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Mr. Lewis the Virginia Molasses Can Vender

For today's segment in our street vender series let go to place not far from the University of Virginia and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. 90-year-old Ella “Gold” Baker's childhood memory of a molasses vender provides a good illustration of our food systems (the process by which we produce, process, exchange, and make a food available) has undergone radical changes since World War II. Born in 1915, Baker grew up in the rural farming hamlet of Cloverdale, Virginia in Fluvanna County. Every autumn, "a one-legged vender named Mr. Henry Lewis would go from house to house" with a portable sugar cane grinder and a vat pulled on a horse drawn wagon. Those who cultivated sugar cane bartered with Lewis to have him turn their small sugar cane harvest into cans of molasses. For example, Lewis would produce nine cans of molasses and receive three of them as his processing fee. 

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