How pecans went from ignored trees to a holiday staple – the 8,000-year history of America’s only native major nut crop

Shelley Mitchell, Oklahoma State University Pecans have a storied history in the United States. Today, American trees produce hundreds of million of pounds of pecans – 80% of the world’s pecan crop. Most of that crop stays here. Pecans are used to produce pecan milk, butter and oil, but many of the nuts end up in pecan pies. Throughout history, pecans have been overlooked, poached, cultivated and improved. As they have spread throughout the United States, they have been eaten raw and in recipes. Pecans have grown more popular over the decades, and you will probably encounter them in some form this holiday season. I’m an extension specialist in Oklahoma, a state consistently ranked fifth in pecan production, behind Georgia, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas. I’ll admit that I am not a fan of the taste of pecans, which leaves more for the squirrels, crows and enthusiastic pecan lovers.

The spread of pecans

The pecan is a nut related to the hickory. Actually, though we call them nuts, pecans are actually a type of fruit called a drupe. Drupes have pits, like the peach and cherry.

The pecan nuts that look like little brown footballs are actually the seed that starts inside the pecan fruit – until the fruit ripens and splits open to release the pecan. They are usually the size of your thumb, and you may need a nutcracker to open them. You can eat them raw or as part of a cooked dish. The pecan derives its name from the Algonquin “pakani,” which means “a nut too hard to crack by hand.” Rich in fat and easy to transport, pecans traveled with Native Americans throughout what is now the southern United States. They were used for food, medicine and trade as early as 8,000 years ago.

Pecans are native to the southern United States, and while they had previously spread along travel and trade routes, the first documented purposeful planting of a pecan tree was in New York in 1722. Three years later, George Washington’s estate, Mount Vernon, had some planted pecans. Washington loved pecans, and Revolutionary War soldiers said he was constantly eating them. Meanwhile, no one needed to plant pecans in the South, since they naturally grew along riverbanks and in groves. Pecan trees are alternate bearing: They will have a very large crop one year, followed by one or two very small crops. But because they naturally produced a harvest with no input from farmers, people did not need to actively cultivate them. Locals would harvest nuts for themselves but otherwise ignored the self-sufficient trees. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that people in the pecan’s native range realized the pecan’s potential worth for income and trade. Harvesting pecans became competitive, and young boys would climb onto precarious tree branches. One girl was lifted by a hot air balloon so she could beat on the upper branches of trees and let them fall to collectors below. Pecan poaching was a problem in natural groves on private property.

Pecan cultivation begins

Even with so obvious a demand, cultivated orchards in the South were still rare into the 1900s. Pecan trees don’t produce nuts for several years after planting, so their future quality is unknown.

To guarantee quality nuts, farmers began using a technique called grafting; they’d join branches from quality trees to another pecan tree’s trunk. The first attempt at grafting pecans was in 1822, but the attempts weren’t very successful. Grafting pecans became popular after an enslaved man named Antoine who lived on a Louisiana plantation successfully produced large pecans with tender shells by grafting, around 1846. His pecans became the first widely available improved pecan variety.

The variety was named Centennial because it was introduced to the public 30 years later at the Philadelphia Centennial Expedition in 1876, alongside the telephone, Heinz ketchup and the right arm of the Statue of Liberty. This technique also sped up the production process. To keep pecan quality up and produce consistent annual harvests, today’s pecan growers shake the trees while the nuts are still growing, until about half of the pecans fall off. This reduces the number of nuts so that the tree can put more energy into fewer pecans, which leads to better quality. Shaking also evens out the yield, so that the alternate-bearing characteristic doesn’t create a boom-bust cycle.

US pecan consumption

The French brought praline dessert with them when they immigrated to Louisiana in the early 1700s. A praline is a flat, creamy candy made with nuts, sugar, butter and cream. Their original recipe used almonds, but at the time, the only nut available in America was the pecan, so pecan pralines were born.

During the Civil War and world wars, Americans consumed pecans in large quantities because they were a protein-packed alternative when meat was expensive and scarce. One cup of pecan halves has about 9 grams of protein. After the wars, pecan demand declined, resulting in millions of excess pounds at harvest. One effort to increase demand was a national pecan recipe contest in 1924. Over 21,000 submissions came from over 5,000 cooks, with 800 of them published in a book. Pecan consumption went up with the inclusion of pecans in commercially prepared foods and the start of the mail-order industry in the 1870s, as pecans can be shipped and stored at room temperature. That characteristic also put them on some Apollo missions. Small amounts of pecans contain many vitamins and minerals. They became commonplace in cereals, which touted their health benefits. In 1938, the federal government published the pamphlet Nuts and How to Use Them, which touted pecans’ nutritional value and came with recipes. Food writers suggested using pecans as shortening because they are composed mostly of fat. The government even put a price ceiling on pecans to encourage consumption, but consumers weren’t buying them. The government ended up buying the surplus pecans and integrating them into the National School Lunch Program.

