Popcorn vs. The Future

Popcorn Sutton made moonshine in the 21st century, and the federal government did not like it. Backed by the support of a national, online, grassroots campaign, Sutton appealed his arrest, claiming shining as a traditional livelihood and his existential craft. Sutton was sentenced and subsequently committed suicide by ingesting the affluent of his hideously painted 79 Ford Fairlane.

Zoom out from the mountain melodrama to the broad reach of Western North Carolina – Cherokee, the reservation, the Asheville Metropolitan Area, and the Great Smokey Mountain National Park, and the inscriptions of violence and displacements, but also hope, music, and mountain culture appear vividly. Cherokee, the impoverished remants of the once great Indian nation appears to the North. Displaced from their land beginning with European invasion and culminating with the Trail of Tears, casinos and sideshows define that life now. The displacers brought a new nature, turning the virgin forests of the Southern Appalachians into a mix of yeoman farms reminiscent of their Scots-Irish heritage and plantation agriculture prevalent throughout the American South. However, their run was short lived as the displacers were displaced by the American Government, or more accurately, John Rockefeller and his new found affinity for conservation. The Great Smokey Mountain National Park displaced thousands of mountains and ushered in urbanization, industry, and commercialization, bringing timber, coal, and tourism to fuel the metabolism of the Land-of-Sky.

Farming remained largely immune to processes of urbanization. Farmers continued to grow commercially outside the park, and the New Deal brought new forms of farming, mostly subsidized tobacco, which sustained this economy and identity until the turn of the 21st century, when the federal government divested in tobacco. Resulting social movements have reoriented farming to a more local and organically oriented system, marketing produce, meats, cheeses, arts and crafts in the numerous markets burgeoning in the Asheville region. In other words, farming is being urbanized.

Popcorn Sutton couldn't survive a world were the practice of his culture was criminalized, wiped off the map, but the persistence of the mountain farming culture depends on adopting to a sort of criminalization. No longer is tobacco supported by government, precipitated by intense push to criminalize tobacco use throughout the country. Instead, (agri)culture must learn to negotiate rurality while adapting to urbanity.