7 Peanuts!

Chapter 7 Peanuts! While at Tuskegee, George liked to tell a story about a talk he had once had with God. "Mr. Creator, why did you make the universe?" George asked. "Little man, that question is too big for you," God answered. "Try another!" So George asked, "Mr. Creator, why did you make man?" God answered: "Little man, that question is still too big for you. Try another!" This time George asked, "Mr. Creator, why did you make the peanut?" And God said: "Little man, that question is just your size. You listen and I will teach you." Apparently, George was a good listener, because while experimenting at Tuskegee, he began to develop more than three hundred products that could be made from the peanut.

They included everything from peanut milk to peanut punch, plastics, glue, soaps, and dyes. Peanuts were considered so lowly that before George began to study them, they were mostly used for animal food. Farmers couldn't make much money from peanuts and had little reason to grow them.

Cotton had been the main crop in the American South. But in the early 1900s, it cost some farmers more to grow cotton than they could sell it for. The boll weevil—a type of beetle that feeds on cotton buds and can destroy entire crops—came to the United States from Mexico in the late 1800s. By 1910, it had arrived in Alabama.

After many years of studying soil, George knew that planting cotton over and over again sucked the nutrients—substances plants need to grow—out of the soil. He wanted farmers to rotate their crops. That meant growing cotton one season, but switching to a different crop the next. Then they could replant cotton the season after that. One of the crops George recommended for cotton growers was the sweet potato. Sweet potato plants were easy to grow, and crops could be stored during the winter months. They were good for the soil, and they could be eaten many different ways. Some of George's earliest bulletins were on the sweet potato. George also experimented with cowpeas, sugar beets, rice, soybeans, alfalfa, and more. His experiments helped him understand the best ways to grow these crops so that they would yield the most food. He learned what

kinds of soil and growing conditions they needed. In 1910, Tuskegee built George a modern laboratory to replace his homemade one. And by 1915, his experiments were taking so much of his time that he began to give up teaching. In 1916, George wrote his most famous booklet: "How to Grow the Peanut, and 105

Ways of Preparing It for Human Consumption." Recipes included items such as peanut soup, peanut bread, and peanut pudding. Several recipes included peanut butter in them: Peanut butter was number fifty-one, peanut butter candy was number seventy, and peanut butter fudge was number eighty! In fact, George wrote so much about peanuts that he is sometimes mistakenly credited with inventing peanut butter. The same year George produced his famous peanut booklet, he was honored by the Royal Society of Arts in London. The Royal Society honors people in science and art who find practical solutions to problems. That summed up George perfectly! At the time, it was rare for an American to be honored—let alone one who had been born into slavery.