Athena Rayne Anderson

This page is home of the project to create a Museum of Southern Appalachian Foodways in Asheville, North Carolina. If you live in the Southern Appalachian Mountain region, especially near Asheville, please share your thoughts about what you would want in this museum and if you want to join the committee to make it happen: Museum of Southern Appalachian Foodways Project Survey.

Scroll down to view an explanation of why this museum is needed and a draft of it’s mission and scope.

Community Need

Southern Appalachian foodways are diverse, fascinating, and part of our identities. Traditional ways of knowing, growing, harvesting, and preparing foods connect us with our past, the land, and our communities. Native species, heirloom seeds, and heritage livestock breeds have proven records of success flourishing in the region. In spite of all this, an aging population, loss of farmland, rural-to-urban migration, and climate change threaten the region’s food cultures. Our planet is changing rapidly and studying, conserving, and educating people about unique foodways will be critical for the stability of our future food system.

Mission

The Museum of Southern Appalachian Foodways (MSAF) is dedicated to the conservation of, research on, and education about the foodways of the Southern Appalachian region.

Scope

The mission of MSAF incorporates all the food-related decisions people of the region have made in the past, are making now, and will make in the future. In short, we’re interested in the who, what, when, where, why, and how of our food. Together, these are our foodways.

• Region – We define the Southern Appalachian region as encompassing the mountainous portions of southwestern Virginia; western North and South Carolina; northern Georgia; and eastern Tennessee. This definition is flexible, depending on context.
• People – The people of the region are varied and diverse, including the Cherokee, European immigrant settlers and their descendants, Black descendants of former slaves, Latin American immigrants and descendants, and others.
• Decisions – Human decisions related to food include everything from site selection for planting seeds to the consumption of the meal created with the food grown from those seeds. It covers the decisions of which foods to grow, nurture, or forage, and how to do so. We explore how food is selected and prepared, using what tools and instruments, and why. Our work includes the choices people in the region have made / make / will make about how to eat, how much to eat, and with whom. We are concerned with the origins of these decisions about food and how and why they’re communicated to others. MSAF considers foodways of the past and present as equally relevant and important and also explores the ways these might shift in the future.

Image Credit: photomanm.com, CC BY-SA 2.0