A TASTE OF APPALACHIA
Food culture tied to the land
Where some see stereotypes, author Ronni Lundy sees wisdom and resourcefulness. She views her connections to the southern Appalachian Mountains as a “beautiful and remarkable gift.”
In Victuals (Clarkson Potter, 2016), she explores the ties between the land and the people who rely on its bounty.
As it turns out, Lundy writes, her people were right about victuals all along — in pronunciation (viddles), practice and sentiment.
Lundy drove nearly 6,500 kilometres meeting farmers, seed savers, chefs, home cooks and shop owners throughout Kentucky, West Virginia, southern Ohio, northern Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina.
In 2008, she began to see evidence of an exciting food movement and spent the next six years “testing her assumptions.”
In researching and writing Victuals, her fourth book, Lundy found that “those beliefs were indeed valid”— something special was happening.
“I saw potential for this movement very early on. And what was gratifying to me was to discover that it was far deeper than I had even realized at the outset. It’s gotten broader and fuller,” she says. “What I discovered is that underneath the chef and restaurant stories, there are still these very powerful farm, community, and family stories going on. And that was wonderful.”
Born in Corbin, a railroad town in Kentucky, Lundy grew up in Louisville. Although her family moved away from the mountains, she says they never fully left. Like many who were forced to leave to find work in the 20th century’s “many hillbilly diasporas,” they returned whenever they could.
Besides representing varied cultural influences, central and southern Appalachia is also North America’s most diverse foodshed. From practices such as canning, seed saving and grafting fruit trees to hunting and foraging, human activity in the area has contributed to the retention of agrobiodiversity.
“People are still growing foods from seeds that their family has kept through generations. …
“The people of the southern Appalachians have continued farming, hunting and foraging practices that they learned from Native Americans. And some of which they brought here from Europe, that were traditions of not just exhausting a food source. But nurturing the crops or nurturing the forest and not killing off all of the animals.”
The people of the southern Appalachians have continued farming, hunting and foraging practices that they learned from Native Americans.