lima. There were also velvet beans grown among the corn, most beloved by
one of my grandmothers (born near Lake City, South Carolina) and,
she said, all her American ancestors. In tropical America, velvets are known
not only as a valuable legume for humans and livestock but for their mild
hallucinogenic effect. Whether velvets cultivated farther north, in
zone , say, possessed much of this enchantment is unknown, because un-
like string and butter beans, velvets seem to have disappeared. Southerners
also relished cabbage, beets, onions, and okra—there is no gumbo without
okra—that is, practically every European, native, and African edible plant
we enjoy today. For washing all this down, there was little beer in the South,
and few except the elite had wine. The typical table (with company or not)
offered water, milk, and whisky, all consumed in volume by men, women,
and children.
tThe era of pellagra, so well documented by public health officials, the
press, still- and motion-picture photographers, novelists, and commercial
moviemakers, may have led many, including historians, to project the
pathological South of the early twentieth century backward, chronologi-
cally. The Confederacy had been doomed (among other reasons) because
of the Old South’s gross inefficiency and the poor nutrition and health of
most of the people. What may have remained of such a thesis should have
been wrecked in with the appearance ofHog Meat and Hoecake: Food
Supply in the Old South, –, by the historical geographer Sam Bow-
ers Hilliard. Here and in hisAtlas of Antebellum Southern Agriculture()
a decade later, Hilliard demonstrated not only that southerners fed them-
selves quite well, but that on the eve of the Civil War, they made percent
of the nation’s corn, exported wheat (mainly from the Chesapeake states),
and ranged, consumed, and sold huge surpluses of pork, of course, but
also beef. Hilliard’s findings were based principally on federal censuses of
agriculture but also on a large number of published and unpublished ac-
counts of food, eating, and food supply by travelers, visitors, and locals at
home. Late antebellum censuses were early marvels of statistics and are
still considered reliable. No matter how many anecdotal sources are con-
sulted, however, as Hilliard warned, it is impossible to discover just how
well food distribution functioned or (among other shortcomings) if every
social class and subclass benefited from the South’s bounty.
One must wonder, especially, about the nutrition of the large number of
herdsmen in the population. Some farmed little, as we have seen, whether
landowners or not, and spent weeks away from home on roundups and long