is completely exhausting. He was the first person to publicly question the coal operators who came to extract valuable natural resources in Appalachia using processes that obliterated the terrain through mountain top removal. ", Beneath all the systemic diseases linked to bad oral health, Ebersole argued, is a disastrous healthcare system in which oral health is considered a luxury. SALON is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon.com, LLC. The lights, claim the legend, are the ghosts of grieving women still searching the mountainside for the bodies of fallen warriors. Kentucky is also the state with the most smokers, followed closely by West Virginia, according to aGallup study. Close. That's because the ABC special took great pains to show the effects of poverty on children in the Appalachian region a territory that stretches from around southern New York state to Alabama and coined a term, "Mountain Dew Mouth," which would be repeated in stories about Appalachian health care for years to come. Today, coal has left Appalachia, as have a host of other industries that brought economic opportunity. Packed with poems and prose, book reviews, science, and exciting exploits from around the globe, Appalachia delivers inspired stories of adventure, redemption, and the outdoors. The distinction between dental care and health care extends to insurance. The Appalachian people were denigrated so that they could be exploited because they owned valuable land with natural resources. Drinking more than a soda a day raises the risk that acids found in many soft and energy drinks will eat away at your tooth enamel and its pearly white color. To compensate for the cracked molar on the left side of her mouth, she had simply learned to chew on the right side. This kid is a hillbilly, which makes it special. Upward of a fifth sometimes a quarter of the babies they were delivering at the highly regarded Trover Clinic were below weight and premature. In January, when an acquaintance who worked on Hillary Clintons campaign touted it on Facebook, I was unable to argue because I had not read it. And in an impoverished part of the country, where the majority of residents either go hungry or receive government aid for food, public health advocates are calling for a policy overhaul to address the problem of rotted teeth and gum disease in Appalachia. The Appalachians run from Labrador south to Alabama, about 2,100 miles, in all. The journal comes out twice a year and has been a tradition of inspired writing since 1876. Dee Matello, a small business owner and mother of three in Laurel, Maryland, had not been to a dentist in nine years. While some people in this region may refer to the soda as "Mountain Dew," it is not accurate to say that all people from Appa. When we got back to Pats house, I was given a crushed up Loratab to snort for the pain. Irish and Scottish immigrants who moved to the Appalachian region to mine coal called their mixers for moonshine, off-market bourbon and whiskey, "Mountain Dew." Barney and Ally Hartman started bottling their Mountain Dew in the 1930s and marketing it as whiskey's best friend, meaning it's had a pretty manly ad strategy from its inception. I utilize photography to address how images fail at representing culture. They say it's used as. Native Americans first began to gather in the Appalachian Mountains some 16,000 years ago. Nationally, the rate of infant mortality was 211.1 per 100,000, but it was higher in five of six southern Appalachian states (all except Tennessee). Glimmering pearly whites have long been a symbol of social and financial success in America. Prenatal training and preparation was a key part of the centering sessions across the pregnancy period and thereafter. Vance and I are of the same generation. O ften, photographers and journalists capture a version of Appalachia that is not a place - a vast geographic region covering 13 states with more than 25 million people - but a social and . Sometimes there were drunken fights. He mentions his aunt, who had an early abusive marriage, and his mother. My research into the origins of this initiative led me to Harry Caudill, a small town lawyer from the eastern Kentucky town of Whitesburg. no food stuff is more personal to me, more deeply burrowed into my sense of identity than Diet Mountain Dew. Good ol' North Carolina. No national news outlet, it seems, cares to shine a real light on the deep and profound problems (drug wars, economic stagnation, post-coal mine environmental havoc) facing the area that causes people to place their health on the backburner and, more often than not, fall on the crutch of unhealthy food and drink. I watched as they trekked back and forth in it, finding great pleasure in turning their ATVs into boats. Like newspaper stories and TV news before and since the War on Poverty, Vance has looked at Appalachia and seen a narrative of a place that needs to be fixed, a place where things have gone wrong. Brothers Barney and Ally Hartman, who had moved their business from Augusta, GA, to Knoxville in 1932, initially bottled a lemon-lime mixer they jokingly called Mountain Dew, a 19th century nickname for moonshine, for their own after-hours consumption. The coal operators, who came from elsewhere to buy the land, blew up the mountains. 