Appalachian Food Story Archives - Page 2 of 2 - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Shepherd University’s Tabler Farm Planting Eco-Friendly Food Forest

A tree planting for a food forest is scheduled this weekend at Shepherd University’s Tabler Farm, where volunteers can help plant edible species native to Appalachia.

“This region that we live in, Appalachia, is a really unique region in the world. It’s very, very highly biodiverse. And it is filled with edible species for humans,” Tabler Farm Coordinator Madison Hale said. “Food forests are really popular right now, but I was specifically wanting to focus on native trees just to highlight the unique ecosystem here.”

A food forest is a created ecosystem of edible plants for food production, mirroring how the plants are found in nature. They act as alternatives to annual crop production that are seen as more ecologically healthy and easier to maintain.

Hale oversees programs at the farm through the school’s environmental studies department, which helps train farmers in sustainable agriculture practices. This particular food forest program comes from a grant from the Cacapon Institute, an ecological conservation group.

Some of the species set to be planted at the forest include sugar maple, witch-hazel, hackberry and spicebush. Persimmons, serviceberries and redbuds were planted during last year’s event.

“There’s a wide range, there’s probably about 20 species that I know of that we could potentially incorporate into this food forest,” Hale said. “And we’re really just receiving whatever is available through the nurseries that Cacapon Institute works with.”

Hale said food forests aren’t just environmentally friendly. The act of planting them gives locals the chance to learn about native tree species and how they fit into the regional culture.

“I think by working with native species, you’re just helping foster that connection with people to the natural world,” Hale said.

The planting event runs Saturday, Oct. 8 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Tabler Farm in Shepherdstown. Information on how to sign up is available on the school’s event website.

Hand Pies: Appalachian Chefs Give Global Food a Local Twist

Fried apple pies, empanadas, Cornish pasties, and samosas are all products of different food traditions, but they share something in common: they’re all hand pies.

A hand pie is a simply constructed “pocket food” made of a filling wrapped in dough. Hand pies can be savory or sweet, fried or baked, and some are sprinkled with sugar. Inside Appalachia Folkways reporter Kelley Libby found that with inspiration and local ingredients, hand-pie makers in Appalachia are getting creative.

A Commercial Success

One of the most popular hand pies in Appalachia is the fried apple pie. Commonly found in convenience stores and at fairs and festivals, the fried apple pie is often served in a paper bag or a cardboard sleeve. Some commercial operations are selling hand pies online.

Dale Mackey of Dale’s Fried Pies in Knoxville, Tennessee, began her commercial operation from a food cart at farmer’s markets and festivals. Mackey said in the beginning, when she was first frying and selling her apple pie variety, she used fresh apples. But then advice started rolling in from customers whose older relatives had used dried apples. So she tried it.

“It ended up making this much more rich, apple butter consistency, more concentrated in the flavor, in the sweetness and the spice,” said Mackey. “And I really was like, ‘Okay, they were right! This one’s the better classic apple pie.’ And so now our main apple flavor—best seller by far—is made with dried apples just because that’s what folks were wanting.”

Now Mackey sells her fried pies nationwide online, and the varieties go beyond apple.

“We do kind of traditional flavors like apple and peach and cherry, and funkier flavors like banana nutella or like a chili mango with cardamom cream cheese, or curried sweet potato. We have a mac-and-cheese pie, a chicken and waffles pie. Whatever you can put in a pie I can try it!”

The unbaked pies being made are some green tomato/mock apple hand pies with a buckwheat crust.

Making Hand Pies Using What’s On Hand

For some cooks, what goes in a hand pie is sometimes just what’s in season.

“Thinking of this season being hunting season, I love to make this braised venison hand pie,” said chef and farmer Mike Costello of Lost Creek Farm in Harrison County, West Virginia. “I really love this smoked rabbit hand pie with some chanterelle mushrooms. It’s amazing, it’s like in the summertime when chanterelles are at their peak.”

Costello said he likes to use ingredients that are on hand—he also made basil and peach hand pies during the summer season. He said he appreciates that some older Appalachian food traditions came out of a need to be thrifty.

