E. Engelhardt and L. Smith, "The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell: Contemporary Appalachian Table" (Ohio UP, 2019)

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Elizabeth Engelhardt, co-editor of the new collection The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell: Contemporary Appalachian Tables (Ohio University Press, 2019), also edited by Lora Smith and published by Ohio University Press. We are also joined by Courtney Balestier who is a contributor to the collection. Though the collection is diverse in genre – including academic essays alongside poetry, memoir, and illustration – the contents are united around challenging and complicating a notion of a single Appalachia. The editors and many of the contributors are connected to the Appalachian Food Summit, a symposium of foodways scholars, professionals, and enthusiasts who meet for dinners, dialogues, and annual conferences. Engelhardt describes the popular and scholarly attention to Appalachian stereotypes as “a dead end conversation” that the collection tries to avoid and undo by highlighting the creativity and diversity of the region, its people, and its food. As Engelhardt explains in the introduction, the collection’s eclectic mix of genres, topics, and contributors reflects the complexities of the contemporary region by generating cognitive dissonance through the structure of the book. The collection features the voices of people living in and out of the region from a wide variety of experiences and ethnicities, Like many of the contributors in the collection, Balestier describes her own path toward Appalachian identity through living outside the region. Her essay on the “Hillbilly Highway” and the Kentucky social club of Detroit asks if perhaps a coherent Appalachian identity is most meaningful to people who have left the geographic region of the mountains. The topics of the essays run the gamut from the idealized and organic home-canned chow-chow to the mass produced and capitalized Banquet frozen fried chicken and factory-packed pickle spears. Many of the objects that come to represent Appalachia are a compromise, a negotiation between the local and the global: repurposed