Peaches, Peanuts, and Vidalia Onions, Georgia's Agricultural Identity

Georgia calls itself the Peach State, but the numbers tell a more complicated story. For most of the twentieth century, South Carolina actually grew more peaches than Georgia. The nickname stuck because Georgia's peach identity was built by boosters, railroad marketing, and the genuine quality of the fruit grown in the red clay of the central Piedmont counties, Crawford, Taylor, Macon, where the soil and climate converged into something ideal.

The peach arrived in Georgia via the Spanish, who brought it from Persia through the Caribbean in the fifteen hundreds, and Native peoples of the Southeast were cultivating it long before Georgia's commercial orchards. Georgia's peach industry in its modern commercial form dates to the eighteen seventies and peaked in the mid-twentieth century. Georgia peaches are still considered a culinary benchmark.

But peanuts may be Georgia's more consequential crop. The state produces roughly half of all peanuts grown in the United States, most of them in the sandy-soiled coastal plain of southwest Georgia, the same country where Jimmy Carter grew up farming them in Plains. The peanut arrived in the American South from South America via West Africa and the slave trade, and it was primarily Southern Black farmers and cooks who embedded it in regional cuisine long before it became the base of a national brand.

Then there is the Vidalia onion, grown only in the twenty counties around Vidalia in southeast Georgia, where low soil sulfur content gives the onions their extraordinary sweetness. The Vidalia's appellation is legally protected, only onions from that specific region may carry the name. It is one of the few American agricultural products with the kind of place-specific protection more common in European wine and cheese law.