Marshall University Marshall Digital Scholar Theses, Dissertations and Capstones 1-1-2013 Persistent Culinary Traditions in Rural Southern West Virginia James Seth Davidson [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://mds.marshall.edu/etd Part of the Human Geography Commons Recommended Citation Davidson, James Seth, "Persistent Culinary Traditions in Rural Southern West Virginia" (2013). Theses, Dissertations and Capstones. Paper 468. This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Marshall Digital Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses, Dissertations and Capstones by an authorized administrator of Marshall Digital Scholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. PERSISTENT CULINARY TRADITIONS IN RURAL SOUTHERN WEST VIRGINIA A thesis submitted to the Graduate College of Marshall University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Geography by James Seth Davidson Approved by Dr. James Leonard, Committee Chairperson Dr. Joshua Hagen Dr. Godwin Djietror Marshall University May 2013 Acknowledgments I would like to thank Dr. James Leonard for both his guidance in writing this thesis and in my overall enthusiasm for regional and cultural geography. I would also like to thank Dr. Dan Holbrook for a constant parade of useful resources and interesting reading material. Finally, I would like to thank my participants for creating such a vivid human backdrop for this study. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………. ii Table of Contents………………………………………………………….. iii List of Figure………………………………………………………………. iv Abstract…………………………………………………………………….. v Chapter 1 Introduction………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter 2 Literature Review………………………………………………………….. 2 Chapter 3 Appalachia as a Food Region……………………………………………… 12 Chapter 4 Methodology……………………………………………………………….. 18 Chapter 5 Primary Source Analysis and Comparison……………………………… 22 Chapter 6 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………. 41 Bibliography……………………………………………………………….. 44 Appendix A: Research Questions………………………………………… 47 Appendix B: Letter from Institutional Review Board...………………… 48 iii List of Figures Figure 1: Campbell’s Appalachia………………………………………… 3 Figure 3: ARC Map of Appalachia………………………………………. 5 Figure 4: Williams’ Appalachia…………………………………………... 6 Figure 5: RAFT Food Regions……………………………………………. 13 Figure 6: Southern WV Counties………………………………………… 19 iv Abstract The Appalachian region is home to a number of culinary traditions that are, in many ways, unique to the area. These traditions have persisted in a nation whose food ways are becoming largely homogenized. Using primary sources from Southern West Virginia such as historic cookbooks, archived newspaper articles, and personal interviews this research depicts a unique regional rural food tradition that has survived in many forms to this day. Comparisons are made to other regional rural diets, as well as well documented historic trends in traditional erosion as seen at the national urban and suburban levels, to support not only the historic food traditions but their impact on the evolution of the Appalachia diet. v Chapter 1 Introduction Appalachia holds pockets of traditionally and economically isolated people who adapted methods of food preparation and consumption that were unique in many ways as compared to adjacent regions. This area is primarily rural, like much of American during the first half of the twentieth century, and relied on local food practices. Though a general remoteness helped to maintain these rural methods for generations, there have been steady erosions in traditional practices, similar in many respects to movements experienced throughout the United States. This erosion has been influenced by a number of factors such as industrialization, market forces, globalization, and consumerism, to varying degrees. The coalfields of Southern West Virginia, for example, were generally slower to adopt new patterns of consumption due to a number of variables. These variables allowed the rural region to longer maintain a food tradition dissimilar to America’s urban processes. Southern West Virginia culinary traditions have been shaped less by ethnic backgrounds and influences and more by the manner in which a group localized people attempted to feed themselves. The term “traditional” culinary practice encompasses methods of raising, obtaining, and preparing foods and also to the specific food items used within this geographic region that housed a number of differing groups. Although Appalachian cuisine exhibits many similarities to the national base diet, methods of production, preparation, and food item availability played a significant role in shaping the regional food ways. 1 Chapter 2 Literature Review Regional geography has long been a staple of geographic inquiry. Geographer Robert Platt (1957) calls the regional method the “heart of geography,” pointing out that systematic geography deals with something about every part of the world as opposed to regional geography which deals with everything about some part of the world. Although this statement may seem a very simplistic explanation of the regional method, it points toward a manner of inquiry that can be used as geographers attempt to paint a picture of an entire region by examining specific localized practices exhibited and created by humans. Among these elements (traditionally) are the utilization of resources for food production and consumption. Three types of geographic regions are commonly recognized by geographers: formal, functional, and perceptual. Formal regions share common physical attributes such as climate, or landform (Kuby et al. 2010). The mountains are the most obvious physical commonality in the Appalachian region. Researchers such as Cooper and Knotts (2010) have used poverty levels and other economic variables to delimit the American South as a formal region. Similarly, Appalachia can be seen as a formal region sharing characteristics of rural poverty. For example, the Appalachian Regional Commission has defined Appalachia by economic status (ARC 2013). One of the first delineations of Appalachia as a formal region came from John C. Campbell’s The Southern Highlander and His Homeland published in 1921. Campbell’s interpretation was based mostly on terrain. He noted similarities in culture across the region but also that there were numerous pockets of dissimilar cultures. A comparison of his delineation, which begins at the Mason-Dixon Line, can be compared to an expanded map of ARC Appalachian counties, many of which were added in 1965 (See Figure 1)(1969). 2 Figure 1: Campbell’s Appalachia Geographer and folklorist John Rehder (2004) acknowledges that Appalachia as a formal region is often mythologized and misunderstood. He argues that mountain culture is often presented as a caricature of itself. Culture, as described by many regional geographers, is in fact 3 learned. It is cultivated, accepted, and passed down by communities of humans who either accept or reject its tenets (which can be said of both rural and urban regions). Rehder discusses the common cultural indicators of Appalachia but also devotes a great deal of time to the delimited region. He points to the obvious shared topography of the region—an elongated S. He also notes that there are regions within the Appalachian Mountains and describes them as three major geomorphic provinces: the Blue Ridge; the Ridge and Valley; and the Allegheny and Cumberland Plateaus. All three regions are linked but have some distinctions, such as land formation, running parallel to one another from Northeast to Southwest. Another method of regional delineation is the use of functional regions that tend to focus on areas as defined by specific spatial interactions, which may include transportation systems or governmental and politic designations such as a county or a state. Though the region of Appalachia can be thought of as a formal region restricted to the topography of the mountains, there are wider functional interpretations of the region that have extended its boundaries. The Appalachian Regional Commission which controls funding, grants, and various programs aimed at the development of Appalachia includes counties that are farther north and south than traditionally thought (See Figure 2). These counties are forty-two percent rural and bound not only by physical geography or economic status but now also by government administration of development funding (ARC 2013). 4 Figure 2: Appalachian Regional Commission Map of Appalachia Williams (2002) claims that Appalachia is better thought of as a functional region with a core and periphery of spatial interaction: Although the traditional approach to Appalachian regionalism originated at least partly in antimodernism, it relied on the modern definition of region as established by geographers at the end of the nineteenth century: a territory set apart from others by an enumerated set of attributes, features that could be mapped in their distribution from regional core to periphery and measured in 5 intensity so that one could say confidently how “Appalachian” (of southern or western or New England-ish) a given place was. (12) Williams (2002) continues to explain that Appalachia can be seen in a postmodern approach as a zone of interactions among the diverse people and environment present in the area. These interactions serve to help researchers define the region without relying solely on a specific set of cultural or socioeconomic or environmental