The Southern diet, which was rich in corn, flour, and sweeteners, traces its origins to slavery. Volumes have been written on this subject, but none has recognized the fascinating role these calorie-dense, low-nutrient foods played in shaping mind sets—and our nation’s history. A diet lacking in fresh produce, specifically dark leafy greens rich in vitamins and nutrients, has the power to alter our physical state and mental faculties in such a way as to change the way we behave. We now know that poor nutrition can create violence, magnify racism and bigotry, and increase tensions between various populations of the world. It did in the past, and it continues to do so today.
A NUTRITIONAL DIFFERENCE
In the nineteenth century, African Americans, on average, died at a younger age compared with poor whites. However, this was not true of all blacks everywhere. Despite high infant mortality rates, a significant percentage of blacks outlived their poor white neighbors. Some enjoyed advantages that translated into superior physical health and optimal brain function.
Todd Savitt, a medical historian, examined Virginia mortality records in four counties and found that more blacks than whites died of old age between 1853 and 1860 and according to an 1850 census, there were more centenarians among blacks.3 The same trend, according to Savitt, existed throughout the South.
Many historians have suggested that slaves received superior medical care because they were considered to be financial investments. However, this implies healing powers beyond those of nineteenth-century doctors, as medicine in those days was primitive and could not account for the kinds of differences observed in the mortality records. Even today, doctors cannot replicate those outcomes through medical means. A better explanation for this enormous health discrepancy and the longer life spans of slaves is not the deliberate effort by slaveowners or the skill of Southern doctors, but is the nutritional advantage of many slaves’ diet compared with the diet of poor whites.
Southern agriculture focused on producing cotton and tobacco; feeding people was an afterthought. Most Southerners ate lots of corn products, because it was cheap and easily grown. It took hundreds of years, and the suffering of many, before modern science discovered that corn is deficient in niacin. Most poor Southern whites ate primarily corn, cornbread, pork fatbacks (like bacon), and molasses-flavored sweets. This resulted in insufficiencies in multiple vitamins and minerals, much like the fast food diet people eat today. But we no longer see cases of pellagra because we now have niacin-enriched junk food.
The diet of slaves living on plantations was different from that of poor whites, in many cases because they were permitted to grow their own food. By the mid-seventeenth century in Virginia, for instance, many slaves were growing kale, cabbages, mustard leaves, black-eyed peas (cowpeas), gourds, okra, spinach, squash, watercress, watermelon, yams, corn, pumpkins, and peanuts.4 These foods fed slaves and plantation families and were not made available to those who didn’t live on the plantation. The resulting health and life span of slaves who ate a healthier diet is a great example of a truth scientists have known for decades: Health and life span can be extended by packing in more micronutrients and more micronutrient diversity. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were no refined fast foods with concentrated calories to induce overeating and obesity. However, all the healthy vegetables and beans were not valued throughout the South.
In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration employed writers through the Federal Writers’ Project to produce a written history of the lives of slaves before the opportunity was lost. They fanned out across seventeen states, mostly in the South, to interview twenty-two hundred former slaves. Firsthand testimony revealed that slave diets varied from plantation to plantation. One former slave from South Carolina said that slaves ate potatoes, rice, corn pone, hominy, fried meat, molasses, a whole-wheat by-product called “shorts,” turnips, collards, and string beans. The white plantation owners ate the white flour, leaving the bran, germ, and whole wheat for the slaves. A former Mississippi slave added: “We always had plenty of something to eat. Meat, cornbread, milk and vegetables of all kinds. The garden was made for the colored, and the whites together, so each person didn’t have to worry with making one for hisself.”5
In the years following the Civil War during Reconstruction, the federal government established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, known as the Freedman’s Bureau, to assist newly emancipated slaves in their transition to freedom. Over the five-year period from 1865 to 1870, the bureau established more than four thousand schools for blacks, employing nine thousand teachers and giving instruction to about a quarter of a million pupils of all ages. The thirst for knowledge of the newly freed community and their children was unquenchable. African Americans went on to sustain more than thirteen hundred schools; they built five hundred school buildings and made donations out of their own earnings to do so and pay teachers and further the cause of their children’s education.6 Unfortunately, an inaccurate vision of newly freed slaves as uneducated and helpless sharecroppers was perpetuated for many decades. On the contrary, many former slaves and their offspring, empowered by a nutritional advantage, embraced education and actively pursued the American dream.
Schools sprang up throughout the South, and literacy rates among African Americans soared, from an estimated 5 percent to 10 percent under slavery to 70 percent in 1910.7 Among black people born after 1860, literacy rates were substantially higher. A significant number of freed slaves obtained college degrees, and a black middle class emerged.
