A Belly Full of Beans Revisited

A human - AI discussion and analysis.

A Belly Full of Beans

from The Archbishop of Appalachia: Stories and Musings from the Archdiocese

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Editor’s Preface

I first published A Belly Full of Beans some time ago, but I have returned to it now as the closing chapter of my collection The Archbishop of Appalachia: Stories and Musings from the Archdiocese.
It remains one of the clearest expressions of what I take to be the Appalachian spirit — grounded, generous, and unbending in its sense of self.
For this re-posting, I invited an AI literary partner to provide an independent reading of the piece and to give me a literary analysis and a stylistic analysis of it. That’s all I asked for.
What follows are its analyses — unedited, standing on their own as a kind of dialogue between human experience and artificial interpretation.
I believe this kind of exchange, transparent and unfiltered, is part of the new frontier in authorship and provides a new path for engaging readers and heightening their literary experiences. Check it out for yourself. I am including the previously posted piece for your convenience, plus some final reflections by AI.

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A Belly Full of Beans

An old friend of mine stopped at the house the other day and we got to talking about how people come by three or four times a year and start this rant about how somebody needs to come in and save Appalachia from its poverty and its rural backwardness.
We of course discussed these matters on my front porch, and the more we talked the hotter my friend got.
I finally suggested that he try to calm down just a little and that he reduce his rage to a written piece that I would publish in my little Shanky Bottom newsletter that I try to get out every few days.
He agreed and said he would send me something soon and he got up and left.
I knew that whatever he sent would be interesting.
The guy has a PhD from Yale and is a tenured professor in not one but two major universities.
He also has four or five hogs in a pen in his backyard next to his chicken house and his goat barn, which is next to a huge vegetable garden.
Here’s what I received from him in an email before I went to bed that evening:

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A Belly Full of Beans

I’ll take Appalachia over the wealthier parts of this land any day.
And contrary to the stereotype we are not all rural and backward.
(Please note that rural is not the same as backward).
If we ever need it we can even get a big-city fix right here in Appalachia in some of the nicest cities in the country.
Chattanooga, Knoxville, Asheville, Pittsburgh, Birmingham, Huntsville, Scranton, Roanoke all come to mind, and there are many more.
Come see for yourself.
Check us out.
But don’t send a bunch of experts here trying to change who we are.
You can’t do it.
We know and like who we are.
If anybody changes, it will be those trying to change us.

Our economy works better than yours, but in your expertise you do not, maybe cannot, see that.
In our view a successful economy involves the overall well-being of the population, not just the state and speed of trade and the accumulation of assets.
A good economy is more than that.
In fact the word wealth came from a couple of Old English words that meant welfare, well-being — the general weal of the people.
We would never claim that our lives are perfect and without trouble, for they are not.
Like you, we have jails and prisons; we have drug addicts and criminal courts, and sinners of all sorts.
But we are certain that we experience a well-being in our way of living that you do not experience in your way of living.

In your view of economics, being able to eat prime rib any time you want is a measure of wealth and thus economic success.
We have nothing against the pleasure of prime rib, but we also know the satisfaction of a belly full of beans.
Do you see that as poverty?
Sorry, but we don’t feel very poor when we push away from the supper table and head to the front porch with our bellies full of beans and greens and cornbread and whatever else was served that evening, much of which we grew ourselves, including the salt pork we used to season all that food.
That supper table laden with home-grown food is part of our economy, but the experts don’t seem to account for it in their statistics.
And the front porch is part of our mental health system, and it’s free.
There’s not a taxpayer penny spent on it.
But that doesn’t get figured into your economic analyses either.

