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<br /> My mother has a sensitive nose. Smells go straight to her head. Particularly troublesome
<br /> are paint thinners,mothballs,petroleum products, lawn chemicals, glues,turpentine, and
<br /> dead things. Crack a container open a floor and several rooms away, and she is knocked
<br /> out seconds later.
<br /> Unfortunately for her nose, she married a chemical engineer. My father filled the
<br /> basement of their house in western North Carolina with carefully labeled containers full
<br /> of industrial-strength preparations. He drove to South Carolina for the"good"pest and
<br /> weed killers,the ones banned in North Carolina. He had a side business through my
<br /> childhood repairing cars in the basement and driveway. Broken cars leak, gush, and ooze
<br /> gasoline, oil, paint, and epoxies. Mom would take to the den at the longest physical
<br /> distance from his explosions of smells and fumes and quietly sigh.
<br /> Nowhere did the battle of smells wage stronger than over food. And no food smelled
<br /> riper, with more stench, and over a greater area of impact than Dad's Wisconsin-born
<br /> Brick Cheese.
<br /> This is the story of a table where the people mesh easily but their foods do not. For every
<br /> romantic tale of breaking bread together on a Carolina table, for every sweet conversion
<br /> to a new land brought about by trading lovingly prepared, flavorful bites for gifts of new
<br /> tastes in return,there sits one food that proves a bridge too far. In this case, it threatened
<br /> to shut down the town post office, was the source of a formal grievance filed at the local
<br /> factory, and segregated an upstairs refrigerator and freezer from a downstairs set, locked
<br /> in a permanent standoff of close to fifty years' running.
<br /> Western North Carolina, and indeed all of Appalachia, is experiencing a food
<br /> renaissance. People search for heritage foods; compose loving photo-essays of its tables;
<br /> produce glossy cookbooks; and flock to pop-up dinners celebrating Appalachian
<br /> foodways simple and complex.' Ripe,rich, smelly, and stinky foods can be found
<br /> throughout the newly celebrated mountain food traditions. Ask people to name an
<br /> Appalachian food and they may well come up with the smelliest of them all: ramps.
<br /> Legendary wild onions, ramps ooze through your skin, hang in a house, and coat a valley.
<br /> 1 The Appalachian Food Summit, recipient of the 2015 John Egerton award from the
<br /> Southern Foodways Alliance,held its third regional symposium in Fall 2016 at
<br /> Berea, Kentucky (ht:tp://gr o a pi iac brat ber e r.edu/ds/).Among Appalachian
<br /> cities,Asheville leads in pop-up dinners, such as those by the Blind Pig group
<br /> (ht tpOthel n p gsu pl ° lu ,com ). In the Washington Post, Jane Black declared,
<br /> "The Next Big Thing in American Regional Cooking: Humble Appalachia," 29 March
<br /> 2016,liftlp_s //wwww;i ➢_t u tonpost.cornjlifestyle/food/the•rw t�hrg-thing-m
<br /> american regionaI-cookies humble-app .Lichia Olt'/03/2 //ida.I76a-f06dd1t.e5-
<br /> 89r =l-c;td,l7l'a c e95e0 sior°y.ht tni . Cookbooks include Sean Brock's Heritage (Artisan,
<br /> 2014) and Ronni Lundy's Victuals:An Appalachian Journey with Recipes (Clarkson
<br /> Potter, 2016). For more on this new interest, see my own"Appalachian Chicken and
<br /> Waffles: Countering Southern Food Fetishism,"Southern Cultures 21.1 (Spring
<br /> 2015), 73-83.
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