Appalachia on the Table

"Appalachia on the Table is an extremely readable exploration of how mountain food has been represented historically and how those representations interact with present day food trends in the region and beyond. . . . People from the region, who may have also been surprised by a grandmother's cookbook, will enjoy Locklear's personal connections and thoughtful consideration of the region, and folks who have vacationed in Appalachia and enjoyed some of the foods Locklear references can now trace those foods back through the food's cultural history."--Jessi Rae Morton "Southern Review of Books"

"Appalachia on the Table makes an important contribution to the fields of food studies, food history, American studies, and Southern studies. I am certainly eager to assign it in my food history and intro to food studies courses."--Megan J. Elias, director of the Gastronomy Program and associate professor at Boston University

"Appalachia on the Table encourages readers to challenge the optimistic view of ramps on the menu at high-end restaurants just as Locklear leads us through the damage of earlier works that portrayed Appalachian food as inedible and low quality. While this is a book about food and representation, it is also a history and a cultural analysis that uses food to read a region."--Meredith McCarroll "author of Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film"

Appalachia on the Table argues, in part, that since the conception of Appalachia as a distinctly different region from the rest of the South and the United States, the foods associated with the region and its people have often been used to socially categorize and stigmatize mountain people. Rather than investigate the actual foods consumed in Appalachia, Locklear instead focuses on the representations of foods consumed, implied moral judgments about those foods, and how those judgments shape reader perceptions of those depicted. The question at the core of Locklear's analysis asks, How did the dominant culinary narrative of the region come into existence and what consequences has that narrative had for people in the mountains?

ERICA ABRAMS LOCKLEAR is a professor of English and the Thomas Howerton Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of North Carolina Asheville. She is the author of Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment: Appalachian Women's Literacies and is a seventh-generation Western North Carolinian.