By Joel Denker
“The Fruit, which are called by Seamen Earth-Nuts, are brought from Guinea in the Negroes Ships, to feed the Negroes withal in their Voyage from Guinea to Jamaica,” the English physician Hans Sloane observed in the early eighteenth century. Many commentators assumed that the peculiar nuts carried in the holds of slave ships were African foods. The peanuts were, in fact, a basic staple of the West African diet. But they were of American origin. Born in the New World before being transported to Africa, the “earthnuts” were making a return voyage. In the hands of African slaves, the peanut would be transformed once again.
The plant was probably first cultivated in the foothills of the Bolivian Andes. From there it was disseminated through Brazil, Paraguay, and neighboring lands. The Indians, who tilled it, would carry the peanut as far as the Caribbean. The legume and its bounty of underground nut-filled pods was highly esteemed in the ancient civilizations of Peru. Archaeologists have unearthed funeral vases decorated with likenesses of the pods. A necklace found in coastal Peru that dated back to between 200 and 800 A.D. had ten gold and ten silver peanut-shaped beads. Scientists have even found the ground on their sites strewn with peanut shells.
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To learn more about peanuts, see The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat, coming in October from Rowman & Littlefield: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442248861/The-Carrot-Purple-and-Other-Curious-Stories-of-the-Food-We-Eat.
