What is the Mediterranean Diet?

In a time when most Americans live in big cities, the sparsely populated places in our country have become a mystery to more people than ever before. Take the Appalachian region of southwestern Virginia. Scholars recently got together at Virginia Tech to talk about what defines the area …and what does not.

When you drive the back roads of southwestern Virginia, it’s not long before someone gives you a sign you’re in Appalachian country - the ‘two fingered wave.’

Stewart Scales teaches geography at Virginia Tech. “I did that twice actually on my way up here,” he says. To him, that gesture is one of civility and respect, not like some other well known hand gestures made from behind the wheel in places where traffic is a nightmare.

“You feel something different when you're in the region.  It could be the closeness of the physical landscape because the mountains are high and close together and the valleys are deep and that’s just one of those ties that binds everybody in the region together and gives it that different feeling."

Customs passed down the generations is one way to define culture.  But it can also become a simplified basket into which go stereotypes about a region.

Emily Satterwhite teaches religion and culture at Virginia Tech. She’s wary of what scholars call the 'Appalachian myth,' that this is a mono-culture descended from northern European immigrants who began arriving here in the 17th century.

“It’s really important to me for people to realize the eastern European heritage, the African American heritage, the American Indian heritage and the new things that were forged by the contact among those groups," Satterwhite says.

"We have to think about Latinos in the region and new Syrian refugees we’ve been happy to welcome here and those cultures are always dynamic and always changing even though it often comforts people to think that there is a singular, long standing culture here. I think that, that’s a mistake.”

Anita Puckett heads the Appalachian Studies Program at Virginia Tech. She adds, “For me,  I take Alan Bateau’s position that Appalachia is a construct. It’s an invention.”

She’s referring to  Batteau’s book called The Invention of Appalachia.

“We use the term to refer to a distinct set of ways of life and meaning systems, more than one, so a lot of people are using it now but it was kind of imposed on us by others.  My relatives who were mountain people were like ‘What? I never use the term.’ So still a whole lot of folks don’t use the term because it’s not meaningful to them or they define it in other ways”

Stewart Scales says that, for him, "Probably the deepest ingrained aspect of Appalachia is the music, how it binds people together. There are songs that I can hear every now and then that will paint a picture of some upland holler somewhere, mists on the mountains on a cold gray day.  I can just hear it and I’m not even there. I’m just listening to a piece of music on the radio.”

On a snowy weekday morning in January, the outdoor economy in the historic coal town of St. Paul, Virginia, begins another business day.

Fly fishing guide Daniel Williams stands behind the counter of Clinch Life Outfitters, talking about how community leaders have rallied around outdoor recreation as a path forward from a long-dominant, but declining coal industry.

"St. Paul has really gotten behind it, changing the laws to let ATVs [all-terrain vehicles] run on the roads, letting a brewery come in — things that 10 or 15 years ago would have been unthinkable," Williams says. "They’ve realized we’ve got to do something."

A block away, Catrina Mullins, a native of nearby Castlewood and manager of Western Front, a boutique hotel, says she moved back to the region after spending more than 15 years working in Colorado. She returned for her family, but she also found that her hometown had a lot of the same things she loved about living out west.

"Coming back from Colorado, I realized we have a lot of those same great aspects that draw people to the mountains [out west]: the river; the kayaking; the fishing; the hiking; the biking; the ATV trails," Mullins says.

>span class="None">population of about 1,000. The town is next to a gateway to the Spearhead Trails, a network of 440 miles of trails that attracts ATV, dirt bike and mountain bike enthusiasts, and it seems as if about half of downtown businesses offer ATV rentals.