by Melanie McGee Bianchi

photo by Jen Lepkowski

KerryAnn Foster didn’t celebrate this Fourth of July by gnawing on mystery ribs or slurping on rainbow-colored popsicles. Instead, she marked two years of independence from unknown—and, for her, potentially deadly—food ingredients.

For years, the Woodfin-based homemaker has suffered debilitating flare-ups of Celiac disease, a genetic autoimmune disorder in which a sufferer’s small intestine violently rejects the wheat protein gluten, mistaking it for dangerous bacteria. She hit bottom on July 4, 2006, becoming extremely ill after eating at a restaurant on an out-of-town trip. “I was lying on the floor of the hotel bathroom listening to the fireworks outside,” she recalls. “I couldn’t move. I thought, ‘This time I could really die.’”

Even though Foster first began to alter her diet nine years ago, it wasn’t until that holiday weekend that she became truly zealous about healthy food for herself and her family—her husband Jeff, a civil engineer, and kids Trey and Belle. She hasn’t eaten out since. Today a committed “locavore,” she buys her cheese from Spinning Spider Creamery in Marshall and shops at the French Broad Food Co-op’s Saturday outdoor market, among other area venues, for natural sweeteners such as molasses and any produce she doesn’t grow herself. She’s been known to look askance at vegetables that come all the way from Georgia. The fresher something is, the more flavorful it is—especially “raw” or unpasteurized milk, which she reluctantly buys in South Carolina because it is illegal to do so in North Carolina.

Foster abhors waste. She plans to start saving the feathers from her Barred Plymouth Rock chickens, which she raises for eggs and meat, to sell to fly fishermen for ties. “I believe in using the entire animal,” she says. She buys part of a cow from Harrell Hill Farms in Bakersville, North Carolina, cooks the familiar cuts and then uses the bones and organs for soup stock. Many people assume that “whole” foods (perhaps because of the proliferation of the high-end grocery store chain with the same name) are organic foods. But Foster points out that whole foods are simply unprocessed. They have no added ingredients like sugar, salt or preservatives.

When she isn’t tending the tomatoes, peppers, beans, legumes, corn, squash, melons, herbs, lettuce, radishes, broccoli, potatoes and berries that grow in her sloping yard, the frail but resolute 32-year-old also cares for her disabled parents and runs a website, www.cookingtf.com, to help other families convert to traditional-cooking methods.

Next up, she plans to keep bees and acquire goats and rabbits for milk and meat. She already slaughters her own chickens, though she is careful to add that her free-range flock is “loved on” in life.  Indeed, six-year-old Belle and four-year-old Trey tote the birds under their arms like puppies. Eventually, the chickens patter away to their shaded, custom-built house.

As conservative Christians, the Fosters don’t fit the tree-hugging lefty mold of other local natural-food lovers. For them, responsible land stewardship is more than an earthly claim. “We believe God put us here to live in harmony with our environment,” Foster says, “not to compete with it.” And while some of their fellow parishioners at Temple Baptist Church in Asheville “think we’re crazy,” she confesses, it is also true that “they all enjoy our produce.”