“When you think about some of these food traditions that came out of those hard times, they’re incredibly rich and beautiful and they’re the product not of desperation but of innovation and ingenuity,” he said.

Hand pies aren’t uniquely Appalachian; pocket foods are found all over the world. And the cuisine of Appalachia has long been influenced by immigrants. Take for instance a kind of hand pie called pasties, which are meat pies that were brought to America by Cornish miners. Costello said hand pies demonstrate the ways Appalachia is always changing.

“And the fact that you can go to more places in West Virginia, more bakeries today, and buy empanadas than you can what many people think of as traditional apple hand pies—I think that says a lot about how the food traditions are always changing,” said Costello.

A Blend of Cultures

Peach and basil hand pies from chef Mike Costello.

Pamela Delaude of Bridgeport, West Virginia, has been a chef for eight years and worked in kitchens for 25. Delaude said when she cooks, she draws inspiration from her home country of Peru and from Italy where she has family. Then she mixes those influences with local ingredients.

“I love empanadas,” said Delaude. “Empanadas, you can make it with everything. Just use your creativity. You can eat it cold, warm, you can eat it hot, you can eat it baked, you can eat it fried. Doesn’t matter, it’s always good.”

Delaude once made catfish empanadas using fish from a West Virginia farm. She was inspired by one of her favorite Peruvian dishes, ceviche, a dish made with raw fish cured in citrus and spices.

“That was my inspiration,” she said. “The two cultures, put them together in one dish.”

That mixing of cultures in one dish may be the most Appalachian thing about Appalachian hand pies. They are a blend of simplicity and ingenuity, old and new, tradition and change.

Music in this story is by Blue Dot Sessions and Tim Marema. This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council. The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation.

Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.

Is Food the Key to This Small Pennsylvania Town’s Economic Revival?

Lincoln Avenue slices Bellevue down its belly, the only break in the borough’s neat rows of Queen Annes, Colonial Revivals and Craftsmans.

The town climbs a hillside along the Ohio River, just six miles north of Pittsburgh. During a 90-year stretch, beginning with the streetcar boom of the 1890s and ending with the decline of steel in the 1980s, the avenue offered residents every shop and service they could ever need in a tightly packed, half-mile stretch. Markets and movie theaters. Bakeries and dress boutiques. Isaly’s and ice cream.

But by 2013, when Judy McAuley opened the Happy Baby Company, a children’s boutique, in the avenue’s 500 block, the Bellevue boom had long ago busted. The stately single family homes had been chopped into apartments, and Lincoln Avenue’s quaint shopping district had been overrun by pizza shops, dentist offices and insurance companies.

Like many Ohio River towns, Bellevue’s economic decline resulted in higher taxes and a dwindling population. Its current population of 8,300 is about half of what it was at the peak 60 years ago.

Crystal Bradley writes while waiting for friends at the Cyclops Cafe on Lincoln Avenue in Bellevue, PA on Tuesday, November 20, 2018.

Despite the borough’s challenges and the nation’s tough retail climate, McAuley reluctantly renewed the lease on her downtown property last summer.

“I’ve been feeling like Bellevue’s been improving, not declining,” McAuley said.

And she’s hopeful that two new restaurants, the upscale Revival on Lincoln and the more relaxed Lincoln Avenue Brewery, will serve as the catalysts for revitalization, transforming the dilapidated downtown into a destination.

Executive Chef Jamie Sola preps food in the kitchen of the Revival Grill on Lincoln Avenue in Bellevue, PA on Tuesday, November 20, 2018. Photo: David Smith/100 Days in Appalachia

It’s happened in other Pittsburgh neighborhoods, to varying degrees and acclaim, over the past decade. The food-driven renaissance in East Liberty and Lawrenceville led to Zagat naming Pittsburgh the country’s No. 1 food city in 2015. But it also drove home values so high that many residents were priced out. In Braddock on Pittsburgh’s southeast side, the poverty rate still hovers around 30 percent and many residents remain food insecure despite the neighborhood being home to Superior Motors, one of Food & Wine’s 2018 Restaurants of the Year.