3. His experience is valid, but its not everyones experience. I saw him pick up and throw several chairs and then punch a friend in the face. My teachers drank it, my doctor drank it and prisoners would drink it while picking up the littered roadside bottles. As a result, Hannah made a 12-minute audio documentary about the experience for the Appalachian Media Institute, called "Foster Care in a Pandemic World." New Fathers and Quarantine Babies. Years before when visiting my hometown for the first time, we took a stroll down Main Street and passed a teenager with a freshly sprouted goatee in a cut off t-shirt carrying a case of Mountain Dew atop his shoulder like a mounted bazooka. And none of them behave the way Vance describes his family behaving. My father was one of 11 children, and my mother is one of five. Though pain and discomfort are unfortunate enough, lack of dental care presents other, more enduring problems. Appalachia has a high concentration of these natural voids, including the world's longest. You dont have to work to read this book. "Mountain Dew" is a centuries-old mountain slang term for moonshine, which Tennessee-bred creators Barney and Ally Hartman found fitting because their bubbly elixir was initially crafted as a mixer for whiskey in the early 1930s. Accept Cookies. 4. Folklore & Superstitions in Appalachia. They were in pain, and theyd be hurting at school.. And I was outraged too. I would probably get fewer dirty looks if I snorted a couple of lines of cocaine every day. ------------------------------------------, the link between transportation and healthcare. A Mountain Dew Code Red, that is. (London) 1841, #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } I dont really have any answers. It's Pepsi's #2 cash cow, second only to their flagship beverage, Pepsi, even beating out Diet Pepsi for total sales. Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, elegantly summed up my decades-long tug of war with how Mountain Dew relates to my identity in a recent interview. Mammoth Cave in west-central Kentucky spans 420 milesmore than twice the size of the second-longest,. Reply It's a thing, reports the Salt blog at NPR, and public health advocates in West Virginia and throughout Appalachia say the damage is real and widespread. Growing up in Eastern Kentucky, Mountain Dew was not a novelty, not an ironic goofjust simply a way of life. Mountain Dew was invented in Tennessee, before PepsiCo bought the brand. While Mountain Dews target audience today might be neon tank top wearing bros and skateboarding teenagers, my Appalachian demographicnamesake and allwere the original consumers. Id like to think if you cut me open a little Diet Mountain Dew would be right there in my bloodstream, hovering just below the surface, like the homesickness that never quite goes away. This name has a Celtic origin and the meaning of the name is 'he who comes from the mountain'. We stopped along the way and enjoyed beer with others who were out recreating. I later found out that a dead body had been found and recovered from the spot where the lights originated. It is not dense, it does not use large words or complicated concepts. Answer: There is a common stereotype that people from Appalachia refer to Pepsi's Mountain Dew soda as "Mountain Dew," but this is not true for all people from Appalachia. I learned about Caudills dark turn while I was traveling in the region. According to Eater, Mountain Dew was invented by Barney and Ally Hartman, Tennesseans who were looking for a mixer to accompany their whiskey in the 1930s. That is what brutes do. We told them dont put Mountain Dew in a baby bottle, dont put that baby to sleep with juice, dont let people kiss that baby, to prevent bacteria being transferred, Almon said. They call each other on behavior like drinking too much soda and then all of a sudden with another group or two, everybodys stopped because something has happened within the group that says, 'This just isnt good.', For UKs Jeffrey Ebersole, programs like this one are policy no-brainers both in terms of cost and disease prevention. While millions of Americans suffer because of their teeth, another portion of America supports a $110 billion-a-year dental industry, investing in procedures such as gum contouring and spending up to $2,000 on a single veneer. Thats one reason why their babies get cavities so fast., After more than four years of the oral health and centering program -- during which it has served 500 women -- Todd-Langston and Almon say they believe attitudes in the county may be beginning to change. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. The angry reaction supports the academic literature on Appalachian Americans, he writes, then proceeds to cite exactly one piece of academic literature, a paper three sociologists published in 2000 about how hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them., We tend to overstate and to understate, to glorify the good and ignore the bad in ourselves, Vance writes. Medicaid, the joint federal-state health care program that provides health coverage for 72 million people, reckons dental benefits as optional for adults, leaving it up to states to decide. And Part 2 explored the link between transportation and healthcare. He mentions that she pushed him to write this, apparently recognizing that claiming his Appalachian heritage as an obstacle to overcome would sell. Appalachian names are often taken as a southern baby name but there are subtle differences. Welcome to family life for the American hillbilly.. Weeks later, he reported finding syringes in the street. Then, I knew I shouldve seen it coming. January 15, 2021. But generally the women coming to Trover Clinic werent doing anything