Ice cream & ice cream parlors have been rooted in racism in the U.S., even though vanilla cultivation was revolutionized by a black pre-teen in the 1800s. A thread.
Early U.S. ice cream parlors played music to keep patrons entertained, often using the Regina music box, which played, among other things, minstrel music. npr.org/sections/codes…
To avoid copyright claims, he used music in the public domain. Enter ye old minstrel songs: medium.com/@luckypeach/tu…
This was largely by custom and not by law.
@KosherSoul lays this out culinary racism here: theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
"People in Stamps used to say that the whites in our town were so prejudiced that a Negro couldn't buy vanilla ice cream. Except on July 4th. Other days he had to be satisfied with chocolate."
The plant was carefully guarded and cultivated by the Totonacs, a Mexican civilization from Veracruz.
They didn't want the Spaniards to learn their process and wouldn't teach them, so the Spaniards just stole the already-cultivated pods and smuggled them out of Mexico.
nationalgeographic.com/science/phenom…
They completely failed.
then, in 1836 a Belgian botanist figured out that the vanilla plants in Europe weren't being pollinated. Mexico had a specific bee species as vanilla plant pollinators.
Europe didn't.
At the same time (around 1820), the French were sending vanilla plants to Réunion.
Today, ~80% of the world's vanilla comes from Madagascar, Réunion's next door neighbor. Vanilla is the world's 2nd-most expensive spice.
It's entirely appropriate for @GoodHumor and @RZA to reimagine the ice cream truck jingle. We owe at least that it to Edmond Albius.
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