Throw An Apple At Cha

Some woman near here has collected several books worth of essays concerning Southern food. I heard her interviewed on government tax supported communist radio which I listen to most weekends in order to balance out my worldview. I haven’t read her book but if I run into it I would.

First, she knew her stuff. She explained shuckey beans properly, and that only we Southern Appalachian Peoples (SAPs) know them. She knew her different beans, and why most people have no clue of the subtleties that we SAPs will good naturedly argue over while we string them. She knew greasy beans are called that because their hulls have no hair on them and therefore they look slick, like they’ve been greased, not because we cook them with grease. She talked of the pleasure we take in stringing beans as a cultural social function and that to us green beans are not color on the plate but a flavorful staple for the diet and the garden.

She even knew how to pronounce “Appalachia” (apple-at-cha). But she didn’t quite talk right. Her accent was off, her phraseology wasn’t quite consistent. But the main thing was at the very beginning what she said was that they were looking at foodways and how food and culture combine from the way we plant to our unique hospitality, in order to understand it IN ORDER TO CHANGE IT. I know I heard her say that.

Like the Yankee Nature Conservancy director called us all ignorant hillbillies one time, because we know logging actually can be done both profitably and sustainably, without government grant supports (or the tobacco settlement and crop subsidy government money that his organization lives on, that his very salary is dependent upon).

Like the only sustained by government grant high salaried would-be organic poobah Yankee with the perfectly matching flannel shirt and jeans sets unmussed by interactions with people actually born here. Organic and sustainable to him is for other Yankees like himself.

Now, I don’t mean this personally; I’ve many wonderful friends who aren’t necessarily “from around here”. I am degreed and well read and reasonably traveled. But gosh darn if I am not glad that I am NOT a Yankee myself.

And how I wish Yankees weren’t bent on coming into my culture in order to change it. Like the Florida bumper sticker says, We don’t care how you do it up north. Like the local said in the flick Milagro Bean Field Wars, If we were interested in it, chances are we’d be doing it already. Quit trying to save us, quit trying to change us, quit trying to preserve us even. Go home and try to make a culture of your own up if you don’t have a legitimate one to begin with. We’ve got one and we like it fine.

Listening to a local call in radio show the other evening, the difference was stark. Three Yankees and two locals called in on the subject of culture and things to do in the area. The Yankees said there was nothing cultural to do here AT ALL. The locals could name all there was to do, from symphonies to ballets to plays to pickin’ and grinning’, and what’s more, the locals could all play an instrument and tell a story and entertain their damn selves without whining that someone else ought to be entertaining us instead.

And it isn’t that I don’t sympathize with the “no culture” folks. When I was a kid, my mother wanted me to be able to take dance lessons but there was no opportunity for that where I lived. So my mother recruited a dance teacher and for her first year in business, she actually lived at our house and ate her meals with us. She left after some years, but now there are several dance and gymnastic studios there, all of them run by students of hers. Another local woman, originally from Cuba (proving that you do not have to be “from around here” to be local), wanted more cultural opportunities for the area and founded a group that brings in at least one cultural performance a month, from the Folkloric Ballet of Mexico to Broadway plays to symphonies to, well, just anything else. The local library there doubles as an art gallery exhibiting a wide variety of works (and changing all the time).

Doing for yourself has a lot of meanings, and none of them speaks in Yankee whine.

Now, would like some chowchow to go with that bowl of shuckey beans? A wedge of onion? Tea?