It’s hard to kill a cabbage. Even when it’s roadkill.
This once-popular mainstay of homestead gardening and cookery has faded in public affection—when’s the last time you had sauerkraut, or made cole slaw?—except in a mountain valley in far southwestern Virginia, where the still-thriving cabbage-growing industry has given rise to one of the quirkiest local pastimes anywhere: Hang out by the road when cabbage-laden wagons go by, and snatch up the ones that bounce off.
Residents of Wythe County, who unabashedly call themselves “cabbage-heads,” label their regional sport “roadkill cabbage.”
“I got two last year,” reports Shane Terry of the tourism bureau in Wytheville, the county seat. “Used ’em as a pasta substitute in a sort of fettucine.
“I took it down to the local brewery and shared it around. Everyone asked, is this cabbage roadkill? Of course it is, I told them.”
Of course it is, agrees local historian, musician, philosopher and barber Jim Lloyd of Rural Retreat, a tiny hamlet down the road from Wytheville. There are just 1,530 people in Lloyd’s town, and around 28,000 in the whole county. Visitors who pull off Interstate highways 77 or 81 will find a couple history museums (Rural Retreat is supposedly where Dr. Pepper was first created) and a dinner theater where, yes, cabbage is definitely on the menu. But this is not just any lightly populated Appalachian fastness. In the early 20th century the area fancied itself the “cabbage capital of the world”—a superlative very few places would aspire to, then or now.
“Cabbage was once king here, everyone was proud of it, people still remember that, and now it’s back,” Lloyd explains. Yes, fine, but avidly foraging road-bounce cabbages? That’s a 21st century phenomenon that, fueled by social media, has become a central fact of life here. Residents have been known to deliberately park by the railroad tracks where a few are sure to bounce off the wagons on their way to the local trucking facility. Rumors abound about asking drivers to pitch one out, a la begging for beads at a Mardi Gras parade.
“I can’t say for sure how it started, but I can tell you that the local record is seven cabbage heads in one day,” Lloyd reports, not a speck of irony in his discourse about a vegetable that’s both high and low in human regard.
“Cabbage,” after all, is an old-fashioned slang term for money. But in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-glass, “of cabbages and kings” is a phrase used to describe random, nonsensical items lumped together meaninglessly. Famous literary curmudgeons Ambrose Bierce, H.L Mencken and Mark Twain all cited cabbage disparagingly in a sundry assortment of jibes.
“Cauliflower,” sniffed Twain, “is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” Bierce sneered that it is “a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man’s head,” illustrating his famous ability to fling insults in several directions at once.
Wythe County’s cabbage affinity dates back to the late 18th century, when the then-remote region drew settlers from Germany, a land where cabbage was and still is highly regarded. Wythe County’s high elevation above 2,000 feet proved ideal for cabbage growing, and its pioneer virtues are strong: Winter varieties of cabbage keep in the fields into spring in moderate climates; it is easily pickled for root-cellar storage. German immigrants in harsher climates, such as the Great Plains, would fill large barrels with cabbages, pour salt over them, seal it all up and happily open the barrel in February when skiffs of snow swirl past the dead grass of the prairie. Even today, you may find celebrities of German heritage lauding this humble food: “I love cabbage!” declares Heidi Klum, and I dare you to argue with the famous model’s personal dietary predilections.
Late 19th century arrival of railroad lines in Wythe County allowed cabbage shipping to major urban areas, but production shifted to Western ag centers in the 1930s and all that remained here was a fond memory of agricultural glory. Cabbage returned to Wythe County in the 1980s when a North Carolina family farm corporation revived the industry. Bottomley Farms grows close to 300 acres of cabbage in southwest Virginia and northwest North Carolina. Although this is a renaissance of this once-revered crop, it pales in comparison to the tens of thousands of acres in cabbage production in California and Arizona. But let’s discard sheer scale in favor of spiffier frameworks.
One struggles to think of other locales where anything similar takes place. I’ve been in all 50 states, and while you can see huge truckloads of tomatoes going down the highway in central California, oranges in Florida, apples in Washington and potatoes in Idaho, none draw foraging fans… For one thing, none likely survive the damage gravity inflicts. In West Virginia, from whence Jim Lloyd hails, residents have been known to pick up stray lumps of coal along railroad tracks—but face the threat of arrest by railroad officials.
So is Wythe County’s avocation just an opportunistic oddity? Let’s view it in more interesting and worthy light. Food waste is a stupidly catastrophic blight in American society—as high as 40 percent, some studies estimate. And Lloyd believes foraging cabbage is not just a whim.
“I can’t prove it, but I am sure this took place back in the Depression, and around here people remember hard times,” he points out. “In some ways, we’re still in hard times here.
“Disdain for waste never left this place.”
Let’s applaud that. Slaw, anyone?
