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Appalachia on the Table

By UNC Asheville

April 5^th, 2024

By Hannah Epperson ‘11 MLAS ‘18

Photos by Nate Burrows

It’s no secret that Asheville has a reputation for good food. Mention to anyone that you live here and you’ll likely hear a response along the lines of, “Oh, I love Asheville! We went there last year and ate at (insert latest hot restaurant here).”

And no wonder. Two Asheville restaurants received James Beard Awards (think the Oscars of food) in 2022 alone. In 2023, Travel + Leisure called Asheville one of the best food cities in the country, and Tripadvisor ranked Asheville in their top 10 list of Best Food Destinations in the United States. Local chefs have put their skills on display on cooking competition shows on Netflix, HBOMax and Bravo. Asheville has billed itself as a “Foodtopia” for a decade, emphasizing the city’s innovative chefs and fresh, farm-to-table fare.

But there’s more to Asheville’s culinary story than award-winning restaurants and appearances on the Food Network. The history of our region’s food, and that food’s reputation, is complex and at times surprising. Uncovering and exploring that history has become the passion of Erica Abrams Locklear, Thomas Howerton Distinguished Professor of Humanities and professor of English at UNC Asheville, who recently published “Appalachia on the Table: Representing Mountain Food & People.”

“Appalachia on the Table” recently won the prestigious Weatherford Award for best nonfiction book of 2023. The award is given by the Appalachian Studies Association (ASA) and Berea College to published works that “best illuminate the problems, personalities, and unique qualities of the Appalachian South.”

“I am humbled and tremendously grateful: this award is the biggest in my field,” Abrams Locklear said. “To receive this level of recognition from people whose work I use and admire is the highest compliment.”

Previous winners include literary and scholarly greats such as Lee Smith, Ron Rash, Denise Giardina, Crystal Wilkinson, Charles Frazier, Robert Gipe, our own Wiley Cash ’00, Henry Shapiro, Ronald Eller, Helen Lewis, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

“‘Appalachia On The Table’ offers a new and important way of understanding Appalachian representation through food and people’s perceptions of it,” said Meredith McCarroll, writer, past president of the ASA, and one of the awards’ judges.

“While this is a book about food and representation, it is also a history and a cultural analysis that uses food to read a region. This duality sets the book apart and makes it especially effective. Viewed together, these chapters make clear the portrayal of Appalachian food across the centuries, adding a layer of understanding in both the conversations about Appalachian representation and Appalachian foodways.”

A Food Transformation

Abrams Locklear grew up just outside of Asheville in Leicester and returned to the area in 2008 to teach at UNC Asheville.

“I began to notice that people were talking about mountain food, and items that would’ve been considered uncouth or shameful in my growing-up years were suddenly popular,” Abrams Locklear said.

Foods once seen as humble or even inferior, like cornbread or ramps, now had a celebrated place on the menu—and a price tag to match.

“That was a driving question. How did this transformation happen?”

That question sent Abrams Locklear poring through travel literature, old hotel menus, and even her grandmother’s cookbook.

“There's a certain set of foods associated with the mountains in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and with a particular kind of mountaineer,” Abrams Locklear found—foods like poke sallet, creasy greens, or leather britches. Those foods–and the people who ate them—were typically portrayed as “coarse,” unhealthy, and impoverished.

“Food carries social meaning with it, and the food that people consume can be used as justification to denigrate or admire those people,” Abrams Locklear said. “The cuisine of a region or a people can also be targeted as an area for uplift if it's found lacking in some way. Food and food culture carry connotations not only about hygiene and culinary know-how, but also about morality and ethics.”

These portrayals of mountain food and people helped solidify the image of Appalachia as a region in need, especially during the Progressive Era reform movements of the late 1800s and early 1900s, as well as during President Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s.

“Stereotypes about the region became embedded in the national narrative, and because it's such a deeply entrenched idea, it pops up again at different points in history,” Abrams Locklear explained. “It was very much in the public conversation during the War on Poverty as well as more recently, during the Trump years.”

Room at the Table

There are, of course, any number of issues with the stereotypical portrayals of mountain food that became so pervasive in the national narrative about Appalachia. One is the frequent association of these foods, and their origins, with white settlers.

“Many of the foods associated with Appalachia have Indigenous roots or have connections to African-American communities or immigrant communities in the coal fields,” Abrams Locklear explained. “It's a much more complicated story.”

“Corn is a prime example,” she continued. “If you ask people, ‘what's a food you associate with Appalachia?’ they'll usually say ‘cornbread and soup beans.’”

Those foods are likely to conjure images of a white, lanky mountaineer with a corncob pipe and a moonshine jug.

“I think very rarely, unless you are an Indigenous person, do you envision the Corn Mother, Selu, or think about the three sisters, corn, beans and squash,” Abrams Locklear said. “But that pre-contact food is the essence of Appalachian food.”

Another Appalachian staple, sorghum, is a sweetener made from a grass that originated in Africa, and only came to the United States in the 1850s.

“This historic whitewashing is clearly an issue. And now these foods are being celebrated in unprecedented ways. On one hand, that celebration is marvelous; this long overdue veneration highlights delicious food, as well as culinary skill, neither of which were previously included in earlier representations,” Abrams Locklear said. “On the other hand, I also think there's a danger here; there's an impulse to curate lists of foods that ‘count’ as Appalachian. Such lists can carry implied meanings with ethnic and racial connotations that can be exclusionary, even when that’s not the intention.”

Abrams Locklear recommends staying curious about the foods you find on those restaurant menus. Enjoy them and ask questions about them. Celebrating Appalachian food means remembering that those foods, just like the Appalachian region itself, is rich, diverse, and worth further exploration.

GLOSSARY:

Creasy greens: also called upland cress, a wild green with a peppery taste

Leather britches: string beans dried in the pod that are rehydrated before cooking; also called shucky beans

Poke sallet: a dish made by sauteing young pokeweed leaves (toxic unless properly prepared!)

Ramps: a wild allium with a strong flavor and pungent odor

Sorghum: similar to molasses, a syrup made from a grass that originated in Africa

Soup beans: pinto beans traditionally cooked with ham hock

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