October 30, 2017 The Nation. 31
ers and advocates to reclaim an integral piece
of Appalachian identity. But expansion not-
withstanding, this burgeoning food move-
ment is still in its nascent stages. It’s difficult
to know the precise effect that it will have on
the regional economy—whether it will se-
cure a real, independent future for a region
that sorely needs one, or whether its poten-
tial will be stymied by national forces beyond
its control. And linking it to tourism, as the
ARC does, may perpetuate rather than re-
solve the region’s doomed relationship with
extractive capitalism.
C
oal may be declining, but in
some respects it may never
really die. The industry has
imprinted itself deeply in
Appalachia’s bones, both by
degrading its natural resources and by
facilitating the concentration of land own-
ership. Anthony Flaccavento, a farmer in
Washington County, Virginia, and a for-
mer Democratic candidate for Congress,
says that while most mine land will never
be “prime agricultural land...that doesn’t
mean that the downstream effects of strip
mining and even some deep mining didn’t
impact water resources. Because
we know it did.” Among these
effects, Flaccavento says, is the
contamination of streams and
water sources and the dumping
of “overburden,” the soil and rock
that has been removed for the
purposes of mining.
The actions of industries like
coal—timber is another culprit—
also makes land difficult for would-
be farmers to obtain. A significant
portion of Appalachian land is still
owned by people and corporations
that aren’t actually based in the
area. “Broadly speaking, anywhere
from a third to three-quarters of the land in
some counties is owned by outside indus-
tries,” says historian Elizabeth Catte, au-
thor of the forthcoming What You Are Get-
ting Wrong About Appalachia. The situation
is improving, she adds; in West Virginia,
for example, much of the land is shifting
from absentee to in-state ownership. But
inequities remain. “You can’t get a fair mar-
ket value of the land because people value
the land so much,” Catte says.
Lundy sees a similar problem in western
North Carolina, where she lives, though it
can’t be pinned entirely on the coal or tim-
ber industry. Farmers “can’t buy additional
land,” she says, “because it’s priced for
people who want to build second homes—
people who largely come into the region for
a limited period of time.”
This hints at one of the chief dilemmas
inherent in the prospect of food as the driver
of an economic renaissance. The region
needs tourists, and as Asheville, North Caro-
lina, has discovered, a food scene draws them
in. But in order to grow that food—even the
traditional Appalachian crops that thrive on
small-scale farms and gardens—you need
land, and those same tourists complicate an
already difficult market for it. Farmers also
need to make a living, which means they have
to charge certain prices for their food. “It’s
a dilemma,” Flaccavento admits, but adds:
“We were pretty conscious of the critique of
the local-food movement and the organic-
food movement as being for the elites.”
Flaccavento says that in addition to
Whitesburg’s Farmacy program, the farm-
ers’ markets in Abingdon and St. Paul, Vir-
ginia, accept EBT, and that despite the ob-
stacles, the interest in farming continues to
grow—and so does the demand for healthy
food. “If you took a snapshot of West Vir-
ginia, southwest Virginia, east Tennessee,
and Kentucky now compared to 20 years
ago, it’s a pretty dramatic difference,” Flac-
cavento says. “There’s a lot more
farming going on.” Many of these
new farmers, he notes, are young
people who either hail from Ap-
palachia or move there as adults.
“The market demand for [healthy
food] is not what it is on the out-
skirts of, say, Philadelphia,” he
adds, “but it’s pretty substantial.”
“Is food the solution to Appala-
chia’s problem?” Lundy asks rhe-
torically. “No—food is a piece you
have to weave a larger net around.
But it’s there, and it’s this wonderful
thing that we have. We’ve got to be
careful not to have it extracted from
us, but we can cultivate it in a way that feeds
tourists as well as the people who live here.”
Food is the story of the people who in-
vented it, and for Appalachia, it’s a definitive
rebuttal to tired stereotypes. Its renaissance
here tells us something else: If the region’s
economic transition falters, it will be be-
cause of failures in federal policy—a refusal
to raise the minimum wage and to expand
access to health care—and not because of
Appalachia’s cultural deficiencies. There are
no trash people, and there is no trash food.
There are only trash politics. Q“Powerful,
important”
—Publishers Weekly
“Will make your
at the blood boil
inhumanity of people
who knew they were
killing patients by the
thousands and kept
right on...a powerful
human story that is
hard to put down and
will be even harder to
forget.”—David Cay Johnston
—Douglas Starr
“Well-written,
gripping...”
rutgersuniversitypress.org
“We don’t
live in
a food
desert.
We live
in a food
swamp.”
— Lora Smith,
co-founder of the
Appalachian
Food SummitSarah Jones is a staff writer for the New Republic,
where she covers politics and culture. She is origi-
nally from Washington County, Virginia.