Appalachian Food Traditions Worth Preserving

This article is published in partnership with The Food Section.

The mountains of Western North Carolina—closer to Knoxville, Tennessee, than the Atlantic coast—are rarely touched by hurricanes. But on September 27, 2024, Hurricane Helene roared into the region. Its wind and rain toppled trees, washed out roads, and flooded whole towns. In downtown Marshall, every building was damaged or destroyed by the French Broad River, which crested at 27 feet.

Rebecca Beyer, a tattoo artist, author, and foraging instructor, lost her studio space and library in Marshall High Studios. She also owns land outside of Marshall, so, “two days after the flood, when we realized things were just crazy in town, we got a caravan of our friends together and everybody headed out to my property,” she says.

There, Beyer had wild rice, vegetables from her garden, and canned jam. Her partner dehydrated fruit he’d taken out of his freezers after the power failed.

“It was harvest time too,” Beyer recalls. “Every night, because there were about 15 of us sheltering out there, we would put our whole effort into cooking a big group meal. We were eating potatoes, squash, and deer meat with some iteration of wild greens. We have nettles, chickweed, dandelions, things like that. And our spicy peppers.” Baba ganoush, made from eggplants roasted over a wood fire, rounded out the feast.

“It was affirmation because I teach foraging and plant stuff as part of my living,” Beyer says. “It’s nice to know that the thing you’ve dedicated your life to is there for you when you most need it.”

Look to the Larders

Because the rugged topography of the southern Appalachians discourages long-distance trips, its communities have always prized self-sufficiency. Strong family ties, self-reliance, and respect for the land have been mountain values since the area was populated by Cherokee people, through settlement by Scots-Irish immigrants, and its rediscovery by members of back-to-the-land movement in the 1970s.

“Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without” is an adage passed down through generations. While many urban residents can’t claim the survivalist know-how of their grandparents, those practices haven’t faded outside big cities.

For many weathering Helene, food was hard to come by. In North Carolina, 27 counties were covered by a major disaster declaration, and those who didn’t lose their homes outright went without electricity and running water for weeks. Early on, grocery stores had limited supplies and people waited in long lines for food and ice—assuming they had cash, since electronic payment systems were down.

Local chefs, such as Ashleigh Shanti, Andre Murphy, and Michelle Bailey, fed as many people as they could. World Central Kitchen was one of the first aid organizations to arrive, providing hot meals every day. Mercy Chefs also deployed to Asheville. But for those who lived in rural communities, especially where roads were impassable, free suppers and donated supplies weren’t always accessible. Many of them looked instead to their own larders.

“I’m a big fan of the mantra ‘better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it,’” says Asheville’s Ashley English, author of 11 books including Homemade Living, Canning & Preserving, and other small-scale homesteading topics. “Though not even remotely a ‘prepper’ or survivalist, my husband Glenn and I attempt to have a well-stocked pantry,” since they have extended family to feed. 

English points out that traditional methods of preserving foods, including canning, drying, dehydrating, and fermenting, capture the flavor and nutrition of an item when it’s at its peak of ripeness.

Also, she continues, “they preserve memories. Maybe the apples used in your homemade apple butter or applesauce came from a nearby orchard, or the tomatoes used in your salsa or tomato jam were grown in your own garden.” Likewise, produce from a tailgate market or farm is an edible reminder of community connections that predated the storm.

‘Life is Hard. Here’s Some Food’

For Holly Silvers, canning connected her to her husband, who taught her the skill, and to the 36-acre farm in Jupiter that’s been in his family for generations. Silvers still lives on the farm, though her husband passed away late last summer. Without him to share the task, she’d decided in 2024 not to preserve greasy beans.

“He was really precise about it,” she remembers. “First of all, it has to look good. He was really strict about cleaning and the process and how you fill the jars and how you pack them full and press them down. I used to roll my eyes a little like, ‘oh, whatever.’” 

But then the storm hit.

A few days after Helene, Silvers saw a message on Facebook that semi-trucks full of fresh produce were parked at the Madison County Fairgrounds and the food was free for the taking. At the time, some roads into Asheville were closed and trucks couldn’t make deliveries to grocery stores.