The rise of the black middle class after slavery was a cause for great concern to many who felt threatened by this emergence. Ray Stannard Baker, an American journalist and historian born in 1870, was considered a muckraker because he exposed political corruption. He observed firsthand the surprising ascent of African Americans:
The eagerness of the coloured people for a chance to send their children to school is something astonishing and pathetic. They will submit to all sorts of inconveniences in order that their children may get an education. One day I visited the mill neighborhood of Atlanta to see how the poorer classes of white people lived. I found one very comfortable home occupied by a family of mill employees. They hired a Negro woman to cook for them, and while they sent their children to the mill to work, the cook sent her children to school!8
Baker further reported that a Senator Thomas of the Alabama legislature stated that “he would oppose any bills that would compel Negroes to educate their children, for it had come to his knowledge that Negroes would give the clothing off their backs to send their children to school, while too often the white man, secure in his supremacy, would be indifferent to his duty.”9
Not only did African Americans embrace education, they also embraced capitalism and employed the skills they learned as slaves—only now, they could profit from those skills. As Booker T. Washington described it: “If a Southern white man wanted a house built, he consulted a Negro mechanic about the plan and about the actual building of the structure. If he wanted a suit of clothes made he went to a Negro tailor, and for shoes he went to a shoemaker of the same race.”10 On plantations young black men and women were constantly being trained not only as farmers, but as carpenters, blacksmiths, wheel-wrights, brick masons, engineers, cooks, laundresses, sewing women, and housekeepers.11
A VIOLENT BACKLASH
The efforts of African Americans to educate themselves was a direct threat to white supremacy. According to historian Leon Litwack, the response to black ambition was swift. Some whites employed terror, intimidation, and violence in response to black success because such success was unacceptable to a people who deemed themselves racially superior.12 As W. E. B. Du Bois put it, “There was one thing that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance and incompetency, and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency.”13
For many poor Southern whites, the rise of an African American middle class was too much
to bear. James Kimble Vardaman (1861–1930), a Mississippi governor and U.S. senator, famously stated, “If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy.”14 He was not referring to criminals.
This emerging black middle class in the midst of a racially segregated and profoundly bigoted society speaks to an African American population of smart, industrious, and fearless individuals who were embracing their newfound freedoms in profound ways that were shifting the culture. And one rarely discussed aspect of this great charge forward was that African Americans were living with a nutritional advantage. As mentioned, African Americans were in general eating a more varied diet with vegetables, resulting in lower chance of pellagra and giving them adequate nutrition to aid these necessary and great steps forward.
And without question and as expected, this rapid development threatened the social status of whites, many of whom suffered nutrient deficiencies in their basic diets. Rather than working to elevate everyone, Southern authorities enacted Jim Crow laws, which suppressed African American advancement and segregated their housing, schooling, and access to public places. It institutionalized the basis for white supremacy. Jim Crow laws were America’s version of South African apartheid, keeping blacks separated from whites and prescribing how they were to behave.
White supremacy and Jim Crow laws were established to diminish the status of African Americans, even if it meant resorting to violence and suppressing educational opportunity for all. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson introduced the doctrine of “separate but equal” and made Jim Crow practices the law of the land. The effect of the Plessy ruling was immediate. There were already significant differences in funding for the segregated school system, which continued into the twentieth century; states consistently underfunded black schools, providing them with substandard buildings, textbooks, and supplies. States that had successfully integrated elements of their society abruptly adopted oppressive legislation that erased Reconstruction-era efforts at reform. Jim Crow practices were encouraged and spread to the North in response to a second wave of African American migration from the South to Northern and Midwestern cities that started around 1941.
Jim Crow laws and white supremacy were motivated by racist ideologies and by competition over jobs and economic opportunities. In a 1965 speech following the Selma to Montgomery March, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. explained how Jim Crow manipulated blacks and poor whites alike:
You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.
. . . the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. . . . If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. He gave him Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow. And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion.15
By the turn of the twentieth century socially promoted white violence against blacks had become common throughout the South, and it coincided with a rampant epidemic of pellagra, which we have seen can make people more aggressive, confused, and eventually demented. Southern authorities turned a blind eye toward or tolerated the violence, and Southern doctors rejected the possibility that the violence might be intensified by a disease.
In 1902, a Georgia farmer became the first American diagnosed with pellagra, which by 1912 was epidemic in the South. He had suffered for fifteen years before his diagnosis. Each spring when the weather warmed, blisters erupted on his arms and legs, and he became severely depressed and suicidal. By 1912, in South Carolina alone, thirty thousand cases were recorded, with twelve thousand deaths. Three million cases were recorded in the early twentieth century in the South, but this greatly underestimates the problem, because it is thought that only one in six people suffering from the disease sought out a physician.16 It was not a new disease; by the time medical authorities detected it in the United States, it had been a recognized epidemic in Eastern and Southern Europe for nearly two hundred years.
“In my professional opinion, you are not eating correctly.”
