The Crop Cycle: Stories with Deep Roots

For a limited time we're delighted to offer with purchase of this book a recipe card featuring one of the recipes mentioned in The Crop Cycle: Woods' Extra Thin Benne Cookies!

The Crop Cycle: Stories with Deep Roots is an episodic nonfiction narrative about consequential crops and food histories in the American South. These stories are framed by personal connections to the culture but also address broader conversations tied to race, labor relations, civil rights, and agriculture. 

At heart, The Crop Cycle is not about food, but how we center it as a way to understand cycles of life, whether that traces the visual evolution of watermelon as a bravura still life to its weaponization as a racist trope in material culture, the exodus of okra from West Africa to the New World by way of the Middle Passage, the communal celebrations of a kumquat queen and a gumbo-loving voodoo queen, or the horrific abuse and trafficking of seasonal workers harvesting our onions and tomatoes. 

Each chapter references centuries of significant plantation and household diaries, scientific journals, botanical studies, estate records, fundamental cookbooks, literature, paintings, and music related to the region, the eras documented, and the food served. 

We learn about Thomas Jefferson's particular passion for salad oil, Jimmy Carter's favorite cracker topping of peanut butter and sliced onions, the difficult path of a fictional character first known as Uncle Ben, an early conspiracy theorist who invented Sugar Babies, and the tragically short life of a guitar hero nicknamed Skydog, whose posthumous album was titled Eat a Peach. 

As importantly, the book acknowledges women’s roles in sustaining this history. The cooks known only by their first names, appearing peripherally in appropriated recipes, the enslaved who carried a few precious seeds across oceans, the mothers who shared and nourished and passed along their skills to daughters and granddaughters. 

Hardcover.