Food Glorious Food

A hundred years before “supply chain” became a household word, people were already singing about it. This week we dig into three records — 1918 to 1926 — that capture the same anxieties making headlines today: a real worldwide banana shortage that became the biggest novelty hit of 1923 (“Yes! We Have No Bananas”), a folk song about the boll weevil that devastated Southern cotton farming, recorded by none other than poet Carl Sandburg, and an early piece of regional food pride dressed up as a love song (“Everything Is Peaches Down in Georgia”) that turns out to be a genuine ancestor of today’s “shop local” movement. The songs are silly. What’s behind them isn’t — and we talk honestly about both.

A heads-up: our recording of “The Boll Weevil” includes a racial slur common to the period, which we discuss directly rather than skip past. We felt it was worth keeping in the conversation rather than out of it.