17. Los Angeles Times, April 12, 1931.
18. Kenneth P. Walker, “The Pecan Shellers of San Antonio and Mechanization,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 69, no. 1 (1965).
19. Jules V. Powell and Donn A. Reimund, The Pecan Shelling and Processing Industry: Practices, Problems, Prospects, usda Economic Research Service, Agriculture Economic Report 15 (September 1962): 1–3.
CHAPTER 7
1. “Nuts Urged as Food,” New York Times, November 9, 1942; “Pecan Prices Decline,” Wall Street Journal, November 24, 1948; Jane Nickerson, “News of Food,” New York Times, December 1, 1948; “News of Food,” New York Times, November 20, 1949; “Government to Buy Pecans,” New York Times, November 21, 1951.
2. Jane Holt, “News of Food,” New York Times, November 11, 1942.
3. Jane Nickerson, New York Times, “News of Food,” November 8, 1945; Mary Meade, “Carrot Pecan Loaf,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 9, 1954; “News of Food,” New York Times, November 30, 1946; “Nuts Urged as Food,” New York Times, November 9, 1942, 36; Jane Nickerson, “News of Food,” New York Times, October 6, 1948.
4. “Ceilings for Nutmeats,” New York Times, October 31, 1943; “Pecan Prices Decline,” Wall Street Journal, November 24, 1948; “Schools Asked for Pecans,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 23, 1952; “US Spends $1,287,600 to Support Pecan Prices,” New York Times, January 5, 1952.
5. Mary Meade, “Pecans Popular in Sandwiches or Tasty Desserts,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 28, 1947.
6. Mary Meade, “Cheaper Nuts,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 21, 1936; Mary Meade, “Pecan Drops in Price for Use of Budgeteers,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 9, 1936.
7. Jane Holt, “News of Food,” New York Times, May 13, 1942; Mary Meade, “How to Make New Orleans’ Pecan Pralines,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 1, 1947.
8. Clementine Paddleford, “Atlanta: Georgia Pecan Pie,” Los Angeles Times, July 7, 1949.
9. “Orange Pecan Pie Wins Recipe Prize,” Washington Post, September 12, 1931; “Louisiana Yam Pecan Pie,” Washington Post and Times Herald, February 6, 1959; “New Nut Recipes,” Washington Post, November 18, 1938.
10. Jane Holt, “News of Food,” New York Times, November 11, 1942; Mary Meade, “Pecans Popular in Sandwiches,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 28, 1947; Marian Manners, “Pecan Biscuits Presented for Culinary Trial,” Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1939.
11. Jane Holt, “News of Food,” November 24, 1948; “Nuts to Be Plentiful,” New York Times, October 3, 1946.
12. Florence Brobeck, “Fresh Nuts for Holiday Tables,” New York Times, November 8, 1936; Helen Van Pelt Wilson, “Most Useful Nut Trees,” New York Times, February 14, 1943; New York Times, November 11, 1943.
13. Campos de Moura, “Experimental Vitamin A Deficiency; Action of Pecan Oil,” Anais da Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de São Paolo 14 (1938): 185–212; H. Levine, “The Pecan Nut as a Source of Vitamin A,” Journal of Home Economics 24 (1932): 49–53; R.B. French, Ovida Davis Abbott, and Ruth O. Townsend, “Levels of Thiamine, Riboflavin, and Niacin in Florida-Produced Foods,” Bulletin 482, University of Florida Experiment Stations, August 1951; Cary Blake, “New Mexico Tops in Pecans,” Southwest Farm Press, May 3, 2007.
14. “News of Food,” New York Times, November 24, 1948; Jane Nickerson, “Food: Storage of Pecans,” New York Times, December 29, 1956.
15. “News of Food,” New York Times, November 29, 1950; ibid., New York Times, April 13, 1959.
16. http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blfrfood.htm, accessed December 11; Gordon Follette, “Frozen Foods: The Formative Years. 100 Years of Refrigeration,” supplement to ASHRAE Journal 46 (November 2004): S35–S39; June Owen, “Food: New Products,” New York Times, March 23, 1959.
17. Lois Baker, “Round the Food Stores,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 17, 1965; “New Food Products,” Washington Post, December 4, 1969; Obituary, “William Stuckey, 67; Built Candy Store into National Chain,” New York Times, January 8, 1977.
18. http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/lehman/chrono.html?company=standard_brands_incorporated; “Standard Brands Acquires Southern Pecan Shelling,” Wall Street Journal, September 30, 1954; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet,_Inc.#History; “Pet Milk Processing Plant,” Wall Street Journal, March 12, 1963; “Retail Entrepreneurs of the Year: J. Givens Young,” Chain Store Age 73, no. 12 (December 1997): 114.
