Case Study 2: Ramps, Leather Britches, and the Politics of Appalachian Food

The Smell of Spring

Every year, in April and early May, the forests of the Appalachian mountains produce something that you can smell before you can see it.

Ramps — wild leeks, Allium tricoccum — push up through the leaf litter on the forest floor in dense patches, their broad green leaves and purple-red stems unmistakable to anyone who has ever harvested them. The smell is somewhere between garlic and onion but stronger than either, a pungent, sulfurous aroma that clings to hands, clothes, breath, and skin for days. For mountain people across the central and southern Appalachians, the emergence of ramps has been the signal that winter is over — a biological clock marking the arrival of spring and the beginning of the season of fresh food after months of living on preserved stores.

Ramps are more than food. They are a cultural institution. Ramp suppers — communal meals built around ramps cooked in every conceivable way (fried with eggs and potatoes, cooked with beans, pickled, eaten raw) — are spring rituals that have been held in mountain communities for as long as anyone can remember. The Feast of the Ramson (an old English word for wild garlic) in Richwood, West Virginia, has been held annually since 1936. Similar festivals occur across the mountains, drawing crowds of locals and, increasingly, tourists.

But the story of ramps in the twenty-first century is also a story about power, class, and the strange alchemy by which a poor person's food becomes a rich person's delicacy. It is a case study in the politics of Appalachian food.

The Class Politics of What You Eat

For most of Appalachian history, the food traditions of the mountains were a source of both pride and embarrassment — pride within the community, embarrassment in the wider world.

Ramps were the emblematic example. Within mountain communities, eating ramps was a seasonal pleasure and a marker of belonging. The ramp supper was a social occasion. Digging ramps was a family activity, an excuse to get into the woods after the long winter. The flavor — aggressive, unsubtle, impossible to ignore — was embraced as part of the package.

But the smell of ramps marked you. Children who ate ramps were literally sent home from school by teachers who found the odor intolerable. Workers who ate ramps were shunned by coworkers. The ramp-eater was identified, by smell, as rural, mountain, and poor — as someone who ate wild food foraged from the forest rather than proper food purchased from a store.

This dynamic — in which specific foods serve as class markers, identifying their consumers as belonging to a particular social position — is not unique to Appalachia. It is a universal feature of food culture. But in Appalachia, where the broader society had already constructed an elaborate apparatus of stereotypes to mark mountain people as backward and inferior, food became another vector of stigma. Eating cornbread (not wheat bread), drinking buttermilk, gathering poke sallet from the roadside, preserving food in Mason jars when store-bought canned goods were available — all of these practices marked you as Appalachian, which meant they marked you as something the wider world looked down on.

Leather britches — dried green beans, one of the most practical and efficient preservation techniques in the mountain food repertoire — carried a similar burden. The sight of strings of drying beans hanging from the porch was legible, to anyone who knew the code, as a sign of rural poverty. Never mind that leather britches, properly prepared, develop a complex, smoky depth of flavor that no fresh green bean can match. Never mind that the technique represents an ingenious solution to the problem of preserving a perishable food without refrigeration. The drying beans on the porch said: these people cannot afford a freezer. These people are stuck in the past.

The shame was internalized. Many Appalachian families, as they gained access to consumer goods in the mid-twentieth century, deliberately abandoned traditional foodways as markers of the poverty they were trying to escape. Cornbread gave way to store-bought white bread. Home-canned vegetables gave way to canned goods from the supermarket. The skills of the kitchen garden, the canning kitchen, and the smokehouse were not lost overnight, but they were increasingly associated with an older generation — the grandmothers who could not be convinced to change — rather than with the future.

The Rediscovery

Then the outside world discovered Appalachian food.

The rediscovery happened in stages. The first wave came with the folk revival and back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when a generation of young Americans, disillusioned with industrial food production, began seeking out traditional food knowledge. The Foxfire books, with their detailed descriptions of hog-killing, corn-grinding, and food preservation, fed this hunger. So did the growing interest in organic farming, self-sufficiency, and the counterculture's romantic vision of rural life.