Bellevue’s location—a quick, 15-minute drive from Pittsburgh—affordability and walkability make it ripe for a resurgence. But right now, the town is still living in the gap between “better than it was” and “not yet all it could be,” leaving residents and business owners like McAuley wondering whether this future built on a foundation of food is a recipe for success or disaster.

“We’re in ‘go big or go home’ mode now,” McAuley said. “I’m trying really hard to stick it out and see what these restaurants do for foot traffic. It’s really hard to think about closing when you look at all the cool stuff happening around us.”

New in Town

Amy and Joel Haldeman moved to Bellevue eight years ago, lured by the borough’s pedestrian-friendly layout and downtown business district. They soon found, though they loved their meandering strolls down tree-lined streets, their arrival at the business district was underwhelming.

“How do you say dead without saying dead?” Joel Haldeman asked.

They decided they wanted to be part of the solution. So they bought a property at the corner of Lincoln and Hawley avenues and partnered with their friends, lifelong Bellevue residents Lisa and Grant Saylor, to launch Lincoln Avenue Brewery, a cozy and slightly industrial hangout for Bellevue’s beer connoisseurs. In a nod to the town’s growing number of homebrewers, the brewery will also offer a program for some of the best locals to scale up their operations and offer their product on tap. It’s slated to open this winter.

The exterior of the soon-to-open Lincoln Avenue Brewery on Lincoln Avenue in Bellevue, PA on Tuesday, November 20, 2018.

Bringing a brewery to Bellevue once would have been impossible. The town only lifted its ban on alcohol in 2015, eight decades after the end of prohibition.

A flatbread pizza from the Revival Grill on Lincoln Avenue in Bellevue, PA on Tuesday, November 20, 2018.

Grant Saylor, who also sits on borough council and the community development corporation board, was an early advocate for alcohol after watching several Lincoln Avenue restaurants—including Pizzeria Regina Margherita and Vivo—flee the borough for wet towns with better foot traffic.

“A good business district should have a certain percentage of its storefronts occupied by restaurants,” Saylor said. “We were very skewed the opposite way. Part of that was driven by the fact that Bellevue was a dry community.”

Several blocks north at Revival on Lincoln—a high-end eatery located in a turn-of-the-century, former funeral home—co-owner Chris Driscoll says his restaurant wouldn’t exist if Bellevue hadn’t lifted the ban.

“You can’t open a restaurant like this without a liquor license,” Driscoll said. “There’s no way any of this works without it.”

Driscoll and co-owner, former chef John King, opened Revival on Lincoln in early November. In a nod to Bellevue’s heyday, and in keeping with the Classical Revival-style of the historic building, they left the floor plan and details virtually untouched. The open foyer, hardwood floors and stained-glass windows are all original, and the building is set to be added to the National Register of Historic Places next year.

The Revival Grill on Lincoln Avenue in Bellevue, PA on Tuesday, November 20, 2018.

Patrons have already traveled from outlying Pittsburgh suburbs like Sewickley and the South Hills to get a glimpse of the interior and try Chef Jamie Sola’s take on shrimp & grits and fried bologna & cheese. Driscoll always envisioned Revival as a destination restaurant—there’s only one other high-end restaurant between Sewickley and downtown Pittsburgh after all—so he’s pleased with the diverse clientele, but he also knows his restaurant resides in an economically depressed town.

Owner Chris Driscoll in the dining room of the Revival Grill on Lincoln Avenue in Bellevue, PA on Tuesday, November 20, 2018.

“We made it a point to keep our price point affordable,” Driscoll said.

Entrees are priced between $13 and $34; brunch plates go for $11 to $25. That’s lower than Pittsburgh’s top restaurants, but still out of range for many residents who are used to frequenting Lincoln Avenue stalwarts like Joe’s Rusty Nail, where $12 gets you a stuffed chicken breast, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, green beans, a house salad and a bread basket.