19. “To Make Good Food,” Washington Post, October 7, 1900; Mary Meade, “Tasty Recipes Lend Variety to Lenten Meal,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 22, 1933, 19; Phyllis Hanes, “‘Natural’ Cereals—How to Produce Your Own,” Christian Science Monitor, February 21, 1974; “More Bounce to the Ounce,” New York Times, December 7, 1952.
20. Ruth Casa-Emellos, “The All-Round Pecan,” New York Times, January 10, 1954.
21. “Ice Cream Processing and Packaging,” Dairy Foods, October 1996, 37; “Today’s Ice Cream Flavors: More than Neapolitan,” Dairy Foods, October 1996, 97.
22. Betsy Spethmann, Brandweek 36 (August 7, 1995): 26; “The Wizard of Oats,” Consumer Reports, October 1996, 61.
23. John Mariant, “Pecan Pie,” Restaurant Hospitality, December 1998, 12.
24. “It’s the Year of Plenty for Pecans,” Christian Science Monitor, October 26, 1965, 4; Pamela Parseghian, “Enchiladas on a Roll,” Nation’s Restaurant News 28 (August 1, 1994): 75; Alan Liddle, “Birnbaum Goes Solo,” Nation’s Restaurant News 28 (May 9, 1994): 3; Susanne Hall, “Georgia on Her Mind,” Restaurants and Institutions (October 1, 1996): 23; “The Recipes,” Restaurant Business (October 1, 1997): 138–141.
CHAPTER 8
1. http://horttech.ashspublications.org/content/5/3/202.full.pdf.
2. Tomsho, “Pecan Industry.”
3. John Huey, “Pecan Growers See Bigger ’75 Harvest,” Wall Street Journal, December 26, 1975.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid. Description from F.W. Williams, M. G. Laplante, and E. K. Heaton, “The Consumer Market for Pecans and Competing Nuts,” Southern Journal of Agricultural Economics (July 1972): 104.
6. Chad Dorn, “Nut Marketing Going Nutty in 96,” Candy Industry (October 1996): 33–34; Doyle C. Johnson, “Economic Trends in the U.S. Pecan Market,” ERS-USDA (March 1998): 21; Tomsho, “Pecan Industry.”
7. Izchukwu M. Onunkwo and James E. Epperson, “Export Demand for U.S. Pecans: Impact of U.S. Export Promotion Programs” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Agricultural Economics Association, Nashville, Tennessee, August 8–11, 1999); Johnson, “Economic Trends in the U.S. Pecan Market.”
8. Guojin Sun, “An International Trade Analysis of the Impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on U.S. Pecan Producers” (PhD diss., University of Georgia, 1991), 3–4; Janet Jacobs, “Japanese Market Tough Nut to Crack,” Corsicana Daily Sun, December 9, 2006.
9. “China Buys $4.5 million Worth of NM Pecan Crop,” Lubbock Online, March 25, 2007; “Jeff Worn Says Pecan Exports Threaten Domestic Consumption,” Growing Georgia (October 13, 2010), accessed online at http://growinggeorgia.com.
10. Lourdes Medrano, “China Goes Nuts over Pecans,” Fiscal Times, January 4, 2012; David Wessel, “Shell Shock: Chinese Demand Reshapes U.S. Pecan Business,” Wall Street Journal, April 18, 2011, accessed January 18, 2012.
11. Jill Galus, “New Mexico Pecans Driving China Nuts” (transcript of kvia report, Las Cruces, New Mexico, November 15, 2010); Wessel, “Shell Shock.”
12. Jennifer Paire, “Pecan Growers Go Global,” Growing Magazine, May 2011 (online edition).
13. http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2011/11/07/drought_demand_from_china_drive_up_pecan_prices/; Shlachter, “Texas Has High Demand but Not Enough Pecans,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, October 9, 2011, accessed online at www.star-telegram.com/2011/10/29/v-touch/3483226/texas-has-high-demand-but-not.html.
14. Josephine Bennett, “Georgia Farmers Hail China’s New Taste for Pecans,” NPR, July 7, 2011.
15. William D. Goft, “Commercial Pecan In
sect and Disease Control” (Extension Pecan Specialist, Auburn University, 2011).
16. http://pecankernel.tamu.edu/pecan_insects/pests/index.html; http://extension.missouri.edu/p/mp711.
17. http://www.caes.uga.edu/commodities/fruits/pecan/growers/documents/pecan%20fungicide.pdf.
BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY
As far as general works go, the only pre-existing single volume on the pecan tree’s history is Jane Manaster’s excellent Pecans: The Story in a Nutshell (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994; republished by Texas Tech University Press in 2008). The book provides a concise overview of the pecan’s pivotal developments, especially when it comes to the emergence of different cultivars and the stories of the breeders behind them. Manaster’s work fits nicely in the context of several broader histories of plant breeding, including Noel Kingsbury’s comprehensive Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), Jonathan Silvertown’s An Orchard Invisible: A Natural History of Seeds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), and Jane S. Smith’s The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants (New York: Penguin, 2010). Luther Burbank’s papers themselves also proved invaluable to me for understanding the process of plant breeding.
Information on the interactions of Indians, Europeans, and pecans was gleaned from a wider range of sources, including The Indians of Texas by W.W. Newcomb, Jr. (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1961), Paul A. Delcourt and Hazel R. Delcourt’s Prehistoric Native Americans and Ecological Change: Human Ecosystems in Eastern North America since the Pleistocene (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Jean Richardson Flack’s 1970 University of Wisconsin dissertation, “The Spread and Domestication of the Pecan (Carya illinoensis) in the United States.” My analysis of the ecological relationships between pecans and non-human animals was deeply informed by articles in the journals Botanical Review, Journal of Mammalogy, and Wilson Bulletin. The big picture of bioprospecting was framed by Londa Schiebinger’s Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). The best source I know of for information on the European encounter with the pecan comes from Rodney Howard True, “Notes on the Early History of the Pecan in America,” in the Annual Report of the Board of Regents (1919) of the Smithsonian Institution.
Histories of scientific agriculture, grafting, and plant breeding are numerous in the field of American environmental history. I relied primarily on Philip J. Pauly’s Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), Benjamin R. Cohen’s Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), Deborah Fitzgerald’s Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), and Steven Stoll’s Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003). These are all critical works in their fields. For information on the actual logistics of grafting and plantation building, it helps to go back to the sources from that time. See H.P. Stuckey and Edwin Jackson Kyle, Pecan Growing (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1925) and Clarence Arthur Reed, Pecan Culture: With Special Reference to Propagation and Varieties (usda, 1916).
I relied on several general sources for background on deforestation, Indians, and Anglo migration into western regions. See Michael Williams’s magisterial Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Lynn A. Nelson’s Pharsalia: An Environmental Biography of a Southern Plantation, 1780–1880 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009); and Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser (eds.), The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521–1704 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994).
Telling the story of a single commodity presents the ongoing challenge of context—as in, how much or how little to provide. I relied on several histories of single crops as models for how to handle the context issue. These included Larry Zuckerman’s The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World (New York: North Point Press, 1999) and Pierre Laszlo’s Salt: Grain of Life (New York: Ecco Press, 2002). Other notable examples of well-balanced commodity books are Arthur Allen’s Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato (New York: Counterpoint, 2011) and Dan Koeppel’s Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World (New York: Plume, 2008).
To the extent that the pecan’s story is the story of industrialization, there are several excellent works that helped me frame the pecan’s path toward globalization. See Alan Olmstead’s and Paul W. Rhode’s Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Paul K. Conkin’s A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929 (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 2009) for two superb histories of industrial agriculture. An excellent complement to these volumes was a plethora of trade magazines highlighting the marketing and consumption of pecans. Particularly notable was Nation’s Restaurant News, which highlighted key culinary trends involving the pecan.
