Hungry Roots: How Food Communicates Appalachia’s Search for Resilience

A journey through Southern Appalachia to explore the complex messages food communicates about the region

Depictions of Appalachian food culture and practices often romanticize people in the region as good, simple, and, often, white. These stereotypes are harmful to the actual people they are meant to describe as well as to those they exclude. In Hungry Roots: How Food Communicates Appalachia’s Search for Resilience, Ashli Quesinberry Stokes and Wendy Atkins-Sayre tell a more complicated story. The authors embark on a cultural tour through food and drinking establishments to investigate regional resilience in and through the plurality of traditions and communities that form the foodways of Southern Appalachia.

Wendy Atkins-Sayre is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication & Film at the University of Memphis and earned her PhD from University of Georgia. She co-edited three books: City Places, Country Spaces: Rhetorical Explorations of the Urban/Rural Divide; Communicating Advice: Peer Tutoring and Communication Practice; and Communication Centers and Oral Communication in Higher Education. Her research has also appeared in Western Journal of Communication, Southern Communication Journal, Public Relations Inquiry, Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, and Women & Language, as well as numerous edited volumes.