"buckwheat festival" news and stories

A variety of buckwheat in full bloom. Photo: fishermansdaughter, flickr

Few American festivals celebrate a foodstuff as archaic as this weekend's Buckwheat Festival in Preston County, W. Va., which annually showcases a dish the New York Times deemed outdated nearly a century ago.

"According to millers, the consumption of buckwheat has fallen off not less than 30 percent in the last five years," the paper reported in 1910. "Where once the mounds of well-browned flapjacks, flanked by the molasses jug, reigned supreme at the breakfast table, now the patent breakfast foods alone are to be seen."

Corn flakes weren't the only culprit in buckwheat pancakes' disappearance from the American table: As new chemical fertilizers facilitated the farming of wheat, most growers abandoned the substitute crop. Buckwheat fields -- which occupied more than 1 million acres of U.S. land when the Times printed its buckwheat lament -- accounted for just 50,000 acres in 1964, when the USDA last bothered to count.

A few of those buckwheat farmers, no doubt, lived near Preston County, which pinned its economic hopes on the plant during the Depression.