{"id":11124,"date":"2016-03-24T07:22:37","date_gmt":"2016-03-24T13:22:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=11124"},"modified":"2016-03-24T07:22:37","modified_gmt":"2016-03-24T13:22:37","slug":"professor-looks-at-trendy-leek-and-its-hillbilly-roots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/03\/professor-looks-at-trendy-leek-and-its-hillbilly-roots\/","title":{"rendered":"Professor looks at trendy leek, and its ‘hillbilly’ roots"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Boehm\"<\/a>

David Crisp\/Last Best News<\/p>

Melissa Boehm, right, talks to an audience member after her lecture on leeks Tuesday night.<\/p><\/div>\n

Even the humble wild leek provides fuel to keep alive centuries of stereotypes of Appalachian Americans, according to a Montana State University Billings professor.<\/p>\n

Melissa Boehm was speaking Tuesday evening in \u201cWhat\u2019s Cooking? Exploring American Food, Culture, Politics, and History,\u201d a series of six lectures <\/a>in the MSU Billings Library Lecture Series. The series started last week with a talk by Sam Boerboom on \u201cAmericans at the Table: The Political Language of Food.\u201d<\/p>\n

Boehm\u2019s topic was \u201cPungent but Problematic: Media and Food Culture.\u201d \u201cPungent,\u201d she said, is a word often used to describe the wild leek, better known in West Virginia as the ramp. Ramps have been a rite of spring in West Virginia for generations, she said. People come together for ramp suppers, and ramp festivals are held.<\/p>\n

Ramps are also favored for their supposed health benefits, including high Vitamin C content and evidence that they reduce blood pressure. An Appalachian saying goes, \u201cBy eating ramps in May, all the year after, physicians may play.\u201d<\/p>\n

In recent years, the wider world has begun to take notice. Books have been written about the ramp, and cookbooks have appeared. Martha Stewart and Better Homes and Gardens have taken notice. Accordingly, the price has soared.<\/p>\n

But Boehm, a professor in the Communications and Theatre Department, said that stereotypes that have persisted in Appalachia for centuries also have been applied to ramp culture. Those stereotypes include depictions of hillbillies, feuds, moonshine stills, environmental destruction, joblessness and hopelessness.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>As evidence of those stereotypes, she cited William Byrd, an early surveyor who wrote in 1728 that Appalachian men were lazy and stupid and that women did much of their work.<\/p>\n

Will Wallace Harney described Appalachia in an 1873 article as \u201ca strange land and a peculiar people.\u201d In a series of novels in the late 19th century, John Fox Jr., who never visited Appalachia, described it based on letters he received from his brother.<\/p>\n

Stereotypes persisted on television and in the movies. The History Channel showed a documentary hosted by Billy Ray Cyrus called \u201cHillbilly: The Real Story.\u201d Although set in California, \u201cThe Beverly Hillbillies\u201d drew on similar stereotypes, as did the variety show \u201cHee Haw.\u201d<\/p>\n

The reality TV show \u201cBuckwild\u201d exploited those stereotypes, as did \u201cThe Dukes of Hazzard.\u201d The movie \u201cDeliverance\u201d was decried by scholars for its depiction of hillbillies as criminals and perverts.<\/p>\n

To test how those stereotypes affected ramp coverage in the news media, Boehm studied newspaper articles from 1980 to 2014 in the New York Times and in the Charleston (W. Va.) Gazette. She focused on 12 articles in the Times and 26 in the Gazette.<\/p>\n

\"Leek\"<\/a>

The wild leek, commonly known in West Virginia as the ramp.<\/p><\/div>\n

Both newspapers printed stories about students supposedly sent home from school because of aromatic breath the day after eating ramps. The word \u201cpungent\u201d showed up in 10 of the 12 articles in the Times but in only 54 percent of the Gazette articles. A Times article said ramps \u201cmake a kitchen smell like a bus in Rome\u201d and quoted a West Virginian who said, \u201cRamps go with changing the oil or your underwear.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Gazette focused more on the ramp crop as a rite of spring and cited health benefits of eating them.<\/p>\n

In general, she said, the Times treated ramps, once they were transported to New York restaurants, as sophisticated and appealing. But the Times\u2019 references to ramps in their native West Virginia were cruder and more condescending.<\/p>\n

Coverage in the Gazette was more nuanced, Boehm said, emphasizing the importance of the ramp in Appalachian culture and the need to preserve it.<\/p>\n

In sum, she said, the ramp is an example of a common wild food long consumed by the working classes that has become prized by the upper class. In their native environment, such foods retain the demeaning cultural stereotypes that attach to the region as a whole. In their adopted big-city environment, they acquire an appealing sense of sophistication and exoticism.<\/p>\n

Ramps operate politically to either separate people or bring them together, she said.<\/p>\n

She asked the audience to name other foods in the same category. One mentioned that his family in Maine ate lobsters during the Great Depression but buried the remains in the yard so neighbors wouldn\u2019t notice that they were too poor to afford fish.<\/p>\n

Others mentioned brisket, once the cheapest cut of meat but now prized in barbecue, and another mentioned Rocky Mountain oysters. One audience member also mentioned lutefisk, but others questioned whether lutefisk had ever become prized by the rich.<\/p>\n

The free lecture series continues at 6:30 p.m. Tuesdays through April 19 in Library Room 148 at MSU Billings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Even the humble wild leek provides fuel to keep alive centuries of stereotypes of Appalachian Americans, according to a Montana State University Billings professor. Melissa Boehm was speaking Tuesday evening in \u201cWhat\u2019s Cooking? Exploring American Food, Culture, Politics, and History,\u201d a series of six lectures in the MSU Billings Library Lecture Series. The series started […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":11125,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[4060,2748,4061],"class_list":["post-11124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-diversions","tag-melissa-boehm","tag-msu-billings","tag-sam-boerboom","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11124\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}