Appalachia, Merika

Third World, USA

I don't really know anything about this area. I have heard of Appalachia my whole life and with watching the above video, I began wondering where in heck that is.

I do know it's generally mountainous, mostly rural and somewhere in the Eastern United States. But it's a cultural region, not a specific state, and it occurred to me I don't really know where it is.

Thanks to auto complete, my initial search was for the Appalachian Mountains and the Wikipedia article doesn't really even have a good map and says it's a mountainous region stretching into Canada. There is, in fact, a Wikipedia article for Appalachia and it has a decent map showing where in the US this area is.

So I got about halfway through the video and started it over to take notes while I watched. Early on, they talk about brown tap water that some locals won't drink. They name the place as Martin County, Kentucky. 

Wikipedia indicates this is a very rural county with two incorporated towns and several unincorporated communities. Total population: Under 12,000 people. The largest of the two incorporated towns is Inez. It is the county seat and had 564 people at the 2020 census.

Floyd, Virginia was mentioned. It's apparently the only incorporated town in Floyd County (pop: ~ 15k) and someone is living in a dirt cheap trailer because it's all they can afford and there is talk in this part of the video of people living without electricity or without running water.

The author moved to Thailand which also gets described in the video as Southeast Asia to get access to adequate quality of life on a limited income. Presumably this includes healthcare because lack of access to healthcare is a big criticism of the video.

The video covers the concept of food deserts where there are no real grocery stores within an hour's drive or more. People shop at Dollar General or a gas station or similar. "Everything is shelf stable." so it's extremely unhealthy.

That doesn't absolutely have to be true that shelf stable food is unhealthy. Noodles are shelf stable and noodles are a staple food in healthy diets around the world, but we're probably talking about people living on bargain off-brand sodas, microwave meals and snack items.

If your tap water is brown and you may not have electricity and/or you're working 68 hours a week in the coal mines or have two jobs to survive, you probably aren't stocking up on traditional shelf-stable foods like noodles and cooking from scratch.

Cities mentioned in the region includ Lexington, Charleston, Huntington.


Later on, Louisville is mentioned. That's probably Louisville, Kentucky.

In that section of the video, the person speaking says there's "No public transportation in like 90 percent of Appalachia." 

That's probably true in most rural places and small towns in most of America. If Appalachia trends rural, most places in it won't have public transit because it's rural and even Intercity bus service and "whistle stops" -- places a train only stops if you ASK them to -- has been on the decline for less populated parts of the US.

She also says there are no homeless shelters and homeless people can't even get food stamps because they have no address to receive paperwork and food pantries are non-existent or wholly inadequate. She describes low quality pantries compared to services available in the big cities.

This is also probably generally true for rural areas and small towns throughout America. It's one of the reasons big cities are overrun with homeless people: You can at least get a meal and food stamps in the bigger cities, so that's where the homeless go to try to survive.

Other issues mentioned in the video include no maternity leave across the US and lack of Internet service in some places.

Completely coincidentally, not hugely long ago, I watched a video about so-called hillbilly dinners that is also described as Appalachian cooking. Dad was from Indiana and no part of Indiana is considered to be in Appalachia according to the map on Wikipedia.

Maybe not completely coincidentally because I made extensive notes and that video is really when I began wondering "Exactly where is this mythical place called Appalachia???" precisely because a lot of the food in the video sounds eerily familiar.

My notes:
My dad said he knew a poor family growing up and the dad would say at dinner "Take big sips of buttermilk and little bites of cornbread" or "Take big bites of cornbread and little sips of buttermilk" depending on what they had a lot of.

I didn't think that milk and cornbread was possibly the entire meal. 

I grew up eating beans with cornbread.

I'm still waiting to see the reason I clicked on the video: it looks like spinach and eggs.

Cornmeal mush. AKA polenta if you are Italian. I always called it polenta when I made cooked cornmeal in Europe as a substitute for grits because grits weren't available.

Never heard of letting it sit overnight and frying it the next morning.

I grew up eating squirrel and deer. I don't remember how squirrel got served. I was young when that stopped being a staple in our household.

Ah, it's poke salad and eggs. I grew up eating spinach, eggs and mashed potatoes as one of the few vegetarian meals my meat and potatoes family served.

Tomato gravy and biscuits. Sounds like a variation on pasta primavera. But a spiffier name would sound less pathetic and less like poverty food.

My mother was German and cooked from scratch a LOT. I ate a lot of German dishes growing up. I'm pretty sure the American food she cooked was likely favorites of my father that she learned to cook for him.

The video that starts this piece is by someone who was sufficiently dissatisfied with life here she left the country and she wants people to be aware these are real problems. I have no desire to suggest that's not true.

But my father grew up on a farm in a long cabin and the room he shared with an uncle had a dirt floor. There was no caulking and small snow drifts came in through the gaps in winter.

My understanding is that the Uncle lived with the family because he was permanently disabled due to mustard gas exposure during World War I (AKA The Great War). My father also left home and spent 26.5 years in the military and verbally agreed to retire in Germany. That isn't how it went and my mother never forgave him.

I considered posting the video elsewhere and trying to suggest potential solutions, but I really don't know enough about the area and what I do know tends to generalize to most of rural and small town America.

Appalachia is generally well known for trending poor, uneducated and rural. The Wikipedia article linked above for Appalachian Mountains says in part:
The Appalachian Mountains are a barrier to east–west travel, as they form a series of alternating ridgelines and valleys oriented in opposition to most highways and railroads running east–west. This barrier was extremely important in shaping the expansion of the United States in the colonial era.

I've done some reading on Idaho, which is a strangely shaped, tall-skinny state and is infamous for having significant problems. It is also mountainous and initially had two east-west oriented highways running through the state and no north-south transit route of any kind internally.

My general understanding of life is that physical mobility and economic mobility -- or lack thereof -- tend to go hand in hand. Most likely, this is a distinctive cultural region in part because there are transportation challenges which help keep people trapped there, so people are less mobile than in other parts of the US and you have regional accents and regional culture because of the tendency for people to stay put.

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