Pellagra, which is mostly caused by a lack of niacin in the diet, was a result of what is called the “3M diet,” meaning meal (that is, cornmeal mush), meat (mostly pork fat), and molasses. White flour was not “enriched” with B vitamins and niacin until the 1940s. In the Southern United States many poor whites relied on this diet. Angry white supremacists were not all poor or hungry; they were also wealthy landowners and community leaders. But pellagra-affected males were already primed by the rampant racism and heightened tensions in the South. It is no wonder that the increased aggression the disease can cause led them to join angry and violence-prone social groups and networks directing their anger against blacks. Far from being an excuse for violent crimes and murders, pellagra is an important factor to consider as we look back at this time in U.S. history.
Most U.S. doctors refused to consider the psychological implications of pellagra and viewed it as merely a skin ailment. A notable exception, James Woods Babcock (1856–1922), a native South Carolinian and Harvard-trained physician, was one of the only American doctors who appreciated the scope of this epidemic. Babcock noted that “apparently healthy persons commit crimes of various kinds for which they cannot be rightly regarded responsible, according to the accepted views as to culpability because they are not mentally sound.”17 He examined old medical records back to 1828 and concluded that pellagra had been continuously present, undetected, and ubiquitous in the South.18
While most people will rightly disagree with Babcock’s assertion about culpability, racism and the violence that went hand in hand with it should never be excused. Racist crimes shattered lives and tore the fabric of this country. But we should not dismiss or ignore the ways in which nutritional deficiency has real and lasting effects on individuals and society. To ignore nutrition is to ignore a critical aspect of how we function in the world. We must not make this same mistake again.
A nineteenth-century French psychiatrist, Henri Legrand du Saulle, was one of the first doctors to draw attention to pellagra’s criminal implications. He described how the disease could result in acts of violence, including homicide and suicide. He noted how people afflicted with this disease “commit the most reprehensible acts, and this is the most convincing proof of [their] insanity.”19 Many other European physicians echoed Legrand du Saulle’s findings. Unfortunately, according to Henry Fauntleroy Harris, a physician from Georgia, U.S. doctors mostly ignored the connection between pellagra and violence and generally ignored the European reports. Harris noted that throughout the South, people “plagued with a multitude of both physical and mental ailments, were often driven to acts of violence and even homicide.”20
As one early-twentieth-century writer noted, “Pellagra is a universal scourge which attacks all races and has millions of victims; which provokes crimes, insanity, and suicide; and fills our prisons and asylums.”21 Pellagra affected the character of the South. Research has demonstrated that areas with higher levels of the disease also had higher rates of violence and social dysfunction.22
There is no way to prove that specific acts of violence
that happened more than one hundred years ago were the result of pellagra or nutritional deficiencies. The important issue here is that a time of extreme violence coincided with the presence of a disease that made people more violent and when deficiencies of niacin and other nutrients were rampant.
A nutrient-deficient, corn-based diet creates a constellation of problems. It impairs serotonin function, a neurotransmitter needed for emotional stability.23 Corn is deficient in omega-3 fatty acids and niacin. Omega-3 DHA and vitamin D also control the synthesis of serotonin. Researchers who discovered this relationship explain that “serotonin plays an important role in inhibiting impulsive aggression toward self, including suicide, and aggression toward others.” These researchers also noted that “experimentally lowering brain serotonin levels in normal people has a wide range of behavioral consequences: impulsive behavior, impaired learning and memory, poor long-term planning, inability to resist short-term gratification, and social behavioral deficits characterized by impulse aggression or lack of altruism.”24 Studies also show that low serotonin combined with high testosterone leads to increased aggressiveness.25
The ideology of white supremacy created a catastrophe. It empowered people with low status and nutrient-deficient dysfunctional brains to be violent toward African Americans. A constellation of mild nutritional deficiencies, even without full-blown pellagra, still affects emotional stability. Subclinical pellagra can also create mental symptoms and induce anger, even without a skin rash. Despite our increased understanding of the relationships between diet and brain chemistry, and brain chemistry and behavior, we still fail to acknowledge how inferior diets can help to create dysfunctional communities today.
I’d like to take a step back here and talk about how this example from history relates to the experiences we have with nutrition in our world today. It’s hard to believe that diet can play a role in how we treat one another, that it can escalate our prejudices and amplify our belief systems, that it can even lead to murder and violence. The prevalence of pellagra in the American South is a devastating example of a moment in time when the accepted diet in the area made matters much worse. While good, nutritious food isn’t a cure for racism, bigotry, misogyny, or any other prejudice, and while nutrient-deficient food isn’t an excuse for prejudice, it is a powerful driver that affects how we interact with one another. You’ll learn more about this in the next chapter, but it’s important that I make this clear now: Pellagra may not be around today, but we have new nutritional disasters amplifying tragic issues in our lives.
Fast Food Genocide Page 11