The second wave came with the rise of the farm-to-table movement in the 1990s and 2000s. Chefs who had built their reputations on French and Italian cuisine began looking closer to home for inspiration and discovered, in the foodways of the American South and Appalachia, a culinary tradition of remarkable depth and sophistication. Southern food — once dismissed by food critics as heavy, unhealthy, and unsophisticated — was rebranded as a legitimate cuisine, worthy of serious culinary attention.

The third wave — the one that brought ramps to Brooklyn — arrived in the early 2000s, driven by the intersecting trends of foraging culture, locavore eating, and the endless appetite of the food media for novel ingredients. Ramps were perfect for this moment: wild, seasonal, difficult to cultivate, available only to those who knew where to look. They were the opposite of industrial food. They were authentic.

The Ramp Boom and Its Discontents

The consequences of the ramp boom were felt most acutely in the mountains where ramps actually grow.

First, the economics. Ramps that had been dug for personal use or shared at community suppers were now being harvested commercially for sale to urban restaurants and specialty food stores. Prices that mountain people would have found laughable — eight, ten, fourteen dollars a pound at urban farmers' markets — created an economic incentive for large-scale harvesting. Commercial foragers, some from the local communities and some from outside, stripped ramp patches that had been harvested sustainably for generations.

Second, the ecology. Ramps are a slow-growing plant. A seed dropped in the forest may take seven years to produce a harvestable plant. Traditional mountain harvesting practices reflected this: you dug some, left some, and never stripped a patch bare. The commercial demand overwhelmed these traditional practices. In some areas, ramp populations declined noticeably. Several states and communities began considering or enacting harvest restrictions.

Third, and most galling to many mountain people, the cultural appropriation. Ramps — the food that had gotten their children sent home from school, the food that had marked them as backward and poor, the food that the wider world had used as evidence of Appalachian primitivism — were now a luxury product. The same cultural establishment that had sneered at ramp-eaters for generations was now celebrating ramp pesto as a culinary innovation.

The irony was not lost on anyone. Social media amplified the frustration. Mountain people posted sardonic commentaries on the spectacle of urban food writers "discovering" an ingredient that their grandmothers had been cooking since before the food writers' grandparents had left Europe. The contrast between the food shame of one generation and the food fetishization of the next was almost too perfect as a metaphor for the larger relationship between Appalachia and the outside world.

Leather Britches: The Same Story, Quieter

Leather britches have undergone a quieter version of the same trajectory.

For decades, leather britches were the most unglamorous of mountain foods — dried beans, plain and simple, the kind of food you ate because you had no other option in February. The technique was associated with poverty, with the pre-refrigeration past, with grandmothers who did not know any better.

Then food writers began paying attention. The deep, complex flavor of properly prepared leather britches — slow-cooked for hours with a piece of smoked pork, the dried beans rehydrating into something entirely different from a fresh green bean — was recognized as a culinary achievement in its own right. Chefs at farm-to-table restaurants in Asheville, Charleston, and Nashville began featuring leather britches on their menus. Food magazines published features. The food that had been a marker of deprivation became a marker of discernment.

The pattern is identical to the ramp story: a food associated with rural poverty is "discovered" by the urban food establishment, stripped of its class associations, and repackaged as a luxury experience. The mountain woman who made leather britches because she had no freezer is now, retroactively, a food visionary. But the system that made her feel ashamed of those beans in the first place has not changed. It has simply shifted its gaze, finding in her poverty a new source of aesthetic pleasure.

Who Owns the Story?

The politics of Appalachian food ultimately come down to a question of ownership: who gets to tell the story of what mountain people ate and what it meant?

When a food writer in New York writes a breathless profile of ramps as a "wild delicacy," that writer is telling a story. But it is a story that erases the social context in which ramps were actually eaten — the community suppers, the spring rituals, the family traditions, the shame, the sending-home-from-school. The food is extracted from its cultural matrix and presented as a raw ingredient, available for reinterpretation by anyone with a skillet and a social media account.