about it, mostly because in Hopkins County there was only one dentist who accepted Medicaid patients -- for one half-day a month and only on a walk-in basis. Tightening regulations wont fix an economy so tied to a dying industry that a staggering majority of residents either rely on government aid to eat or are regularly hungry. I think it valuable for us to question how we arrive at the meaning of poverty. Great Britain. He lived in a trailer and was occasionally put in jail for petty non-violent crimes. But what is "Mountain Dew Mouth?" None of them, as far as I could tell, fell into laziness, violence or what my mother might call sorryness. Ive been thinking a lot about the War on Poverty. Harry Caudill, Whitesburg Position Statement. Proc. The soda is ruining teeth, in an epidemic known as Mountain Dew-mouth. The acid causes erosion and the sugar abets decay. The Appalachian Mountains range southwestward from Quebec and Newfoundland in Canada to Alabama in the southeastern United States.The central and southern highlands of this ancient mountain range, consisting of the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountain ranges, the Allegheny and Cumberland plateaus . 4. Cherokee Indians were the main Native American group of the Southern Appalachian and Blue Ridge region, but there were also Iroquois, Powhatan, and Shawnee people.. The drink is also native to the region. You get a group of 10 or 12 women, theyre going to say things, like one woman I remember, I cant believe that youre still smoking. Over the next six weeks I returned regularly, befriending the extended group of people that spent time at Pats house. And by quite a wide margin, one might add. I said I hadnt really noticed as he shook his head. Appalachians are portrayed as individuals who are unable to get out of their own way problems caused by excessive Mountain Dew consumption. If you buy something from an Eater link, Vox Media may earn a commission. Appalachian English is a term linguists use to describe the speech patterns of people in Appalachia. At this point, I should probably make this clear: Im no Mountain Dew apologist. Dew Baby". Brushing Teeth 'Too Painful' The problems faced by the region are painfully real, and deserve not to be trivialized or oversimplified in the national spotlight. The Story Behind the Song Bascom Lamar Lunsford first wrote the song in 1928. MADISONVILLE, Ky. Nurse LeAnn Todd-Langston and nurse-midwife Sarah Almon had long known their rural west Kentucky county faced a crisis, but it was getting worse. "Here in West Virginia, you see people carrying around bottles of Mountain Dew all the time even at a public health conference," says public health researcher Dana Singer. According to a report from WiseG About Us Consider what every movie star, news anchor and television personality has in common: not height, weight or ethnicity (though there is certainly an enormous amount of room for more diversity). Join me as I explore Marion. In Kentucky, the state with highest proportion of adults under 65 without teeth, Smith has witnessed the extremes ofMountain Dew-mouthtoddlers with baby teeth filled with cavities, kids who won't brush their teeth because of inflamed gums, and teenagers who have pulled out their own rotting teeth with pliers. Its not just a beverageits a portable sense of home. 2. Now why would you want your baby to be smoking? Rising, whose Centering Healthcare Institute has worked with major medical schools across the country, flew down to Madisonville to help Todd-Langston and Almon start the prenatal program there. The elderly are affected, too. For Appalachians, a sense of place and of home seem particularly important, yet from the 1940s to 1960s, an estimated seven million immigrated north into urban areas in search of work, only to be met with widespread prejudice against any Appalachian-speaking mountain speech. My consumption of Diet Mountain Dew ensures that Im served a double shot of shamecomplete with Backwoods Barbie stereotypeon a fairly regular basis. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Lyndon B Johnsons January 1964 State of the Union address. Under current guidelines, any kind of soda of any size can be purchased with a SNAP card even Mountain Dew, which has 170 calories in a single 12-ounce can. As a defense mechanism, Ive become a trivia expert on the most esoteric facts available about Mountain Dew so I can titter them off as a nervous shield. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Arent there more important factors to consider like physical abuse or abandonment? Frequently he attributes rough behavior and inexperience with the world to, essentially, hillbillies being hillbillies. In a region long undergoing a cultural and economic crisis, Appalachias thirst for Mountain Dew is perhaps the lesser of many evils. (Farmland is even lighter than usual in this image because the fields are fallow after the harvest.) Dozer had collected several people along the way so by the end of the ride, there were 4 of us on the ATV. All last fall I resisted reading J.D. Poor Law Commissioners. People exist, of course, who are violent, dysfunctional, addicted, and on welfare. Instability begets instability. I. Waxman Chaim,The Stigma of Poverty: A Critique of Poverty Theories and Policies. Whats more, 40 percent of all births are paid for by Medicaid. In her book, she writes: "In the way that they disfigure the face, bad teeth depersonalize the sufferer. 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