Pickled vegetables, hot dogs and a beef with JD Vance

If you want to see my Appalachia, don’t read Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Go to a community cannery.

Jul 29, 2024

I come from a long line of pickled vegetable people. My grandmother raised eight kids officially and several more unofficially as head lunch lady at the elementary school in Blue Ridge, Georgia. She married my grandfather, a preacher, while they were in their teens. She chewed tobacco while watching Braves games. She had a third grade education and never learned to drive. But she had more wisdom in her pinkie finger on how to care for the people around her than college degrees could ever bestow. Part of that wisdom manifested in pickling and preserving foods.

Our family potlucks always included bowls of pickled beets, pickled corn and chow chows, punchy little jewels among the rich casseroles. She canned big batches of tomato-based vegetable soup, which lined the pantry shelves waiting for winter, both the literal and metaphorical kinds. Taking one down on a February night felt like abundance, ancestral care and the warmth of summer from a jar.

I also come from a long line of hot dog eaters, a preserved food in a more um processed way. Folklorist Emily Hilliard writes about the popularity of hot dogs as a quick, inexpensive meal in rural areas and the coalfields of West Virginia in her book Making our Future. I’ve wondered if a connection exists to the copper mines where I was raised in North Georgia. My great-grandfather on my mom’s side mined for copper. Later, my maternal grandfather started a lumber and hardware business. He used to say that Ralph & Grady’s Pool Hall, a favorite for hot dogs, was his stiffest competition. Miners could spend their checks at Tennessee Copper Co.’s “Company Store” on building supplies, groceries, furniture, everything. But Tennessee Ernie Ford sang truth in “owe my soul to the company store,” because miners, ever exploited by their overlords, could draw on future checks too. They’d go into debt on cans of paint and hardware at the company store and sell them to Grady’s for barroom credit. My grandfather, who pool-sharked at Ralph and Grady’s, said they had a room full of building supplies for resale.

After my dad took over the hardware store, we also liked to get our hot dogs from a beer store around the corner run by a bushy haired man with long sideburns. As a young girl I wanted to be afraid of him, but he wouldn’t let me be. He’d use a dramatic, faux scary voice to warm me that the hot dogs were steamed in Budweiser. He also had a drive-thru in back that he called the “deacon’s window.”

On a recent visit home I ate my way through a food portal to these memories, which came first at dinner when we passed around a jar of chow chow—a pickled food that incidentally tastes great on a hot dog. It led to a discussion about “putting up” or canning foods and the community cannery in town, a hub where folks can bring in their produce and use commercial canning equipment.

The next day, we dropped by the Union County Canning Plant, which hosted about 20 people that morning—grandmothers to grandkids bustling around green beans packed into Ball jars and vats of simmering tomato sauce. Contraptions that sterilized jars purred steam as a crane lifted trays of up to 90 hot jars from giant pressure cookers. The cannery has existed since the 1940s and for the last decade it’s been by the farmers' market sheds. It doesn’t look like much from the outside. But inside, it’s a glorious hive of work among the gifts of the Earth. It’s joy in shared harvests, passed on wisdom and community care. And here’s where JD Vance comes in.

As everyone knows by now, Vance is the Republican candidate for vice president and author of a 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy. Vance grew up in Ohio. He isn’t from Appalachia, but he describes it through some family ties to Kentucky in sweeping generalizations. Some folks looked to the book as an explainer on voters in the region—including some liberals who might like to write off the area as ignorant and hopeless. Vance’s story is a tough tale, and he seems to be carrying trauma that he now inflicts on all of us with his hard-right (and backward) views. He’s said women should stay in violent marriages and proclaims ”childless cat ladies” as miserable and incapable of caring about our future. But that’s a beef for another time. I’m focusing here on the stereotypes he perpetuates about mountain people—the kinds of people who raised me—as lazy welfare leeches. He blames “bad genes” on failings rather than a complex stew of factors including corporations and drug companies that have preyed on poor people and the region’s resources for eons. He calls it a “hub of misery” with people who are pessimistic and resentful. His book lacks the nuance I see in my hometown, especially when I visit places like the community cannery, a space brimming with joy, life and the gifts of this place.

