Muscogee County GaArchives News.....Peanuts : The Salted, Oiled, Buttered Beans That Shaped the South 1978 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/ga/gafiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Christine Thacker http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00033.html#0008100 May 17, 2007, 7:29 pm Sesquicentennial Supplement III, Ledger- Enquirer 1978 Peanuts The Salted, Oiled, Buttered Beans That Shaped the South By William Rowe Ledger Business Writer The peanut is not a pea and it is not a nut, it is a bean. Which merely proves that things are not always what they seem. The United States is one of the world's top producers of peanuts. Georgia is the nation's top producer. And Jimmy Carter of Georgia is President of the United States. That's enough to set off an unprecedented peanut-mania, for carter is a peanut farmer-broker. Allegations that Carter and the peanut sprouted simultaneously are pure balderdash. The lowly legume preceded the Pride of Plains in history by some 2,874 years, achieving its niche by 950 B.C., and may even have nourished elephants on the Ark. Long before Carter ascended, peanuts shaped the South. You will eat eight to 10 pounds of peanuts this year if you are "nationally average". The intake may be higher for native Southerners, for how else could "furriners" keep pilgrimaging to Plains asking to see the peanut "trees?" Peanuts mean money, even if they do not grow on trees. Georgia peanut production totaled $310.769.000 in 1977. This came from 519,000 acres harvested, at a yield of 2,865 pounds per acre, making 1,486,935.000 pounds, with the crop valued at 20.9 cents per pound,said Frazier Galloway of the Georgia Crop Reporting Service in Athens. This was a decline from 1976, but only a slight one, and the value per pound was higher. In 1976, Georgia growers harvested 526,000 acres of peanuts, produced 2,955 pounds per acre for a production of 1,554,330,000 pounds. With a value of 20 cents per pound, the crop was worth $310,866.000. "Without peanuts, some of Georgia's southern counties just wouldn't be there," says men like specialist J. Frank McGill of the Tifton Rural Development Center who is so knowledgeable that he's widely known as "Mr. Peanut." Before the 1976 peanut-hysteria, when has any object been so glorified? Natives of Enterprise, Ala., including this writer, claim with unbowed heads the credit for popularizing the peanut. "King Cotton" was the money crop until the boll weevil devastated the harvest in 1910. Farmers switched from one-crop agriculture to diversification, and their sandy soil rewarded them with peanut prosperity. As a left-handed tribute to deliverance, Enterprise' erected the Boll Weevil Monument in a unique salute to a harmful insect. This act gained worldwide fame and is featured in Robert Ripley's "Believe It Or Not" series, All natives, and many visitors, looking, at the countryside of South Alabama and South Georgia have old memories of peanut stacks dotting the fields like raisins on a sweet potato pie. George Washington Carver had a hand in that. Before The Rainbow Division and my "Uncle Doc" went to France in World War I, Carver (1862-]943) invited Macon County, Ala., businessmen to lunch. He served them nine dishes containing peanuts: soup, mock chicken, creamed vegetable, bread, salad, ice cream, candy, cookies, and coffee. Before he was through, Carver created more than 300 products from peanuts, and helped establish Tuskegee Institute. Today, there are more than 400 peanut products. Carver's influence helped to focus national attention on Columbus and the peanut in 1950. Mrs. T. L. Green had read of the famous black man's exploits. Besides, she has a lifelong interest in contest-entering. So she entered the Pillsbury' National Bakeoff competition, creating a peanut crust pie with a chocolate chiffon filling. "Dutch" Green had to bake it during the finals in the Waldorf Astoria ballroom in New York City under critical Yankee pressure. She won $10,000 second prize and received the stove, table, chair, mixer and refrigerator used in the contest as fringe benefits. The Duchess of Windsor presented her prize, and Mrs. Green was interviewed by such notables as Arthur Godfrey and Art Linkletter. You never eat peanuts, you say? Well, how about peanut butter? In other countries, peanuts are grown mainly for edible oil. U.S. peanuts are used for peanut butter; roasted, salted nuts, and for use in candy, bakery products, plus a small part of the crop being crushed for oil. Georgia and Alabama produce two-thirds of the nuts used for peanut butter, which comes in smooth, regular, and chunky textures. Peanuts are also one of the six basic agricultural crops. They're nature's masterpiece of food values. Consider their pleasant aroma, appealing taste raw or parched, juicy and salty flavor when boiled. Profitable peanut farming requires at least five months of warm weather with a growing season rainfall (or irrigation equivalent) of 22-24 Inches or more. Peanuts are planted in late May or June, harvested in the fall. Peanuts in the shell go one route, the plants go another into baled hay for livestock feed. Harvesting leaves enough nuts in the hay for youngsters to enjoy picking them out and munching while playing on the bales in the barn loft. It also leaves enough nuts in the ground for "hogging off," or letting hogs root them up and be fattened. Peanuts are grown in three major sections of the U.S.: Georgia-Alabama, the Southeastern Runner, Virginia and Spanish types; Virginia-Carolina, the Virginia type; and Oklahoma-Texas, mainly the Spanish type. Old-timers recall the one-cent vending machine that spilled a few salted, shelled peanuts into your hand, still in the brown husk that had to be shucked off before the nuts were eaten Some recall a peanut company representative coming into school classrooms, putting up a peanut poster and proving that if you stared at it long enough, then closed your eyes, the image lingered on. Vendors with small brown paper bags of parched or boiled peanuts are indelibly linked with ball games, and some toured offices. Peanuts also make their way into glassine or cellophane bags, others are packed under vaccum in tins or glass jars, and countless peanuts go into peanut butter crackers and candles. Sold in many places are the little red, white and blue cellophane packets of Tom's Toasted Peanuts, 15 cents retail, net weight one ounce. One of these recently eaten contained exactly 39 whole kernels and 69 half-kernels, or 73 % nuts, all delicious. The peanut story is far too vast to stuff into any one nutshell. There is the Museum of Peanut Butter History in Chicago. Dothan, Ala., has celebrated an annual Peanut Festlval for 36 years. Steven Industries of Dawson, founded as a cotton all company in 1904, is one of the world's largest peanut butter plant. Tom Huston Peanut Company, organized in Columbus in 1925, is now Tom's Foods Ltd., storing more than 27 million pounds of peanuts in its 14-story-hlgh silos. Bob Garner of Nathan's Feed & Seed Inc. handles seed peanuts after March brings on the planting season. Valley Fruit and Produce Inc., at the Columbus Farmer's Market, deals in lOO-pound bags of peanuts for $40, down to 25-pounds for $11, or even smaller orders through its cash and carry window. U. S. Department of Agricuiture peanuts find their way into bowls placed on teachers' tables at public school lunchrooms, and some school dietitians slip peanuts on students' cafeteria trays as often as twice a week. Peanuts joined Brazil nuts and Enalish walnuts in Santa Claus stocking- stuffing plans the past two years as never before. With two more Carter years still ahead, the fad's frivolities are likely to spread further than peanut tbutter. The philosophical prognosis is, " If you can't beat'em might as well eat'em." Special Sesquicentennial Supplement III Ledger-Enquirer, Sunday , April 30, 1978. Pg S-4. File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/ga/muscogee/newspapers/peanutst2259gnw.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/gafiles/ File size: 8.4 Kb