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Chefs converge on Asheville for Appalachian food salon

Jonathan
Ammons

February 13, 2016

Being a chef can be isolating work. It is easy to disappear into the fluorescent lights of the kitchen, the whirring of
immersion blenders, the tapping of the knife against the cutting board. Cooking often requires so much time of a chef
that it is easy to forfeit oneself to the job, losing connection with the community at large.
Its easy to feel like youre just on your own little island, says Richmond, Va., chef Travis Milton. Long obsessed
with Appalachian ingredients and Southern foodways, Milton seeks out rare, heirloom ingredients indigenous to the
Appalachian Mountains strains of vegetables and grains that have slowly disappeared over time due to market
demand for more universally accessible varietals.
Youll be looking up old recipes and realize that you cant figure out where to find something, he says. It can be
hard to remember that there are other chefs on your team.
Earlier this month, Asheville chef William Dissens downtown restaurant, The Market Place, played host to Milton
and over 20 other chefs plus renowned writers, farmers and food justice leaders for the James Beard Foundations
inaugural Chefs at Work on Policy and Change Appalachian food salon. The likes of Alan Benton of Tennessees
Bentons Bacon, Burnsville historian and cookbook author Ronni Lundy and Kentucky seed saver Bill Best sat
alongside some of the Souths best chefs during networking sessions.

Levon Wallace of Nashvilles Cochon Butcher, Anthony Lamas of Louisvilles Seviche and Ashley Christensen of
Raleighs Pooles Diner rubbed elbows with hometown heroes such as Katie Button and John Fleer during
the salon, which was a private discussion on all things Appalachian. The aim was to allow the chefs to dig deeply
into issues of sustainability, food inequality and access, and cultural heritage.
It was an amazing group of chefs all coming together to discuss our Appalachian values, our cuisine and those
traits that tie us all together, says Dissen. There are some pretty amazing things happening in Appalachia that the
rest of the country kind of gets but doesnt really understand. It was about figuring out how we can use our voices
collectively to let the world know that we are making some serious waves in the culinary world here.
The salon was an extension of the James Beard Foundations Chefs Action Network, the nonprofit organization that
hosts the Chefs Bootcamp for Policy and Change, a recurring gathering that seeks to connect chefs to tools and
resources for effecting positive change within their communities.
Forever, Appalachia has been a really extractive society, where people come in and take things from us, says
Milton. Whether it is coal or timbering, its been a constant stream of people benefiting from our resources. So how
do we as chefs in the region create systems so that the actual communities in Appalachia can benefit?
Dissen, who has worked extensively on a national level as a representative for sustainable food systems, adds that
issues of sustainability and environmental awareness have been innately important to residents of Appalachia for
centuries. A lot of the folks here were impoverished, so by nature, youd never throw anything out. You canned, you
pickled, you preserved. If you slaughtered a hog, you used every single part of it, not because it was a Brooklyn DIY
trend of the moment; it was because if you didnt do that, you couldnt feed your family, Dissen explains. That is our
heritage, and now we take those traditions and use them to create a modern Appalachian cuisine. These are flavors
you dont find anywhere else.
Chai Pani chef and James Beard Award nominee Meherwan Irani came away with a different perspective. As an
Indian immigrant, Irani notes, I had begun to feel really stuck in what I am doing and how Im doing it, but it was like
a lightbulb just went off this week. I have the opportunity now not just to tell the story of Indian food but to really
weave in the story of Asheville. It really helped to fire up the whole creative machine again.
If an Indian family were to move to Appalachia with no idea how to access the ingredients from home, theyd still
figure out a way to make the food from home with what they found here, Irani continues. So [the question is], how
can I actually cook Indian food with what I have around me?
Irani, whose restaurants motto has always been Namaste Yall, adds, Instead of that just being a nod to being an
Indian in the South, I want it to become a mantra for having a sense of place in the South.
Milton says the salon also focused on the idea of preserving a sense of place and community in food and the
importance of constantly working to improve the understanding of Appalachia and the regions heritage. He also
says there was discussion of how shifting from local to regional sourcing is a big step in the right direction.
We have to look at how we work with farmers. We cant keep working in a symbiotic way anymore, but looking at it
as a true partnership and understanding what it is to be a farmer, he continues. It gets lost for a lot of chefs that
there is a lot of work that goes into that piece of squash that you ordered. There are rotational crops that the farmers
might not even be able to sell, and that thats why the price is different [for those]. So it really takes an understanding
of what it takes to get the food to you and, from the farmers side, an understanding of the sheer economics of being
a chef. We can all build on that.
Dissen adds that during the discussions, a lot of energy was directed at identifying values. Community, family,
sustainability, preservation: These are bigger-picture issues that come up nationally, he says. What can we do to
be more effective in our communities? What about food deserts and childhood nutrition?

We really started working with coal miners and really dealing with a lot of aspects of rural law as a way to look at
how we could effect social change through the lens of food, says Milton, who routinely works to use Appalachian
traditions to bring change through food with organizations such as the Appalachian Food Summit, Grow Appalachia
and the Virginia Food Heritage Project.
A lot us had been doing this well before anyone took notice that Appalachia even had a cuisine, and now its getting
a little harder because there is a spotlight on it, he continues. We just want to make sure that things are done
properly, and with a lot of respect, and in a way that can benefit Appalachia as a whole and not just a single
restaurateur.