February 1 marks the beginning of Black History Month. At HazelBea, we have an opportunity to highlight a few of the contributions and achievements of African Americans and their impact on the culinary world from our rocky start to the American tables of today.

We begin with George Washington Carver, an American agricultural chemist, agronomist, and inventor whose development of new products derived from peanuts (groundnuts), sweet potatoes and soybeans helped revolutionize the agricultural economy of the South.

Carver was born enslaved in western rural Missouri around 1861, orphaned as an infant and freed shortly after the Civil War. Sometime in his 20s, Carver moved to Iowa where studied art until a teacher encouraged him to enroll at Iowa State Agricultural College to study botany. There, he became the school’s first African-American student. For most of his career he taught and conducted research at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama.

Carver, emboldened by the inequities of Jim Crow south, set out to help what he called “the furthest man down." He encouraged black farmers to grow or forage their own vegetables and proteins so they would spend less money on food. Later, he developed and implemented the Jesup Agricultural Wagon, a school-on-wheels that brought agricultural equipment and demonstration materials to rural farmers unable to travel. The wagon reached 2,000 people a month in its first summer of operations, in 1906.

Carver's work, while most notably clouded by peanuts, was a way of thinking holistically about the environment, and an understanding, well before it had reached mainstream thought, of the relationship between the health of the land and the health of the people who lived on it. In Carver’s phrase, “the mutual dependency of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms.”

We celebrate his work with a beautiful salad composed of local ingredients sourced from Glade Road Growing Farm, right here in Blacksburg. Watermelon and purple daikon radishes, celery, apple, spinach walnuts and blue cheese are dressed with a sherry vinaigrette.