Sustainable Growth

Shortly after taking office in May 2018, Bellevue Mayor Emily Marburger created the Sustainable Growth and Inclusiveness Committee, a group of active community members who are thrilled with Bellevue’s sudden foodie status, but want to ensure responsible growth.

Lincoln Avenue Brewery and Revival on Lincoln aren’t the only newcomers to Lincoln Avenue. Grille 565, located across the street from the Happy Baby Company, bought the town’s first liquor license, and 202 Hometown Tacos is scheduled to open near Revival in December.

“Bellevue is on the cusp, and I do believe that the new restaurants will thrive here,” Marburger said. “But there is still so much food insecurity in Bellevue. I don’t want socio-economic barriers to prevent people from eating in those restaurants.”

Case in point: The Center of Bellevue ministry center, located across the street from Lincoln Avenue Brewery, offers a free meal to residents every Monday. The last time Marburger attended, hundreds showed up.

Another ministry, The Shepherd’s Door, provides a backpack full of free snacks and meals to children every Friday so they don’t go hungry through the weekend. More than 55 percent of students at the Northgate School District, which serves Bellevue and neighboring Avalon, are eligible for free or reduced school lunches.

A woman and child cross Lincoln Avenue in Bellevue, PA on Tuesday, November 20, 2018.

Marburger is also conscious of rising property values. About 60 percent of Bellevue residents are renters, and it’s not unusual to find a decent place for $500 per month. But Marburger worries that could change as restaurants thrive, spurring developers to purchase older apartment buildings, completely renovate them and hike prices.

When Amy and Joel Haldeman bought the brewery building, they also inherited five upper-floor apartments. Though their building renovations justified a price increase, they purposefully kept rent stagnant.

“It’s such a hard and complicated issue,” Amy Haldeman said. “There’s the part where you want to see values and prices increase, then there’s the other part where you really have to care about people.”

Marburger has fewer concerns about home ownership. Though housing values have risen about 7 percent in the past year, the prices are surprisingly affordable considering Bellevue’s walkability and proximity to Pittsburgh. The median home price is still an affordable $135,000, compared to $171,000 in Pennsylvania, leaving room for growth without inciting a housing crisis.

“No one’s aiming to be Lawrenceville,” Driscoll said, alluding to the Pittsburgh suburb’s skyrocketing real estate prices, driven, largely, by the influx of top-tier restaurants.

“I want to do my part to make Bellevue as good as it can possibly be. It’s a good place, and I think it could be a great place. A lot of the elements are there. I think [Revival on Lincoln] could help spark something.”

Lincoln Avenue Brewery’s Lisa Saylor has the same aspirations.

“Bellevue is home and, when you love your home, you want to improve it,” she said. “I want to bring back the vibrancy we all know used to be here.”

April Johnston is an award-winning freelance writer and podcaster based in Pittsburgh. Contact her through her sites apriljohnston.net and nebbypittsburgh.com

Food editor Mike Costello shares his vision for Appalachian food. (It's complicated.)

“Food is political but not partisan.” This apt perspective came from Mike Costello in a conversation earlier this year as we imagined ways to expand 100 Days in Appalachia beyond political coverage, and he joined the team to lead our reporting on food and culture for the region. Mike has long been one of my favorite Appalachians — a printmaker, fiddler, storyteller, satirist, photographer, square dance caller, restorator, entrepreneur, food historian, gardener, forager, hunter … and brilliant chef. Mike is co-owner of Lost Creek Farm with his partner, Amy Dawson, and has led pop-up dinners throughout the region as a form of place-based, cultural performance. His storytelling dinners are so much more than meals, and we know his work for 100 Days in Appalachia will be about so much more than food.

The rest of the world will get a glimpse of Mike through Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, when it airs tonight, but as 100 Days in Appalachia likes to remind our readers … there is always more to the story. Here Mike talks about his experience with “Parts Unknown” and shares his unique vision for what he’s dubbed “The Seed Swap,” a collaborative way to tell Appalachia’s complex economic, political, cultural and human stories through food.

— Dana Coester, Executive Editor

This evening CNN’s “Parts Unknown” airs, and for a few minutes of the show, Anthony Bourdain is at Lost Creek Farm. You have what some might think is a surprising reaction to being featured on the show.

