Hog Meat and Hoecake

Researched in the 1800’s and published as a book in the 1970’s, Hog Meat and Hoecake is a study on food production in the Old South. From the information gathered, it seems like the food supply of the Old South was based on a backward subsistence farming culture imported from Scotland. While the Northeast states were originally known as the “bread and butter colonies,” Southern agriculture was weak when it came to food. It had none of the cash crop production that you had in New England. There was plenty of room in the South to raise lots of pigs and chicken, grow corn and potatoes to feed them, and good rivers for shipping the produce around the country, but it wasn’t happening. Lack of commercial food farming was one of the reasons the South lost the Civil War.

While the agribusiness sector may have been weak, the southerners definitely knew how to make their food last. They knew how to preserve their pork, eggs, beans, and butter for months at a time. Sausage was a big part of southern fare, as were pickled vegetables. I don’t know for sure how accurate this information is, because it’s contrary to a lot of what I’ve seen in other research. In most of the stories I hear about the South, there’s a large population that’s poor and hungry, even though they have plenty of space to grow their own food and raise animals for food. It doesn’t take much effort to breed rabbits for meat or chickens for eggs, and it’s not expensive to feed them. I suspect that the southern mentality doesn’t encourage entrepreneurship, so there’s not much incentive to take care of the problem yourself.