administrators know that candy, pop, and chips sold best, and they consider the extra money vital to the functioning of the school’s programming, from purchasing supplies for teachers to paying for school enrichment programming for poorer children. Crooks characterizes this enterprise as “trading nutrition for education” as schools prioritize funding these programs over constructing a more nutritious food environment.^[53] As a result, school children experience higher rates of obesity, they consume more low-quality diets, and snacks are likely displacing more nutritious foods in their diets. Since the 1990s, major shifts have occurred in the school food environment as there is greater recognition of the ways that childhood food environments influence food behaviors into adulthood.

Wild Game Harvesting and Food Insecurity in Appalachia

Jonathan Hall and co-authors explore the role of wild food provisioning as a possible way to address food insecurity in West Virginia.^[54] Wild game in West Virginia and the surrounding states includes white-tailed deer, sika deer, elk, black bear, and wild or feral hogs. In comparison with its six surrounding states (Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland), West Virginia had the second lowest game harvest during the 2012-2017 data collection period, approximately 10 million pounds of game meat per year, of which 96% was white-tailed deer. However, West Virginia had the highest amount of game meat available for each resident, and the harvest of game meat is significantly higher than local domestic meat production (such as cattle). The data indicate that the wild game harvests in West Virginia “are enough to meet the red meat consumption needs of 10% of any state’s food insecure population.”^[55] In fact, in McDowell County an average annual harvest of wild game is enough red meat to feed the entire county for five years. Hall and co-authors suggest that wild game provisioning in West Virginia should be explored as an option to build food security. Currently, the West Virginia Hunters Helping the Hungry program takes meat donations from hunters and distributes them through two food banks (Mountaineer Food Bank and Facing Hunger Foodbank).^[56] From 2012 to 2017, they distributed 151,513 pounds of venison (approximately .25 percent of the 60 million pounds harvested over that time). This program could be a large area of research in Appalachia to understand how individuals and households rely on wild game to provision their families through informal food economies. 

Conclusion

Appalachian agriculture and food systems have changed significantly, from the early development of horticulture during the Mississippian period to the expansion of agriculture with the Cherokee and early settler farmers. These early communities were responsible for developing Appalachia’s immense agrobiodiversity and building food systems based on small-scale agriculture, foraging, and the harvesting of non-timber forest products, in response to and resistance to processes of globalization, colonization, and the expansion of coal mining and timbering. Today, a small cadre of seedkeepers, farmers, and food activists are responsible for maintaining Appalachia’s diverse food system. Many food systems professionals look to Appalachia’s agricultural and foraging heritage to solve some of its most pressing issues, including preventing food insecurity and developing new economic opportunities.

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