It’s hard to explain, but when something like this happens, you’re not just basking in publicity overnight. Sure, it’s an honor to feel like people are paying attention to your work, but it’s all pretty stressful, actually. When you’re from a place that’s been so consistently misrepresented, you feel a tremendous weight on your shoulders any time you’re picked out to represent the state and the region. In a way it’s kind of silly, because it’s out of your hands. It’s up to the editors and producers to decide how the story is framed, but you still want to do your best to make people here proud. You try really hard to tell a story that’s not just your own, but reflects some of the nuance and complexity that’s typically overlooked. It’s all a very heavy lift.

Lou and Jessie Maiuri, with Anthony Bourdain, at Lost Creek Farm during a taping of CNN’s “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.” A master seed saver, Lou, 88, passed several varieties of pole beans down to Mike Costello to grow at Lost Creek Farm.

Since September, as I’ve been thinking about this show, I’ve become very much aware of the pressure we put on ourselves when something like this happens. It’s so rare that national media asks us to tell our own stories, rather than showing up with a preconceived narrative and picking out characters to fit. But the reality is, even with a thoughtful, respectful production team, it’s impossible to fit every story that deserves to be told into an hour-long show. “Parts Unknown” gave us an opportunity to tell a few stories we don’t normally get to tell on national television, but it’s still incomplete, and that’s what we should expect. I think sometimes we fall into this trap, feeling like every news story or profile of Appalachia should encompass everything we like and nothing we despise about this place. Obviously that’s not realistic, and it just adds to the pressure we put on ourselves. I guess you could say one of the goals of “The Seed Swap” is to alleviate some of that pressure by providing a consistent outlet for homegrown stories. If there’s an article or video that didn’t include certain people or themes, let’s write another article, let’s shoot another video. Let’s add to the conversation and point to the body of work we’re willing to establish through conversation, rather than looking at each story as a high-pressure, get-it-right-or-else scenario.

What originally spurred this idea of launching a food and culture publication with 100 Days in Appalachia?

Of course 100 Days in Appalachia came from a desire to provide counter-narratives to themes of desperation or small-mindedness among white inhabitants of “Trump Country” following the 2016 election. Obviously, those of us who live here know there’s much more to the story — layers of nuance, complexity and diversity omitted from those tired themes. 100 Days really took off, and at the same time, there was a lot more media hype around Appalachian food. Just like the media coverage around the election, Appalachian food stories are often informed by stereotypical ideas, and stories about food are about much more than ingredients and flavors. Food stories are stories about people. When Appalachian cuisine is portrayed as nothing but biscuits and gravy, deep fried snacks and moonshine, there are potentially some pretty damaging takeaways. In recent years, we’ve seen a lot of hype around Appalachian food being “trendy.” That’s certainly given rise to some Appalachian writers, chefs and other food businesses, which is really important. But from time to time it’s also had this pigeonholing effect. If you look outside the region to the way Appalachian or southern food is interpreted, you’ll quickly notice it’s the stereotypical expectation of simple mountain food, not the complete story, people are after. In this regard, there’s a lot of similarity between a D.C. area chef who says “Let’s offer something Appalachian — spam and beans in a tin can, which we’ll call ‘best darn’ something-or-other,” and an editor in New York telling a reporter, “Go to Appalachia and write a story — make it about desperate, jobless white people who still don’t regret voting for Trump.”

Why is storytelling so important to your work with food?

I think to really grasp my passion for storytelling as it relates to food, you have to understand what it’s like to grow up with derogatory portrayals of the region in your face as part of everyday life. I’m not just talking about media, although stereotypes were and still are very much present on television and in the movies. I’d see these things all around me growing up. I remember going to gift shops in or around state parks and seeing trashy kitsch like single toothpicks wrapped up with labels that said “West Virginia Toothbrush” or little figurines of barefoot, toothless moonshiners. Even through these hokey trinkets, we were telling a story about who we are to the outside world. In turn, we’re also telling that story to ourselves about how much we value our own cultural assets.