INDEX
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
agribusiness, 99–101, 110–111, 129–131, 135, 146–150
agriculture, 15; industrial, 77, 100, 118, 129–131, 149–150; scientific, 49–50, 52, 78, 82, 138, 163n23
Alabama, 3, 77, 97
Albright, Owen, 84
Alexander the Great, 53–54
Algonquin language, 7
almond, 26, 49, 121, 137, 141, 144, 154
Alzheimer’s, 144
American Farmer, 59, 60
American Pecan Growers Association, 112
antioxidants, 7, 126, 144, 158n3
Antoine (slave), 61–62, 69
Antoine’s graft, 61–67, 69, 72, 76, 77, 106, 146, 152. See also cultivars, pecan: Centennial
apple, 44, 49, 51, 57, 64, 71
Arizona, 96, 107, 109, 144
Arkansas, 4, 7, 8, 36, 37, 45, 73, 109
Bacon, G. M., 80, 91, 97
Baker, Georgia, 61
barter, 11, 34, 42, 48
Bartram, John, 26–28
Bechtel, Theodore, 107
Bedichek, Roy, 12–13, 14
bees, 148
Berdoll, Lisa, 135, 151
Berdoll Pecan Farms, 135–136, 147
Birnbaum, Jan, 133
bison, 8, 10, 17
boll weevil, 93–95, 96
Bonzano, Herbert, 63–67
Brazos Valley, 16
British colonists, 26–28
Brobeck, Florence, 125
Bryan, Guy, 59
budding, 52, 57–58, 64, 65, 67, 79, 82, 83; patch, 101–102; ring, 103
Burbank, Luther, 4, 22, 171
Burkett, J. H., 108
California: pecan consumption in, 112, 133; pecan cultivation in, 55, 69, 93, 96, 101, 105, 107, 109; walnut production in, 22
Chandler, William Henry, 100
Charlevoix, P. F., 25
chemical controls, 136, 147, 152, 154
China: grafting invented in, 57; peach cultivation in, 53; pecan consumption in, 55, 140–146, 147, 150, 152, 154
Coleman, Texas, 97, 107
Collinson, Peter, 26
Colomb, A. E., 61
Colorado, 10
commercial pecan orchards, 14, 66, 100, 135–136
ConAgra Foods, 131
Concho River, 10
conservation, 31, 33
cooperatives, 112
Corsa, William P., 66, 72
cotton, 34–37, 39, 49, 93; coexisting with wild pecans, 38
cover crops, 150
cross-fertilization, 19
crows, 11, 13, 14, 150
cultivars, pecan, 22, 50, 74–76, 80, 81, 94, 100, 106, 108; Alley, 109; Apache, 108; Boggus, 109; Bradley, 109; Burkett, ii, 96, 108, 109; Caddo, 108; Candy, 107; Centennial, 64–65, 67, 73, 76, 106, 146
(see also Antoine’s graft); Cherokee, 108; Cheyenne, 108; Crane, 96; Curtis, 109; Forester, 109; Frotscher’s Eggshell, 66, 110; Halbert, 107; Havens, ii, Kidney, 109; Kincaid, 96, 109; Lady Finger, 109; Mahan, 107; Major, ii, Mohawk, 108; Moneymaker, 98, 109, 110; Navajo, 135; Nigger, 109; Onliwon, 107, 109; Owens, ii, Pabst, 107, 109; Pawnee, 108, 135; Post, 156; Rome, 156; Russell, 107, 156; San Marcos, 109; San Saba, 107, 109, 110; San Saba Improved, 107, 109; Schley, 109; Sioux, 108; Sovereign, 96; Stringfellow, 109; Stuart, 107, 109, 156; Success, 96, 107, 109; Texas Prolific, 107; Van Deman, 156; Warrick, ii, Western, 107, 109; Wichita, 107, 108, 135; Zink, 109
cultivation, passive (of pecan), 29–30, 43–45, 46–48; and cattle, 39, 49, 60, 68, 153; Native American, 11; and pigs, 41; transition to active, 48, 52, 81, 83, 91. See also pecan farming
deforestation, 31, 33, 172
diversity, genetic, 4, 37, 51, 55, 60, 64, 67, 74, 78; and insect pests, 91–92, 138, 152, 155
Downing, Andrew Jackson, 21–22
entomologists, 89–92
environmental exploitation, 23, 35, 39
environmental history, ix
evolution, 4, 14, 52, 54
extension agents, 8, 51, 66, 78–79, 82, 87–88, 93, 97
farmers, 63, 75, 82–84, 85, 88, 89–92. See also pecan farming
fat, 7, 55, 117, 121, 125–126, 131–132, 158n3
Federal Farm Board, 112
federal government. See usda and specific agencies
Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation, 111
fertilizer, 52, 69, 92, 135, 149–150
figs, 57–58
Florida, 55, 57–58, 70, 77, 84–86, 93–94, 107, 125–126
French explorers, 24–26
frontier, 26, 34, 41–42, 44, 48, 61
Frotscher, Richard, 65–67, 69
fungicides, 135, 149
genes. See diversity, genetic
Georgia: early pecan growing in, 61, 70–71, 77, 78, 80, 93–96; modern pecan industry in, 20, 55, 92, 96, 115, 129, 133, 144; peaches, 53; pecan pie, 122, 128
Girardeau, J. H., 86
Gordon, W. W., 71
grafting, 51, 52, 56, 57, 58, 59, 65–67, 70, 79, 84, 86; bark, 103; chip, 102–103; cleft, 84, 86; tongue, 84; and usda, 89–90; wax, 86, 102, wedge, 84; whip, 84
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