Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T18:38:50.188Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Peeling Back the Layers: Vidalia Onions and the Making of a Global Agribusiness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Tore C. Olsson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In Depression-era South Georgia, truck farmers experimenting with onion planting found that their crop emerged unusually sweet, due to the region's climate and particular soil content. But what gave Vidalia onions a unique flavor—their low sulfur and high water content—also rendered them nearly impossible to market, as the vegetable spoiled much quicker than regular onions. In their seventy-year quest to overcome the onion's natural limitations, Georgia growers would transform their formerly insular region into a hub of global supermarket capitalism. As onion acreage skyrocketed with the advent of controlled atmosphere storage, growers recruited thousands of Latin American workers. Then, when storage techniques proved imperfect, industry leaders contracted with growers across Central and South America to produce sweet onions for sale during Georgia's off-season. In striking contrast to the Vidalia onion's branding as a “down-home” southern crop, the vegetable's history reveals the contradictions in our modern food system.

Type
Articles
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , December 2012 , pp. 832 - 861
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2012. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bibliography of Works Cited

Books

Anderson, J.L. Industrializing the Corn Beit: Agriculture, Technology, and Environment, 1945–1972. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Barndt, Deborah. Tangled Routes: Women, Work and Globalization on the Tomato Trail. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.Google Scholar
Bartley, Numan. The New South, 1945–1980. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Belasco, Warren, and Scranton, Philip, eds. Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies. New York: Routledge, 2002.Google Scholar
Bland Farms. The Vidalia Sweet Onion Lovers Cookbook. Memphis, TN: Starr-Toof Publishers, 1996.Google Scholar
Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Calavita, Kitty. Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the INS. New York: Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Cohen, Deborah. Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Cox, Karen. Dreaming of Dixie: How the South was Created in American Popular Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Daniel, Pete. Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures Since 1880. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Daniel, Pete. Toxic Drift: Pesticides and Health in the Post-World War II South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Ferguson, James. The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Ferguson, James. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Fink, Leon. The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Fite, Gilbert C. Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865–1980. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Fitzgerald, Deborah. Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freidberg, Susanne. Fresh: A Perishable History. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Hahamovitch, Cindy. The Fruits of their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870–1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hahamovitch, Cindy. No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940. New York: Vintage, 1999.Google Scholar
Hamilton, Shane. Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Kirby, Jack Temple. Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Kirby, Jack Temple. Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Kloppenburg, Jack Jr. First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492–2000. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Levenstein, Harvey A. Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Easting in Modern America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Olmstead, Alan L., and Rhode, Paul W. Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Odem, Mary, and Lacy, Elaine, eds. Latino Immigrants and the Transformation of the U.S. South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Peacock, James, Watson, Harry, and Matthews, Carrie, eds. The American South in a Global World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2006.Google Scholar
Presley, Delma. Piggly Wiggly Southern Style: The Piggly Wiggly Southern Story, 1919–1984. Vidalia, GA: Piggly Wiggly Southern, 1984.Google Scholar
Ray, Janisse. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1999.Google Scholar
Silber, Nina. The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Soluri, John. Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Stoll, Steven. The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Striffler, Steve. Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Strom, Claire. Making Catfish Bait out of Government Boys: The Fight against Cattle Ticks and the Transformation of the Yeoman South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Vance, Rupert. Human Geography of the South: A Study in Regional Resources and Human Adequacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935.Google Scholar
Wilkinson, Alec. Big Sugar: Seasons in the Cane Fields of Florida. New York: Knopf, 1989.Google Scholar
Wolf, Eric. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.Google Scholar

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Boyd, William. “Making Meat: Science, Technology, and American Poultry Production.” Technology and Culture 42 (2001): 631–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Durand, Jorge, Massey, Douglas, and Parrado, Emilio. “The New Era of Mexican Migration to the United States.” Journal of American History 86 (September 1999): 518–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gisolfi, Monica. “From Crop Lien to Contract Farming: The Roots of Agribusiness in the American South, 1929–1939.” Agricultural History 80, no. 2 (2006): 167–89.Google Scholar
McCorkle, James. “Moving Perishables to Market: Southern Railroads and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of Southern Truck Farming.” Agricultural History 66 (Winter 1992): 42–62.Google Scholar
McCorkle, James. “Agricultural Experiment Stations and Southern Truck Farming.” Agricultural History 62, no. 2 (Spring 1988): 234–3.Google Scholar
McCorkle, James. “Southern Truck Growers’ Associations: Organization for Profit.” Agricultural History 72, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 77–99.Google Scholar
Smittle, Doyle. “Evaluation of Storage Methods for ‘Granex’ Onions.” Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science 113, no. 6 (1988): 877–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smittle, Doyle, and Williamson, R.E. Onion Production and Curing in Georgia. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia, Experiment Station Research Report 284, June 1978: 1–11.Google Scholar
Wilkins, Mira. “The Neglected Intangible Asset: The Influence of the Trade Mark on the Rise of the Modern Corporation.” Business History 34, no. 1 (1992): 66–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Government Documents and Reports

Smittle, Doyle. “Onion Production in Nicaragua.” USAID Report, Assignment Number ST–115, March-April 1992. Available online at http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNABN551.pdf. Last accessed April 27, 2012.Google Scholar
Smittle, Doyle. “Observational Tour of Georgia’s Vidalia Onion Production Areas,” USAID Report, Assignment Number ST–115, May 4-7, April 1993. Available online at http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDABG467.pdf. Last accessed April 27, 2012.Google Scholar
United States Census of Agriculture, 1860–2000.Google Scholar
United States Census of Population, 1860–2000.Google Scholar
Vidalia Onion Act of 1986. http://agr.georgia.gov/Data/Sites/1/ag_Marketing/Vidalia%20Onion/files/Vidalia%20Onion%20Act%20of%201986.pdf. Last accessed April 27, 2012.Google Scholar

Newspapers and Magazines

Associated Press State & Local WireGoogle Scholar
Atlanta ConstitutionGoogle Scholar
Atlanta Constitution MagazineGoogle Scholar
Atlanta JournalGoogle Scholar
Atlanta Journal-ConstitutionGoogle Scholar
Augusta ChronicleGoogle Scholar
Christian Science MonitorGoogle Scholar
Direct MarketingGoogle Scholar
Macon TelegraphGoogle Scholar
New York TimesGoogle Scholar
Tattnall JournalGoogle Scholar
Vidalia AdvanceGoogle Scholar
Wall Street JournalGoogle Scholar
Washington PostGoogle Scholar

Interviews

Delbert, Bland, Glennville, GA, November 13, 2008. Transcript in possession of author.Google Scholar
Reid Torrance, Reidsville, GA, November 13, 2008. Transcript in possession of author.Google Scholar

Television Program

Murrow, Edward. “Harvest of Shame.” CBS, 1960.Google Scholar