Praise for Appalachia’s Foodshed

Craft Beverages • Food • Local Ingredients

Biodiversity

The Appalachian Mountains region of the eastern United States is among the most biodiverse areas anywhere on the planet. Its forests are thick, green, and ancient. Its farms are small, rustic, and authentic. The temperate climate, varied soils, changing elevations, micro climates, and four distinct seasons make it a perfect place to explore local ingredients.

Small farm heritage

A land of small farms, Appalachia has long been known for its exceptional home gardens with folks raising an incredible variety of traditional and heritage fruits, vegetables, and grains generation after generation. In fact, the area encompassing central and southern Appalachia holds the most diverse foodshed in the country. 

In Appalachia, Heirloom is not a recent fad, but a way of life.

Fruit trees and berry bushes love the hill country climate. It is some of the best land in the country for growing apples, peaches, plums, blackberries, raspberries, and much more. Pioneers brought with them their domesticated fruit trees, bushes and vines as they settled the area and, today, there are still hundreds of old varieties growing in the hills.

Foraged abundance

Men and women have foraged the Appalachian Mountains for as long as humans have roamed the region. Native Americans, pioneers, and today’s residents, as well, supplement their gardens and larders with a multitude of wild foods and herbs of the forest. Thoughts of morels, sassafras, creasy greens, black walnuts, venison, and biscuits with squirrel gravy make many mouths water.

Moonshine and quaffables

For as long as they have been growing corn in these hills, Appalachian mountaineers have been famous for making whiskey. Beginning with the Scotch-Irish pioneers, many have made it outside the law since coming out on the losing end of the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794. This true heritage industry is today making a comeback as a legal enterprise, thanks to changing state laws allowing easier entry to and more flexibility for small-scale distilling.

Beer brewing, hard cider making, and winemaking — widespread industries pretty much wiped out as commercial enterprises during Prohibition — are in recent decades transforming from in-home hobbies to legitimate business enterprises. Again, thanks to state legislatures enabling smaller-scale commercial brewing and farm winery operations, Appalachian-region breweries, cideries, and wineries are in the midst of a Renaissance. The region has even been sought out by larger, national craft beer brands as sites for new production breweries (Sierra Nevada and New Belgium, for example).

Diverse influences

In pre-Colonial times, Native Americans farmed the Appalachian river valleys and foraged the hills. In their gardens they raised the Three Sisters—corn, beans, and squash—plants that are the ancestors of today’s varieties. It was also the Native Americans who taught the European pioneers about the rich nutritional and medicinal properties of hundreds of native plants and trees.

During the Colonial Period, English settlers brought their barley, hops, honeybees, and apple trees—and along with them their ales, meads, and ciders. Scotch-Irish settlers brought, among other things, their taste for whiskey. In the 1800s, more Germans arrived in the mountain towns and cities—and with them their yeast breads and lager beer. From the early days of European settlement, in Western Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio, through the Virginias, Carolinas, Kentucky, and Tennessee, those cultures blended their food traditions with local Native American foods. This blend of delicacies still commonly shows up on Appalachian dinner tables today in the fried potatoes, ham & bacon, half-runners, sliced tomatoes, summer squash & onions, soup beans, turnip greens, and cornbread.

Immigration expanded food diversity

The coming of the Industrial Age added thousands of immigrant families from Eastern and Southern Europe filling the steel mill and mining towns of southwestern Pennsylvania and the upper Ohio Valley and landing in the coal camps of West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southwestern Virginia. Kielbasa, pierogis, cabbage rolls, pepperoni rolls, spaghetti, meatballs, and grape wines gained a foothold on the region’s dinner buckets and supper tables.

As the number of factories, mills, and mines grew, the region also experienced growth in its African-American population, as families from the deeper South came seeking better economic opportunity. Similarly, Lebanese, Syrian, and Jewish immigrants sought opportunities in the region’s growing towns and cities. Rice, collards, black-eyed peas, ham hocks, hummus, pita bread, tabbouleh, lox, and latkes started being found across the region.

In recent decades, immigrants from Mexico and Central America, known affectionately as Appalatins, arrived bringing with them their Latin culture and cuisine. Asian immigrants also found Appalachia welcoming. Folks from China, Southeast Asia, India, and the Philippines have made their homes in mountain towns from Pittsburgh to Knoxville. Tacos, stir fries, green tea, curries, and adobo all have added depth, spice, and variety to the region’s culinary and beverage landscape.

Appalachia’s growing culinary landscape

Each new influx of people changes Appalachia, as Appalachia changes them. Newly-arrived people assimilate to life in the age-old, lush green mountains, learning its rivers and valleys, its people and pace, its flora and fauna, its seasons and seasonings, its ways. Yet through this assimilation they invariably add their threads to the Appalachian fabric.

Whether it is local corn turned into tortillas or mountain moonshine; wild blackberries made into sweet, rustic wine or a fancy reduction; apples picked and baked into a pie or juiced and fermented into a crisp hard cider; foraged mountain herbs brewed as a pot of tea or flavoring a farmhouse ale; forest honey dripped onto a biscuit or fermented into a sweet mead; the Appalachian region provides endless possibilities for beverage and food creation and experimentation.

The resulting culinary fusion and creativity taking place in Appalachian foodways today takes a backseat to no other region of the United States. Likewise the region’s beverage producers are now making some of the finest beers, ciders, meads, and distilled spirits found anywhere.

Hail Appalachia — a regional food and beverage experience like no other place on earth.