Jonathan Hall gathers wild paw paws during the “Parts Unknown” shoot at Lost Creek Farm in September 2017.

We all process these narratives in different ways. There are plenty of people I know who, because of the negative connotations around Appalachian identity, moved away and left every morsel of association with the mountains behind. I can’t really say I blame them. But for me, all of those stories inspired me to chip away at telling different stories, with the hope that one day we might be perceived differently, and that young people in Appalachia won’t have to do a risk/reward analysis over embracing place-based culture and heritage.

There are a lot of us out there now, in organizations like the Appalachian Food Summit — a broad network of chefs, farmers, food writers, food justice advocates and so many others — who are sort of on this mission to flip the narrative, and make the story about Appalachian food is one about strength and resilience, rather than shame. I think there’s a lot of good that’s possible when we take food heritage, something we’ve been conditioned to run away from in some sense, and turn it into a source of pride.

Tell us about the name, “The Seed Swap.”

This is something we put a lot of thought into for months. We wanted something that transcended racial and ethnic lines, which can be tough with food. There are certainly dishes that have more cultural overlap than others, but when we looked at certain dishes, ingredients or cooking and preservation techniques, some of them sounded pretty catchy, but with most of those we felt they left people and communities out. That’s the opposite of what we wanted to do. Somewhere in the brainstorming process, “The Seed Swap” emerged as a candidate and it really just seemed to fit. Seed swaps occur when farmers and gardeners get together to share seeds that have been saved, sometimes for many generations. Whether it’s only two home gardeners or a hundred farmers and homesteaders participating, these events represent a sense of community I’ve always considered a trademark of mountain foodways. But seed swaps really go beyond the sharing of seeds, because folks are also sharing tips and tricks they’ve learned for growing certain varieties, and they’re sharing the rich stories behind the crops themselves. Essentially, a seed swap is an exchange of ideas, opinions, information, stories — and that’s what we wanted our publication to be.

How is the name “The Seed Swap” universal?

If you look at the crops that are most closely associated with Appalachia today, even what we grow on our own farm: Fat Horse and Logan Giant pole beans, Bloody Butcher corn, Cushaw and Candy Roaster squash, they have deep roots in Appalachia and Mesoamerica before that, long before the arrival of white settlers. Throughout history, there’s been a tradition of knowledge sharing here. I think a lot about the waves of immigration into the coalfields. You had people from different backgrounds sharing knowledge and resources over gardening to survive. During the mine wars, African American families who left sharecropping arrangements and former Eastern European farm workers were segregated in many ways, but they came together to share knowledge and resources, including seeds, as an expression of solidarity. They grew and preserved food together. Those gardens really became a tool of empowerment when they had enough food on hand to extend miners’ strikes and achieve historic victories for the labor movement. I’ve also witnessed the way seeds have provided entry points into deep conversations that allow us to discover common ground. Last year, I got to hang out with some folks from Oaxaca. When they saw these varieties of bright red and blue corn we were working with, their eyes just lit up, and they started talking about corn from back home in Mexico that looked identical to the varieties we call Bloody Butcher and Blue Clarage. All of a sudden, what started out as a conversation about seeds became a broader exchange about people and place, and that was very special.

Lorelei Tenney bottles freshly boiled sorghum syrup in Tallmansville, West Virginia. Originally from the Philippines, Lorelei and her husband Donnie, a Tallmansville native, grow and process several acres of sorghum cane each fall.

What kind of content can we expect?

Over the past several months we’ve been building a team of incredibly thoughtful, talented contributors who’ll be working to produce content in a variety of media. I love sitting down to read great writing, for sure, but I really want to look at how we can use other media, too. Of course, video and audio make sense, but what are some other ways we can tell stories? We have some ideas. Stay tuned.

