George Washington Carver

George Washington Carver is typically reduced to 'the peanut man' in grade-school textbooks. That reduction hides the real contribution: a systematic, research-based approach to crop rotation, soil regeneration, and yield diversification built for Black farmers working the worn-out land of the post-Reconstruction South.

His 300+ uses for the peanut and his bulletins from Tuskegee are the earliest formal expression of the yield-thinking philosophy that runs through Black American cooking. He belongs as much in a culinary framework as in a scientific one.