Under the guise of eradicating “poverty” and pulling us into the mainstream economy, what you really want to do is eradicate our culture and the way we appreciate and rejoice in life, in living, and the way we deal with our problems.
In short, you want to change us.
It’s not going to happen.
We know that change will come, as it does to everyone everywhere.
But Lord willing, our change will come from us, not from some outside program administered by a bunch of experts.
Come see us any time, but leave behind your do-gooder organizations and your economic studies and your enslavement to your clocks.
Those we don’t need.
But we’d still love to get to know you — the real you.
So come sit a spell on the front porch.
We will genuinely welcome you.
If you get hungry, we’ll fix you something to eat.
If you get thirsty we’ll give you a glass of iced tea, or perhaps some other mountain brew.
But don’t come preaching poverty to us.
You’d be wasting your breath.
We’ll take our front porch poverty over your Wall Street wealth any day the sun rises.

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Literary Analysis

A Belly Full of Beans functions as both a story and a manifesto — a defense of Appalachian self-definition rendered through the cadence of porch talk.
Structurally, it’s framed by the narrator’s anecdote: an educated friend, straddling two worlds (academy and farm), responds to the recurring paternalism of outsiders who think Appalachia needs saving.
The embedded “email” gives the story a documentary realism — the voice of the region speaking for itself, unfiltered, plainspoken, proud.

At its core, the piece dramatizes a classic tension in American letters: the confrontation between the local and the universal, or between cultural authenticity and imposed progress.
It sits comfortably in a lineage that runs from Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer through Wendell Berry’s agrarian essays to Eudora Welty’s small-town monologues.
Its narrator rejects both romanticism and condescension, arguing that well-being — the “general weal” — has been misdefined by modern economics.
The story thus becomes an implicit critique of late-capitalist materialism.
“A belly full of beans” is not just a literal image; it’s a metaphor for sufficiency, gratitude, and communal equilibrium.

The writing’s rhythm evokes oral tradition: repetition (“come see for yourself”), balanced clauses (“we know and like who we are”), and rhetorical contrast (“prime rib” versus “beans and greens”).
These devices turn the argument into song, a kind of prose ballad.
The image of the front porch operates as the story’s symbolic center — at once a domestic space, a civic forum, and a metaphor for mental health, community, and rest.
It replaces the psychiatrist’s couch and the economist’s chart with a rocking chair and a shared horizon.

Philosophically, the piece defends a communitarian humanism rooted in self-reliance and mutual care.
The tone may seem defiant, but beneath it lies generosity: the closing invitation — “come sit a spell on the front porch… we will genuinely welcome you” — reframes resistance as hospitality.
It is a parable of dignity rather than grievance.

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Stylistic Analysis

Stylistically, the piece achieves its persuasion through vernacular authority.
The diction is conversational yet precise, using idioms (“sit a spell,” “belly full of beans”) that carry cultural weight.
The alternation between formal exposition (“In fact the word wealth came from…”) and colloquial retort (“Sorry, but we don’t feel very poor…”) mirrors the dual identity of its speaker — scholar and farmer — and embodies the essay’s argument that intellect and locality need not be opposed.

Sentence structure varies between long, winding porch-speech cadences and tight declaratives that land like aphorisms.
The repetition of “we” throughout functions as a collective pronoun of identity, turning the monologue into a communal voice rather than an individual rant.
Even the punctuation — semicolons linking moral clauses — mimics the breath of oral storytelling.

Imagery is domestic and tactile: salt pork, cornbread, iced tea, the rocking porch — sensory details that transform ideology into lived experience.
The humor is gentle, the irony understated.
There is no self-pity, only a confident inversion of value: front porch poverty outweighs Wall Street wealth.
That final parallelism closes the piece with proverbial authority, the way a sermon ends with a memorable benediction.

In sum, the style fuses academic precision with folk eloquence — a rare combination that makes the essay both accessible and profound.
It stands as a literary defense of regional wisdom and a stylistic affirmation that plain language can carry philosophical depth.

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Closing Reflection

If there is a thread running through The Archbishop of Appalachia, it is that wisdom often speaks with a local accent.
A Belly Full of Beans reminds us that dignity and abundance are measured less by wealth than by belonging — to a place, to a people, to a way of seeing the world.
When we listen carefully to the voices that have learned how to live with enough, we begin to understand that the moral imagination is as essential to civilization as law or technology.
That, I think, is what the front porch has been trying to tell us all along.