As I talked with a cannery regular named Dennis, a volunteer extended a large spoon our way glazed in applesauce. He urged us to drag a finger through for a taste before he washed up. “You do get samples,” Dennis said. Nearly everyone in the room that fall day had a batch of applesauce or apple butter. Dennis came prepared with an accompaniment. “I got some biscuits back there,” he said.

Meanwhile, friends Courtney and Carla worked up a batch of blueberry-apple sauce. Their grandmothers had been first cousins, and they gather regularly to can chow chow, beans, chicken pot pie filling or soups. (Later Courtney texted Mom to say she’d left a jar of green beans for us at her shop.)

Another woman named Pat had driven nearly an hour from Dahlonega where her community cannery had closed. “Our counties need our canneries,” she said.

Indeed, the community cannery network seems to be at a crossroads. While some have closed, Dustin Rogers, the manager of the Union County cannery, said he fields requests regularly from new folks and young people who want to learn. “I think it’s skyrocketed,” he said. “People private message me all the time. I tell them, ‘bring your stuff and we’ll get through it.’”

On the way home from the cannery, Dad reminisced about watching my grandmother shuck corn for canning with her friends under the mimosa tree. He told me the guy who used to run the cannery, a longtime agricultural agent, ran for state senate several years ago as a moderate Republican, and my parents—staunch Democrats—worked on his campaign. We talked about the time my Dad bought a .45 caliber pistol (illegally, maybe?) from the bushy haired man at the beer store. Dad was on a hot dog run when he mentioned he wanted a gun to keep at the hardware store. “Well, come around here and pick you one out,” the man said. Dad learned he had a cache of weapons under the counter. "I still have it," Dad said. "Never fired it." And yet my liberal Dad has fired plenty other guns, mostly during a period when he hunted quail and tried to train a wild Spaniel named Butch.

I share these stories, because as people take an interest in Vance’s book again, I want to do my small part in sharing some nuance that Vance does not. I know most folks in the area have voted Republican in the recent past, and I don’t know—and it’s not my place to assume—the voting patterns of the people at the cannery. I just don’t agree with Vance’s assessment of Appalachians as lazy and miserable. And I appreciate that my parents have modeled for me a coloring outside the lines of boxes politicians would like to put us in (though I have a long way to go in living that out). I want you to know the work of the region’s people and the joy in this place. My Dad, for one, spent decades in his first career as a band teacher and started the first band program at a local high school where he helped kids and teens—many of them living in poverty—foster the joys and rewards in making music. He later worked at a community college where he helped students find hopeful ways to a better future in healthcare or technology. He’s also been a lifelong appreciator of the natural landscape fishing with his father the streams and rivers that thread the mountains.

To be clear, I’m also not trying to say my Appalachian home is a utopia. Mom tells a story of the early days of the mines when workers went on strike, and the company brought in folks to cross picket lines. The mostly Black men who came to work were tied to a flatbed train car and sent back out of town. The mines closed here in 1986. But we still see corporations everywhere taking advantage of workers and pitting them against one another. I think of Trump telling his RNC audience—as they waved “Mass Deportation Now” signs—that immigrants have been taking “Black jobs.” It’s part of a long playbook that pits minorities and/or poor folks against one another and keeps us fearful and angry so that the wealthy can maintain their power. Trump and Vance might like us to believe they’re in support of workers by stoking grievances when their policies cut taxes for the wealthy. We need real solutions instead for affordable healthcare, better public education and living wages, and that’s not just for people Vance scorned in his book.

On the last night of my visit home, Mom suggested we go to a place in town for Colombian-style hot dogs topped with pineapple. It’s on menu at one of several Latin restaurants that have popped up, a vibrant thread to the tapestry of this place. While important debates over immigration rage on, we know thanks to a 2022 study by MIT researchers that immigrants are 80 percent more likely to start businesses and create jobs than native-born citizens. And how wonderful to have the opportunity to sample the various ways we steward resources in our recipes from soup beans to picadillos all set against the lush green folds of these old, quiet mountains. It’s a brighter view than the dark shadow Vance tries to cast on the region. No doubt we all need to do better by our rural neighbors. But from my perspective, the person who seems most miserable is JD Vance, and despite the ways he might like me to believe we have some hillbilly commonalities, I can assure you that JD Vance does not speak for the Appalachia I know and love.