By RAY WYCHE
Staff Writer

Two area vegetables prized for their good flavors and ready availability were extremely helpful in providing good nutrition to Columbus County residents during a trying time.

During the dark days of the 1930s Great Depression, when money was scarce and nutritional knowledge often lacking, collards and sweet potatoes played a big role in maintaining the health of Columbus County residents.

A physician who practiced in the county for many years during those dark days of scarcities once said that had it not been for sweet potatoes and collards, sicknesses brought on or exacerbated by nutritional deficiencies would have been more prevalent and damaging.

Fortunately, these two nutritional powerhouses grow readily and plentifully in our soils and climate. Often complementing these nutritional heavyweights was iron-loaded molasses, readily available from local stores for a few pennies or by barter.

Collards and sweet potatoes (which are not yams despite a popular festival) rank near the bottom of the vegetable social scale; the two would not be appropriate fare for an upscale wedding reception, but when it comes to nutritional value, the pair is hard to beat.

Green edibles grown in California or Florida, so prevalent in today’s supermarkets, would have been beyond the food budgets of most Depression-era households, even if the vegetables had been available. The fresh green stuff we take for granted 12 months per year today was not so easily obtained in the early 1930s.

So let us sing praises, not for the coast-to-coast truckers who bring supposedly fresh vegetables to our tables when our land is fallow, but let us raise the song for what grows so freely here — collards and sweet potatoes —when most of our garden plots are producing only dried weeds and grasses.

If you’re choosing your menu strictly for nutritional value, look no further than what was standard fare in Columbus County of the earlier years.

Collards, with their deep green color, have a high content of all things that make for healthy eating. A cup of the humble green leaves has only 27 calories but carries a full range of vitamins, plus calcium, folic acid, potassium, and a full load of fiber.

Collards are easily grown, thriving in weather cold enough to kill most vegetables. Collards often provide the only edible greenery in winter in our fields.

It’s true that while cooking, collards emit an odor that fairly screams: INEDIBLE; FIT ONLY FOR BURIAL. Unpleasant cooking odor or not, the cooked product kept Depression-era locals sound enough to tackle whatever needed to be done.

As healthy as collards are, the plant must take second place in the nutrition derby to the lowly sweet potato.

Generally considered the most nutritious vegetable in nature’s larder, the underground tubers are loaded with vitamins, beta-carotene and wholesome trace elements such as manganese, copper, zinc, magnesium and phosphorus.

Sweet potatoes, if protected from freezing in a “bank” made of limbs or boards covered with layers of dirt, can be enjoyed year-round.

Lending themselves to a variety of tasty methods of preparation, sweet potatoes can be dressed up with nuts, spices and flavored sweeteners. But perhaps the most popular way of preparing them is the simplest: baking them with their skins intact.

Many a local home’s supper in years past consisted of cold baked sweet potato, cold biscuits that had been baked for lunch, and perhaps the third component of the poor man’s health food of years ago, molasses.

Molasses, made from the juice of Caribbean Islands sugarcane, is a storehouse of iron and other nutritional elements.
In the gloomy Depression years, molasses was used in place of sugar in many dishes as it was less costly than refined sugar. It was also considered to be healthier than white sugar, a fact of little importance to its 1930s users who bought molasses because it was cheap.

Molasses now comes to the supermarket in brightly labeled containers but it was only a few years ago that grocery stores (there were no supermarkets) and country stores got their molasses in wooden barrels. The thick sweetener was drawn from the barrels by a wooden spigot into quart and half-gallon jars for retail sale.

The arrival of a new barrel of molasses at a country store was sure to bring several offers to buy the barrel once it was emptied.

How this container was used once the molasses was drawn out is perhaps best left unexplored. Suffice it to say that many a molasses barrel found a second life in a very private enterprise in the deep woods or swamps.

Regardless of the barrel’s contributions to mankind in its later uses, its former contents played a part in keeping many people healthy in a trying time.