Road Trip Through Appalachia
Humanities Magazine, National Endowment for the Humanities
“Eating is an agricultural act,” Wendell Berry once wrote. It’s also, of course, a historical and cultural act. For as long as humans have existed, we have looked to food for sustenance and emotional comfort. Before the current pandemic brought a shortage of therapists, grocery store shelves were picked clean of baking flour and yeast packets.
I happen to be an avid consumer of both food and history, so my pandemic coping habits have taken me further afield. Armed with a full tank of gas and a keen eye for roadside history markers, I’ve spent weekends following the winding roads that head west from Washington, D.C.
Beyond the capital beltway, highways turn into old turnpikes, leading to colonial towns and aging churches on whose walls the graffiti of convalescing Union and Confederate troops can still be read. There’s no better salve for modern worries than being immersed in the long view of history—and fresh air doesn’t hurt, either.
The real prize, however, is when the invisible lines of history intersect with the foodie trails of today. A snug tavern dining room that has offered peanut soup to travelers for the past 250 years. Or wild pawpaw groves that yield armfuls of the luscious indigenous fruit in late summer, as they did for the Piscataway tribe hundreds of years ago. General Washington slept here? Great, I say. Now tell me what he had for dinner.
Eating and cooking with the ingredients of past cultures is its own form of gustatory time travel: allowing us to dine with soldiers of the Continental Army for breakfast, to lunch with a Cherokee warrior, and to have dinner with an Appalachian miner. Their names may not be known, but the flavors, ingredients, and recipes that shaped their lives have been passed down. A square of cornbread can tell us about the people who risked their lives in a wilderness frontier to seek a better future.