In terms of themes, we’re not a public relations magazine, which is often expected from food media. Some readers anticipate boastful profiles of chefs and restaurants, and reviews of products from whiskey to barbecue sauce. There’s a place for that, for sure, so I’m not disparaging existing publications, but we’re just going to be different. Will “The Seed Swap” feature farmers and chefs? Sure, but in doing so, I want to look at broader social issues affecting these individuals and their families. I really don’t care for lists so much, but I hope, if we ever run lists, they’ll look less like “Top five new, hip craft breweries that’ll knock your socks off,” more like “Community leaders share five policy ideas to improve food access in Appalachia”. If such a list comes about, we need to really dig in — to learn about the complexity of the issues and celebrate the people doing the work on the ground. And that idea, that the real heroes of our region’s food stories aren’t in restaurant kitchens, but they’re out there in their own homes and communities, doing incredible, largely unnoticed, work is a central theme to “The Seed Swap.”

Can you give us some examples of what that would look like, to look at broader issues through the stories about food or farmers or chefs?

One of the issues that comes to mind for me is access to affordable healthcare. That’s not always something people connect to food, but there are a lot of farmers and entrepreneurs who are only able to do what they do because health insurance suddenly became affordable within the past five years. Now, when we’re looking at perpetual threats to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, there’s a lot of worry and uncertainty among farmers and independent business owners about where they’ll be next year. Recently, I read an op-ed from a very conservative state official who said we needed more full-time farmers in West Virginia. That would be nice, but unless affordable health care and other facets of a certain social infrastructure are in place, it’s unrealistic to think that’s a possibility.

Another issue I think about a lot, especially this time of year during ramp season, is how extractive industry affects foodways. Right now we’re looking at several major pipeline corridors, some of which will end up in the middle of working family farms, treasured hunting grounds and ramp patches foragers have been frequenting for almost their entire lives. We’re hearing a lot about the economic boost from pipeline construction, but what do farmers and foragers stand to lose? Who’s telling their stories?

Jonathan Hall carries a freshly killed and dressed deer following a hunt at Lost Creek Farm in November 2017. Hall wrote about his experience as a black hunter in West Virginia for “Explore Parts Unknown.”

“The Seed Swap” will be a publication that largely focuses on Appalachian food, but what, exactly is Appalachian food?

It’s a tough question, and I’m not going to answer it. “The Seed Swap” won’t make an attempt to define it, either. I always say, Appalachian food is up for interpretation, because our experiences as Appalachians vary too widely to arrive at a point of consensus. I know what it means to me, and I know how the people around me have shaped my experience, but Mike Costello’s story is not the story of Appalachia. Heck, if you just talk to ten families in North Central West Virginia, you might get ten different answers as to what Appalachian food heritage means, and you’d get another ten answers about how today’s Appalachian food has evolved. It will be interesting to dig in and explore those differences, painting a broader picture of regional identity than many would expect.

Aside from exploring how we each define “Appalachian,” I hope we can look at food as more than just a combination of flavors and ingredients. These stories are really about people doing amazing work, whether around diversity and inclusion, economic development, food security and a host of other critical issues facing the region. When people hear “Appalachian food” now, they typically think of dishes they consider to be emblematic of the region’s cuisine. I’d like for the associations with Appalachian food to be about the people behind foodways work in the region, just as much as the food itself.

As a chef and journalist, I want to create an outlet that stops short of defining exactly what Appalachian food is, and recognizes that our foodways are constantly evolving with an ongoing shift in social demographics. Most importantly, I want it to legitimize Appalachians as the storytellers of our region. I don’t want to create an environment that discourages others from seeking out stories or discovering our traditions. In fact, some of the most thoughtful, sensitive, community-minded work around Appalachian food and culture is done by folks who came here as outsiders, yet they show this unwavering commitment to the region that deserves recognition. At the same time, I think there’s room to look at certain interpretations of Appalachian identity, especially when they’re commodified for economic gain outside the region, with a critical eye. Going back to the original mission of 100 Days in Appalachia, we’re very much interested in creating an outlet for stories about Appalachians, told by Appalachians.

Food editor Mike Costello (@costellowv‏) is a chef, farmer and storyteller at Lost Creek Farm in Harrison County, West Virginia. Through his cooking and writing, Mike strives to tell important stories about a misrepresented and misunderstood region he’s always called home.