Silvers was motivated to do some canning. She’d already gathered apples from a downed tree on her property and preserved them in her yard, over a propane burner. When she arrived at the fairgrounds, thinking she’d pick up enough tomatoes for her family, members of the National Guard loaded her truck to the brim.

“I did the math, and there were 4,000 tomatoes, over 1,000 apples, and 150 pounds of beets,” Silvers remembers. She put out a call for canning jars, and her mother drove down from Virginia to help her process the haul, which she then distributed to those in need in the Burnsville area. 

While she gave away plenty of fresh produce, too, Silvers recognized that without power and refrigeration, fresh food would quickly spoil. Plus, some people who had put up their own canned goods had lost their supplies in the flood. “I thought, as people reestablish, finances are going to be hard,” she says. “Life is hard. Here’s some food.”

Too Much Corn

More than 200 people died in Hurricane Helene—roughly half of them in North Carolina—and hundreds of thousands more were displaced. But communities came together in the wake of disaster. Neighbors helped neighbors remove fallen trees, collect water from streams, and locate the supplies they needed.

One contribution Candice Hensley made was freezer corn. Though she grew up with a canning practice handed down for generations, last year she decided to throw batches of fresh garden produce into a chest freezer.

“It was one of those things where it kind of seemed too good to be true,” she says. “And then, of course, when we lost power, I had all these gallon bags of tomatoes that were about to go bad.” So, she quickly started canning on her gas stove, preserving tomatoes and turning to stores of green beans, potatoes, and garlic to sustain her family.

“I definitely felt way more prepared than most people,” she says. Before the storm, “I filled every Mason jar I had with water.” Hensley also had reserves of chow chow and frozen pesto: “I knew that we were not going to be hurting for supplies for a while,” she says.

But the one thing she couldn’t save was her frozen corn, so that was quickly distributed among neighbors. By day four of Helene’s aftermath, freezer corn was a welcome gift.

Sheri Castle, author of The New Southern Garden Cookbook and The Southern Living Community Cookbook, among other titles, is a lifelong believer in “any skills that enable and empower people to shorten the distance and chain of possession between themselves and the source of their food.”

While technological advances mean we’re seldom sweating over wood stoves or ad libbing wild game stews, as Beyer and her friends did, “knowing how to prepare food is a worthwhile life skill,” Castle says.

Canning Lessons

Steffanie Mormino, creator and host of the Alternative Homesteading YouTube channel, lives a few miles from hard-hit Marshall. Listening to a ham radio, she and her husband realized how serious the situation was. 

Mormino stores dried goods such as beans, lentils, and grains, as well as tomato sauce and other canned goods. “We were delivering rice and lentils to people at the Capitola Mill [a 1905 textile mill renovated into apartments and offices] who were stranded,” she says.

A friend of Mormino’s who works for an emergency dispatch told her that people were calling 911 three days after the storm to say they were starving. Mormino credits homesteading skills with allowing her “to do something, instead of being consumed by what we were going to eat and how we were going to get water, which was a lot of people’s whole existence for a while.” 

In Asheville, the storm destroyed major portions of the water system and residents in many parts of the city went 53 days without drinking water. Plastic water bottles—often liters rather than gallons—were offered at every distribution center. That led to a glut of single-use containers, and recycling services weren’t online to process the refuse. 

Mormino was also attuned to the waste created by food donations. “It was all plastic wrapped, processed foods: Cereal bars, fruit salads in plastic containers, ​​chips,” Mormino says. For her, the experience “showed me that what we’ve already been doing is very effective. It really was the difference between being able to live well and have fresh, healthy food, and [what’s] very destructive to people’s bodies and the environment.”

English, the author and homesteader, says the storm inspired her to maintain her food stocks with an eye toward extended power outages, as well as teach what she knows via books and online classes. “The reassurance offered by knowing you have a pantry full of non-perishable items is beyond value,” she says.

While those in Western North Carolina don’t know what the next crisis will look like, many of them are confident they’ll be able to weather it with their traditional skills. They know they’re #MountainStrong.

Alli Marshall is a writer, editor, and creative facilitator based in Asheville. She is a longtime champion of independent artists and accessible maker spaces and believes creative expression is a birthright. Some of Alli’s best friends are trees.