Appalachian Families Used to Grow and Preserve Everything They Ate — So Why Did That Stop?

Every Appalachian family once put up three hundred jars of vegetables each summer, cured their own hams, and fed themselves for a year without buying groceries. Then between 1940 and 1980, it all vanished. This video explores why Appalachian families stopped growing and preserving their own food, how subsistence farming knowledge disappeared in a single generation, and what replaced the self-sufficiency that sustained mountain communities for two centuries. From root cellars and smokehouses to the coal boom and out-migration, we trace the economic and cultural forces that turned food independence into food dependence, and why some families are now working to reclaim those lost homesteading skills before they're gone forever.