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King Cotton, Jim Crow, and Pellagra
Accounts of the US food system take it for granted that it used to all be nice little family farms, until agribusiness suddenly changed it all in the 20th century. But corn monoculture, feedlots, and cheap bulk commodities didn't come out of nowhere in modern times- they've always been the core of US agriculture!
This episode traces the origins of today's food system back to its origins: slavery, and most importantly, Jim Crow. These institutions laid the foundation for northern agriculture, where "nice" little family farms that grew food for plantations. Both regions were oriented towards large-scale export commerce, self-sufficiency played surprisingly little role, and this helps explain why our food system looks the way it does today.
Main sources for this episode:
Larding the Lean Earth, Steven Stoll
Accounting for Slavery, Caitlin Rosenthal
Dun, James Alexander. 2005. “What Avenues of Commerce, Will You, Americans, Not Explore!”: Commercial Philadelphia’s Vantage onto the Early Haitian Revolution. William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, The Atlantic Economy in an Era of Revolutions (Jul 2005), 62(3):473-504.
American Trade with European Colonies in the Caribbean and South America, 1790-1812. John H. Coatsworth. William and Mary Quarterly, April 1967, vol 24 no. 2, pp 243-266.
Politics and pellagra: the epidemic of pellagra in the US in the early twentieth century. A.J. Bollet. 1992. Yale Journal of Biological Medicine 65(3):211-221. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2589605/
The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. W.E.B. Du Bois. A. C. McClurg and Co. Chapter 9: Of The Sons of Master and Man.
Commod Bods and Frybread Power: Government Food Aid in American Indian Culture. Dana Vantrease. 2013. The Journao of American Folklore 126(499):55-69. Available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerfolk.126.499.0055#metadata_info_tab_contents
Rural Rent Wars of the 1840s. Matthew Wills. Sept 1 2020. JSTOR Daily. Available at https://daily.jstor.org/rent-wars-1840s/
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