“People Around Here Like Their Fruits and Vegetables”: Eating, Growing Food, and Food Sovereignty in Eastern Kentucky

Abstract

This article explores community-based food production and sharing practices in eastern Kentucky that are often obscured by dominant neoliberal paradigms and market-based solutions. I begin with an orientation to eastern Kentucky, which is nestled in the mountains of central Appalachia, and its history of economic precarity and subsistence. Next I introduce my methods, followed by discussions of food sovereignty. Through the presentation of ethnographic evidence from participant observation and in-depth, semi-structured interviews in eastern Kentucky, I illustrate an extant “quiet food sovereignty”—community-based food production that is overlooked by institutions and unrecognized by practitioners as constituting food sovereignty. I argue that any push to marketize growing, gathering, and/or hunting food in eastern Kentucky is not the solution to economic precarity or poor public health in that part of the state. As I illustrate, small farming (or large farming, for that matter) is not an economically viable (although socially and culturally valuable) option in the United States. Instead, I argue for local and federal efforts that support community food sovereignty.