While you are sitting around the Thanksgiving table this year, you can discuss one of the biggest controversies in the pecan industry: Are they PEE-cans or puh-KAHNS? Editor’s note: This article was updated to include the amount of protein in a cup of pecans. Shelley Mitchell, Senior Extension Specialist in Horticulture and Landscape Architecture, Oklahoma State University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why the chemtrail conspiracy theory lingers and grows – and why Tucker Carlson is talking about it

Calum Lister Matheson, University of Pittsburgh Everyone has looked up at the clouds and seen faces, animals, objects. Human brains are hardwired for this kind of whimsy. But some people – perhaps a surprising number – look to the sky and see government plots and wicked deeds written there. Conspiracy theorists say that contrails – long streaks of condensation left by aircraft – are actually chemtrails, clouds of chemical or biological agents dumped on the unsuspecting public for nefarious purposes. Different motives are ascribed, from weather control to mass poisoning. The chemtrails theory has circulated since 1996, when conspiracy theorists misinterpreted a U.S. Air Force research paper about weather modification, a valid topic of research. Social media and conservative news outlets have since magnified the conspiracy theory. One recent study notes that X, formerly Twitter, is a particularly active node of this “broad online community of conspiracy.” I’m a communications researcher who studies conspiracy theories. The thoroughly debunked chemtrails theory provides a textbook example of how conspiracy theories work.

Boosted into the stratosphere

Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, whose podcast averages over a million viewers per episode, recently interviewed Dane Wigington, a longtime opponent of what he calls “geoengineering.” While the interview has been extensively discredited and mocked in other media coverage, it is only one example of the spike in chemtrail belief. Although chemtrail belief spans the political spectrum, it is particularly evident in Republican circles. U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has professed his support for the theory. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has written legislation to ban chemical weather control, and many state legislatures have done the same. Online influencers with millions of followers have promoted what was once a fringe theory to a large audience. It finds a ready audience among climate change deniers and anti-deep state agitators who fear government mind control.

Heads I win, tails you lose

Although research on weather modification is real, the overwhelming majority of qualified experts deny that the chemtrail theory has any solid basis in fact. For example, geoengineering researcher David Keith’s lab posted a blunt statement on its website. A wealth of other resources exist online, and many of their conclusions are posted at contrailscience.com. But even without a deep dive into the science, the chemtrail theory has glaring logical problems. Two of them are falsifiability and parsimony.

According to psychologist Rob Brotherton, conspiracy theories have a classic “heads I win, tails you lose” structure. Conspiracy theorists say that chemtrails are part of a nefarious government plot, but its existence has been covered up by the same villains. If there was any evidence that weather modification was actually happening, that would support the theory, but any evidence denying chemtrails also supports the theory – specifically, the part that alleges a cover-up. People who subscribe to the conspiracy theory consider anyone who confirms it to be a brave whistleblower and anyone who denies it to be foolish, evil or paid off. Therefore, no amount of information could even hypothetically disprove it for true believers. This denial makes the theory nonfalsifiable, meaning it’s impossible to disprove. By contrast, good theories are not false, but they must also be constructed in such a way that if they were false, evidence could show that. Nonfalsifiable theories are inherently suspect because they exist in a closed loop of self-confirmation. In practice, theories are not usually declared “false” based on a single test but are taken more or less seriously based on the preponderance of good evidence and scientific consensus. This approach is important because conspiracy theories and disinformation often claim to falsify mainstream theories, or at least exploit a poor understanding of what certainty means in scientific methods. Like most conspiracy theories, the chemtrail story tends not to meet the criteria of parsimony, also known as Occam’s razor, which suggests that the more suppositions a theory requires to be true, the less likely it actually is. While not perfect, this concept can be an important way to think about probability when it comes to conspiracy theories. Is it more likely that the government is covering up a massive weather program, mind-control program or both that involve thousands or millions of silent, complicit agents, from the local weather reporter to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or that we’re seeing ice crystals from plane engines? Of course, calling something a “conspiracy theory” does not automatically invalidate it. After all, real conspiracies do exist. But it’s important to remember scientist and science communicator Carl Sagan’s adage that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” In the case of chemtrails, the evidence just isn’t there.

Psychology of conspiracy theory belief

If the evidence against it is so powerful and the logic is so weak, why do people believe the chemtrail conspiracy theory? As I have argued in my new book, “Post-Weird: Fragmentation, Community, and the Decline of the Mainstream,” conspiracy theorists create bonds with each other through shared practices of interpreting the world, seeing every detail and scrap of evidence as unshakable signs of a larger, hidden meaning. Uncertainty, ambiguity and chaos can be overwhelming. Conspiracy theories are symptoms, ad hoc attempts to deal with the anxiety caused by feelings of powerlessness in a chaotic and complicated world where awful things like tornadoes, hurricanes and wildfires can happen seemingly at random for reasons that even well-informed people struggle to understand. When people feel overwhelmed and helpless, they create fantasies that give an illusion of mastery and control. Although there are liberal chemtrail believers, aversion to uncertainty might explain why the theory has become so popular with Carlson’s audience: Researchers have long argued that authoritarian, right-wing beliefs have a similar underlying structure. On some level, chemtrail theorists would rather be targets of an evil conspiracy than face the limits of their knowledge and power, even though conspiracy beliefs are not completely satisfying. Sigmund Freud described a fort-da (“gone-here”) game played by his grandson where he threw away a toy and dragged it back on a string, something Freud interpreted as a simulation of control when the child had none. Conspiracy theories may serve a similar purpose, allowing their believers to feel that the world isn’t really random and that they, the ones who see through the charade, really have some control over it. The grander the conspiracy, the more brilliant and heroic the conspiracy theorists must be. Conspiracies are dramatic and exciting, with clear lines of good and evil, whereas real life is boring and sometimes scary. The chemtrail theory is ultimately prideful. It’s a way for theorists to feel powerful and smart when they face things beyond their comprehension and control. Conspiracy theories come and go, but responding to them in the long term means finding better ways to embrace uncertainty, ambiguity and our own limits alongside a new embrace of the tools we do have: logic, evidence and even humility. Calum Lister Matheson, Associate Professor of Communication, University of Pittsburgh This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.