When a chef in Brooklyn serves ramp pesto on handmade pasta for twenty-eight dollars, that chef is profiting from a culinary tradition developed by people who never received twenty-eight dollars for anything. The knowledge — where ramps grow, when to harvest them, how to prepare them — was developed over centuries by mountain communities. The profit is captured by an urban restaurant that pays a forager (who may or may not be from the mountains) and adds a markup that reflects not the value of the food but the value of the experience of eating something rare, wild, and fashionable.

This is not to say that no one outside Appalachia should ever cook ramps. Food traditions have always traveled, and the spread of culinary knowledge across cultural boundaries is one of the good things about human civilization. The issue is not that people eat ramps. The issue is the power dynamics embedded in who gets credit, who gets paid, and whose version of the story gets told.

What Mountain People Are Doing About It

The most encouraging part of the story is the growing movement of Appalachian food practitioners who are reclaiming their own culinary traditions — not as nostalgia projects but as living, evolving food cultures rooted in place and history.

Organizations like the Appalachian Food Summit, community-supported agriculture projects across the mountains, and individual farmers and chefs who identify themselves explicitly as Appalachian food practitioners are working to ensure that the story of Appalachian food is told by the people who created it.

Chefs like Travis Milton (who calls his work "Appalachian food from Appalachian soil"), Mike Costello and Amy Dawson (Lost Creek Farm in West Virginia), and others are building restaurants and food businesses that honor mountain traditions while insisting on the right to innovate. They are not recreating their grandmothers' kitchens. They are building on their grandmothers' kitchens — using the foundations of mountain foodways as a starting point for contemporary culinary creativity.

Seed-saving projects are preserving heirloom varieties of corn, beans, and other crops that were developed over generations in mountain gardens. Community gardens and food sovereignty initiatives are addressing food access in communities where the nearest grocery store may be thirty miles away. Appalachian food is being reclaimed, not as a quaint relic of the past, but as a living tradition with a future.

The Broader Lesson

The politics of Appalachian food teach a lesson that extends far beyond the mountains.

When a powerful culture "discovers" the food of a less powerful culture, the discovery typically follows a predictable pattern: first dismissal, then curiosity, then fetishization, then commodification. The food itself does not change. What changes is the social position of the people consuming it. Ramps eaten by mountain people are hillbilly food. Ramps eaten by Manhattan chefs are artisanal cuisine. The beans dried on a poor woman's porch are an embarrassment. The same beans on a menu in Nashville are a revelation.

This pattern is not unique to Appalachian food. It plays out with soul food, with Mexican cuisine, with Vietnamese street food, with every culinary tradition that has been "discovered" by a more powerful cultural establishment. The power dynamic is always the same: the originators of the tradition are erased or marginalized, while the appropriators receive credit and profit.

Understanding this dynamic — seeing it clearly, naming it honestly — is the first step toward changing it. Appalachian food belongs to the people who created it. Their stories, their knowledge, their right to define what their food means — these should not be for sale at a farmers' market in Brooklyn.

Discussion Questions

1. The case study describes a pattern in which food associated with poverty is "discovered" and repackaged as a luxury product. Can you identify other examples of this pattern, in Appalachia or elsewhere? What are the common features?

2. Is the urban interest in ramps and other Appalachian foods a form of cultural appropriation, cultural appreciation, or something more complicated? How do you draw the line between legitimate cultural exchange and extractive appropriation?

3. The ramp boom created economic opportunities for some mountain people (commercial foragers, restaurant owners) while threatening the ecological sustainability of the resource and generating resentment at the perceived theft of a cultural tradition. How should communities balance economic opportunity against cultural and ecological preservation?

4. Many Appalachian families deliberately abandoned traditional foodways in the mid-twentieth century as markers of poverty. Now those same foodways are being celebrated. What does this reversal tell us about the relationship between food, class, and cultural value? Is the current celebration of Appalachian food more authentic than the earlier rejection of it?

5. The case study argues that "Appalachian food belongs to the people who created it." What does this mean in practice? Can food traditions be "owned"? If so, by whom? And what obligations does ownership impose on outsiders who want to engage with those traditions?