Storied Charlotte

My friend and colleague Ashli Quesinberry Stokes is a professor in the Department of Communications Studies at UNC Charlotte. She also served for several years as the Director of UNC Charlotte’s Center for the Study of the New South,  and she is currently serving as the Interim Chair of the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Studies. I always enjoy talking with Ashli about her research in part because her research often involves food.  Ashli sees food, not just as a source of sustenance, but also as sort of communications medium.  Ashli often writes about the cultural significance of Southern foodways, and she shows how we can learn about Southern culture by paying attention to the messages embedded in the food we prepare and consume.  

Ashli and her co-author Wendy Atkins-Sayre first wrote about this topic in their 2016 book titled Consuming Identity: The Role of Food in Redefining the South.  Now they have a second collaborative book in which they take a more focused look at Southern foodways.  Titled Hungry Roots:  How Food Communicates Appalachia’s Search for Resilience, this book focuses on the foodways in the mountains of western North Carolina as well as the mountain areas in the neighboring states.  Curious to know more about their new book, I contacted Ashli and asked her for some background information about Hungry Roots.  Here is what she sent to me:

Years ago, the popular television show Justified premiered, called a “backwoods procedural” by the media, and featuring the hillbillies, “rednecks,” and drug abusers caught up in crime, deep in the hollers of Kentucky. The show was set in Ashli’s UNCC colleague and Department Chair at the time, Dr. Shawn D. Long’s, hometown. Shawn, one of most joyful, creative, and innovative leaders at Charlotte sighed, complaining to Ashli: “Ash, don’t you which there more stories about Appalachia that showed more than our poverty, racism, and substance abuse?” Over the years, they kept talking about how the region was frequently portrayed, and when Shawn passed away from an aggressive form of lung cancer in 2021, our work on what would become Hungry Roots was two years in, with us dedicating the book to Shawn upon publication. Like Shawn, Ashli had grown up in a different corner of the Mountains (Southwest Virginia) and was interested in adding nuance to the stereotypes circulating about Appalachia. Building upon two previous book projects about the South and rural America, with frequent co-author Dr. Wendy Atkins-Sayre, we decided to think about how food had the possibility of adding new stories and perspectives to the ones more commonly shared about Appalachia.

Along the way, other Charlotte area connections helped to flesh out a broader Appalachian food story. I talked with Haymaker Chef William Dissen, had a fantastic Appalachia farm dinner at Shelby’s Old North Farm, interviewed one of its proprietors and star-baker/author Keia Mastrianni, and looked for Appalachian “leather britches” beans and the stunning variety of NC Mountain apples at the Yorkmont Farmers Market. Since we eventually settled on focusing on Southern Central Appalachia, an area roughly 100 square miles-ish surrounding Asheville, NC, Charlotte provided an easy base for going on fieldwork expeditions, where we visited and interviewed hundreds of area farmers, bakers, cooks, gas-station food market chefs, activists, distillers, and brewers. 

Everyone encounters assumptions people make about their regions and places they live. Unfortunately, if the South is America’s Other, Appalachia is the South’s Other, so its people live with these often incorrect assumptions that affect their identities as well as regional and national policy and decision-making. By studying its food and food traditions, our book tries to uncover some of the resilience topoi that Appalachia has faced and continues to face, offering suggestions about how those conversation themes offer potential in taking discussions in different directions or keeping them same, reinforcing stereotypes. 

These resilience topoi emerged as we were working on the book in the middle of the pandemic—actually trying to do fieldwork during this time—and continually reading about “resilience” in the news when discussing the pandemic. We started to see the parallels with food in Appalachia. We look at how resilience messages are communicated through Southern Appalachia’s food and drink messages through three common topoi: messages about preserving cultures through food traditions, messages about how food and food tourism can fortify Appalachian communities, and messages about how Appalachian food and drink also melds communities and traditions together, creating new stories about the communities. 

In the end, we hope the book helps academic and non-academic audiences learn about how resilience rhetoric operates, how it encourages and limits communities and solutions, and sometimes at the same time. We write about how resilience rhetorics are contradictory  – they emphasize how people find innovation and creativity to help solve regional problems but they also convey senses of stasis and acceptance of “that’s just how it’s going to be here.” Resilience was the dominant food and drink message we saw communicated in the Southern Appalachia region and we encourage those from other places to explore the ones that share messages about their own communities and people.

My thanks go to Ashli for providing such a tantalizing appetizer to Hungry Roots.  To further whet your appetite, I am pleased to announce that NC Humanities has selected Hungry Roots as one of the five featured books in their 2025 North Carolina Reads statewide book club program.  I congratulate Ashli and Wendy on having their book selected for this prestigious program.  You make Storied Charlotte proud.