(C) BoingBoing
This story was originally published by BoingBoing and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Come for the pickles, stay for the agricultural history lesson [1]

['Jennifer Sandlin']

Date: 2023-05-09

If you've got a hankering for something sour, cold, and crunchy, make your way down to Jackson, Mississippi on Saturday, June 10, for the Mississippi Pickle Fest. It's being held at the Mississippi Agriculture and Forestry Museum. Admission is a mere 12 dollars, and you can feast on all of the fermented delights your heart desires. Their festival website explains:

The Mississippi Pickle Fest is a refreshing taste of all things fermented. This fun-filled festival is a day of music, games, contests, vendors, and so much more. We have partnered with local individuals and restaurants to provide fun pickle-themed foods and drinks. There is something for everyone at this fun-filled family event!

While you're there, check out the rest of the museum's 44 exhibits, which sprawl across a 39-acre site and include an exhibit barn, nature trail, children's barnyard, herb garden, rose garden, general store, the National Agricultural Aviation Museum, and the Heritage Center Gallery, which features an exhibit focusing on "500 years of Mississippi's agricultural history, from the early contributions to agriculture of the Choctaw population, to turn of the century forest conservation, to modern catfish farming." The museum's vast agriculture garden is home to the Victory Garden, which contains 17 raised beds with rotating seasonal crops, a blueberry patch, muscadine arbor, potato tuber viewer, and worm dig compost station. The museum hosts school groups and other visitors interested in learning about soil fertility, conservation tillage, crop rotation, pollination, and historic and modern methods of farming.

I haven't been to the museum, and while they mention "slavery" briefly on their website, I'm not sure how thoroughly they cover how fundamental the institution of slavery and the stolen labor of enslaved people were to agriculture in Mississippi. My hunch is that they do about the same job as most museums, which is to say, not great. To remedy this failure, some newer museums have come on the scene that are definitely worth checking out: The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, in Montgomery, Alabama; the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina; and the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana.

And for a terrific deep dive into the land theft via deed of title that has occurred in Mississippi (and elsewhere) since Emancipation, check out this great piece in The Atlantic. Here's an excerpt:

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2023/05/09/come-for-the-pickles-stay-for-the-agricultural-history-lesson.html

Published and (C) by BoingBoing
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/boingboing/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.