This Side of the Mountain

This Side of the Mountain George Brosi I'LL ADMIT THAT WHEN I FIRST READ ABOUT "A Taste of Appalachia"—an extravagant August weekend excursion to the Biltmore Estate sponsored by the Southern Foodways Alliance—I laughed out loud because it seemed so ludicrous! After all, to me, The Biltmore doesn't stand for Appalachia. It represents the families who exploited the people and land of the region. The mention of "sustainable agriculture" in the article I was reading struck me as particularly anomalous. If everyone tried to live as "high off the hog" as did George and Edith Vanderbilt who created this estate, all the earth's resources would be gone before very many people got started. The Vanderbilt's lifestyle was abjectly dependent upon a huge infusion of money that came ultimately from working people from all over the world who had made the Vanderbilt family rich for three generations. This contrasts sharply with my view of sustainable agriculture: an operation that can continue indefinitely without depleting the resources of the land or requiring money or materials—such as fertilizers and herbicides—from outside. Native peoples have lived inAppalachia in healthy harmony with the land for ages, and since the Eighteenth Century, thousands ofpeople have lived here on exemplary subsistence farms that remained self-sustaining for generations. Theirnumbers havebeensadlydepleted in the lastcouple of generations, and, worse, many of their descendents now have diets so terrible that they have abnormally high rates of diabetes and other lifethreatening diseases. Healthy food has been replaced by over-processed junk produced on non-sustainable corporate farms and despicable processing plants and trucked in from thousands of miles away. The irony is that eating well at home the old-fashioned way can be accomplished very cheaply, yet while some eat junk, others insist on spending enormous amounts of money for natural foods with exotic ingredients entailing transportation and other negative impacts upon the environment just as junk food does. Can events like the Alliance meeting at the Biltmore create foodways that are ecologically sound and healthy for all? Not by themselves. It will take grassroots action for change by farmers, businesses owners, educators, government workers and other citizens aware of the problems and committed to solving them. 14 ...