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

Abstract

AbstractThis 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.