"More Cowpea!"

If you eat black eyed peas for good luck on New Year’s Day, you are participating in a tradition linking American foodways to West African foodways via the trans Atlantic slave trade. For the past 7 years I have lived in (and eaten my way through) New Orleans and Georgia. Now I am residing in a region of Ghana that was lucrative for looting humans to sell into the Dutch and Portuguese slave markets that fed the plantation systems in the Americas.  I’m always seeking and contemplating the connections between these two settings.  Though I’m pretty convinced that the vibe I felt at a parade in Accra is the same vibe I felt when watching a Second Line in New Orleans, vibes are a little too subjective. Food is definitely a more objective connection to make. 

As a Stateside vegetarian, I’ve a bit of an affinity for legumes. The black eyed pea that we know in the States is one of many types of peas fitting in the category of cowpea. So a black eyed pea is a cowpea but a cowpea is not necessarily a black eyed pea.

Cowpea at market in Wa

 The cowpea is indigenous to Southern Africa and spread outwards to West and East Africa as well as Asia.  The cowpea is still important to farming and culinary practice in Ghana.  As a cultivar, cowpeas are important for fixing nitrogen in the soil.  For this incredibly variable climate, it’s also a relatively resilient crop to rains that can either be lacking or too intense.  As a food, cowpeas are an important source of protein for households that can only afford to integrate small amounts of meat into their diet. Cowpeas are eaten boiled and whole with rice to produce waakeye (a dish that must be a cousin to Hoppin’ John) and with fried plantain to produce a dish known as red-red.  The dried bean is also ground into a fine flour that is used to make fried bean cakes called kosi that make for a filling breakfast alongside a millet based porridge.   Even the leaves of the cowpea plant are used, consumed both by people (as a tasty leafy green in soups) and by livestock.  

Making kosi (note the antiquated US aid oil can in the background.....perhaps it is soy oil)

So in addition to being delicious, cowpeas fit comfortably into the local agro-ecology and promote food security for small scale farmers in Ghana.  That’s why it’s a bit frustrating to see and hear incessant buzz about soy.  Soy beans are being pushed fast and furious as the crop du jour that will end poverty for all Ghanaian farmers who partake in its cultivation. Soy is already grown in Ghana, but neither prolifically nor very profitably as it does not compose a substantial part of the local diet.  

Soy is not being pushed as a food crop in Ghana (or elsewhere in the new soy colonies that are already very expansive in South America) but as a commercial crop for processing into oil as well as animal feed that can quench an increasing global desire for meat.   The idea is that there is a global demand for soybeans and if small farmers in Ghana are able to meet that demand they will walk away with cash in their pockets that can be used to buy all needs (including food).  

In theory this sounds great.  In reality, it never really works out that well for the small-scale farmer. For at least the past 40 years, anthropologists and other social scientists have shown how this idea has failed to profit the people proposed to profit.  The reasons for failure can begin at production (when farmers are not given access to the inputs they need to produce the crop) or at harvest (when the market is so un-regulated that buyers are able to grossly under-pay or when the supposed demand is no longer there and the farmer is left with a commodity crop that is not consumable).  

The US is a prime harbinger of how scaling-up does not necessarily work out that well for most parties involved. We’ve already seen what happens when agriculture becomes more about a supply chain than about food that nourishes people.  This is why we hardly have any family farms left in the US.  Small farmers don’t profit in a farming system that is all about links in a chain.   Corporations processing the crops profit.  And those who profit can buy out the “failing” farmer. In the meantime, our food becomes really cheap, but at the cost of a diverse, fresh and nutritious diet.

Salvation soy projects are already unfolding across Northern Ghana. In visiting a community selected to participate in such a new agricultural venture, a major hurdle to success was already prevailing.  Two different varieties of soy were given to farmers.  One variety was not as drought tolerant as the other and the dried out shells of the soy burst, producing an audible popping sound and a visible shooting bean. Farmers who were given this variety decided that the only way the crop was salvageable was to harvest the plants whole and put them in a pile.  In a pile, the burst pods would at least provide an accumulation of beans in one spot rather than exploding all over the field.  However, because the farmers who were harvesting in this manner did not put a tarp down to capture the popped beans, they became vulnerable to demands of the buyer (a processor) looking for a pristine product.  Soybeans captured on the ground are soybeans that are likely to be mixed with detritus such as small stones and dirt.  Such sullied beans do not make processors happy because it messes with their system of efficiency.  So while small scale farmers are smart, adaptable and open to experimentation, they are not always equipped with foresight for all of the potential problems that can undermine their foray into commodity production. 

Soy plants piled to collect exploding beans

Production of soy in Ghana may or may not be of benefit to farmers here.  No matter what the outcome,  emphasis on soy is detracting farmer knowledge from important indigenous crops like the cowpea that are capable of growing in this increasingly variable climate and are enjoyably consumed in multiple, nutritious forms. If we get to make a wish for what kind of luck we’re seeking in our black eyed pea consumption, I’m hoping that there can be more praise for agricultural bio-diversity, and not just for the context that we individually live and consume in.  In the US, we’re starting to honor our diverse agricultural heritage by refining our knowledge of and palettes for the varieties of fruits, vegetables, and livestock that fell out of fashion when our farms turned into mono-croppers and all of our produce started coming from California. Just as we start to realize that our food system really doesn’t work out that well for us, we push the same kind of models across the pond. As citizens trying to re-define our own food system, we should acknowledge that people everywhere have the right to honor their own interwoven agricultural and culinary heritages.  Just because people are poor does not mean that the best and longest lasting solution to their poverty is integration into a global commodity chain that may boom now but bust in the near future.  

If I could re-write a catchphrase, it would be “More cowbellpea!”  It’d be awesome if some celebrity would make it their cause.

Should you be inclined to read some more in-depth anthropologicalness….

Troubled Fields by Eric Ramirez Ferrero is an ethnography that explores how the 1980s farm crisis came to fruition through political and economic means and how the crisis negatively affected farming communities and farm families in Oklahoma.

Silent Violence by Michael Watts is an ethnography that shows how a shift from subsistence to commodity farming in Northern Nigeria failed to procure wealthier farmers and instead produced hungrier families.

Though I haven’t read their work, Judith Carney and Jessica Harris are scholars who have written about the linkages between crops/food in Africa and the American South.