HOW THE COTTON FARMER LIVES 247 



TABLE XXI 68 



Milk \i pint per day 



Butter 1 ounce per day 



Chickens ^ per month 



Eggs y% per day 



Pigs % per year 



Beef Mo per year 



Sirup % o gallons per year 



Irish potatoes 9 pounds per year 



In the dietary of families on the lower levels of living, 

 pork comes first in value of all the items of food sup- 

 plied directly from the farm, often amounting to 40 

 per cent. 69 Corn is the staple article of diet throughout 

 the whole Cotton Belt, prepared as roasting ears, hom- 

 iny, grits, and meal for corn bread. Molasses, homemade 

 from sorghum and ribbon cane, furnishes the sugar in 

 the diet during the winter months. During the summer, 

 beans, tomatoes, Irish potatoes, cabbage, okra, field peas, 

 and onions are raised in the garden. During the winter 

 months cotton farmers subsist on turnips, collards, sweet 

 potatoes, and fried pork. An observer says of cotton 

 tenants in Oklahoma: "Very few have vegetable gardens 

 of any description. Their supply of meat, milk and butter 

 they must buy or go without most of the time the lat- 

 ter and a great many of them are actually on the bor- 

 der line of starvation. The writer has been in their homes 

 when there was not enough on the table for even a smaller 

 family." 70 At best the diet is composed of fried foods, 



68 Augusta Survey, p. 169. Pamphlet. 



69 Hawthorne, et. al., Farm Organization and Farm Management 

 in Sumter County, Georgia, Dept. of Agriculture Bulletin 1034, 

 p. 37. 



70 C. E. Gibbons, op. cit., p. 38. 



