Provisions (Finding Home Through the Food Folklore of the Appalachian Table)

A sensory celebration of Appalachian culinary traditions, and a call to reclaim the lost rituals, recipes, and food folklore of the places you call home.

Amanda Held Opelt’s childhood was shaped by the shared, multi-generational table that brought everyone at her Granny’s 100-acre farm to breakfast over buttered biscuits, fried brook trout, wild honey, and blackberry jam. But as she came of age at the peak of the nineties’ diet culture, her relationship with her body became fraught, and she began to resent the culinary culture of her Appalachian heritage. It wasn’t until her own daughter was born that she realized another body depended upon her nourishment. That was when she set out to learn how to cook and reclaim her ancestor’s food traditions.

In Provisions, Opelt devotes herself to attending local sorghum boil parties and apple festivals, interviewing farmers, foragers, and herders, and recreating the meals she remembers her Granny serving at her own table. She confronts the false food narratives that dominated the religious landscape of her Southern, conservative roots. Along the way, she rediscovers the joy of eating, and with newfound faith learns to love her body again and the places it calls home.

A love letter to Appalachia as much as a corrective to the mountain culture “hillbilly” and “tradwife” tropes, Provisions is a heart-forward exploration of the ways food draws us all into sustenance, healing, community, and delight. Opelt charts our broken relationship with food through body image, consumer culture, political stereotypes, and forgotten history, as well as the vitality that can be ours again as we:

• reconnect with our roots and learn to cook from our ancestors' recipes and table traditions,
• unlearn our individualism and take our place at the table of nourishing community,
• and come home to joyful embodiment.