"mississippi" news and stories

Mississippi's peanut production has sprouted so significantly over the last decade that the state's growers association last month generated $100,000 to send three truckloads of peanut butter to Haiti.

"Peanut butter is the perfect food in a situation like this," the association's executive director, Malcolm Broome, explained in a release. "Peanut butter is portable, nonperishable and a very good source of protein."

Not long ago, a few trucks could have held the state's entire peanut crop. A strict quota system kept Mississippi's farmers from planting the legume that's long been a staple of Georgia and Virginia fields. Since the quota was lifted in 2002, Mississippi's peanut acreage has surged from 2,000 to 20,000, with production increasing every year but one, when weather got in the way.

"We've had a lot of people really interested in peanuts," says Mike Howell, area agronomist for Mississippi State University's extension service.

Cotton in the Mississippi Delta. Photo: Natalie Maynor, Flickr

A national organization devoted to combating hunger has found a way to wring good works from the South's most notorious prison farms.

The Mississippi office of the Society of St. Andrew, which identifies itself as "America's premier food salvage ministry," last month joined with the Mississippi Food Network to start collecting surplus produce from the Mississippi State Penitentiary -- commonly known as Parchman Farm -- and distributing it to 350 food pantries across the state.

"It's a win-win situation," program coordinator Jackie Usey reports. The program has already collected 40,000 pounds of squash from Parchman's fields.

Photo: Amazon.com

'Lee Bailey's Southern Food & Plantation Houses'
Recipes by Lee Bailey and the Pilgrimage Garden Club
Photographs by Tom Eckerle
Clarkson Potter -- 1989
Buy it at Amazon

Lee Bailey is a Louisiana native, home-furnishings store owner and the author of several books on food and entertaining. So he comes to this, his seventh book, quite naturally: both a compendium of Southern recipes and tour of the plantations in and around Natchez, Miss., it's part "Antiques Roadshow," part Southern Foodways Alliance, part National Lawn & Garden Show.

It's elegant, faintly -- and winningly -- eccentric, and imbued with unaggressive charm. Reading it is like taking a courtly stroll through a vast garden, bottomless mint julep in hand. You can almost smell the clematis -- and the gumbo.

Takeaway Tips: This is as much a celebration of Natchez as its food: the book begins with a self-explanatory section entitled "Natchez Bouquets" (remember, the tome was co-written by the town's Garden Pilgrimage Club) and recipes are organized into menus that are paired with particular plantations. "Informal Dinner at Stanton Hall," for example, provides readers with a brief history of the towering antebellum estate.

See what we tested and whether it's worth buying after the jump.

Snack maker Hunter Yerger has taken a cue from fellow Mississippian Elvis Presley in fusing two wildly disparate Southern traditions. Just as Elvis miraculously blended country pickin' with soul rhythms, Yeager is simultaneously feeding his region's collective sweet tooth and -- sacrilege alert -- cheese straw cravings.

Cheese straws are revered south of the Mason-Dixon line, so we had to investigate. "We introduced the concept of the sweet straw," Yerger, owner of The Mississippi Cheese Straw Factory in Yazoo City. "We call it the 'cookie straw.'" The latest addition to the 18-year old company's line of pioneering sugary straws is the Elvis Peanut Butter Banana variety shown at right, a recipe commissioned by the official management team of the Elvis Presley Trust.

"They wanted to do a food product in a tin," Yerger explains. "And peanut butter banana just sounded like a natural for Elvis."

CalorieLab recently released their list, which ranks US states from fattest to thinnest, for 2008. For the third year running, Mississippi is the fattest state in the nation, with 32.6 % of that state's population coming in overweight or obese. CalorieLab determines the fattest state rankings using the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System database maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rankings use a three-year average in order to correct for statistical irregularities.

Rounding out the top five fattest states are West Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana and South Caroline. They've found that overall the fattest states tend to be in the South and Rust Belt, while Northeastern and Western states are a bit slimmer. The only area to lose weight in the last year is Washington, D.C. Colorado remains the nation's fittest state.

It's disheartening to see that with all the attention given to diet and exercise, these numbers continue to climb. With the cost of food is going up these days, mostly in relation to rising gas prices, the cost of eating healthfully is also increasing. How would you address this issue?

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