Excerpted with permission from The Curious Lives of Vegetables: An Artful Exploration of the Wonderful World of Edible Plants, Their History, and Their Crucial Role in Our Future written by Ali Francis, illustrated by Adriana Picker, published by Hardie Grant North America, September 2026, RRP $30.00 Hardcover.
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In Chef Kevin Mitchell’s classroom at the Culinary Institute of Charleston, the peanuts are small, pink, and maddeningly difficult to shell. He passes them around to students, most of whom quickly complain: the skins are too tight, the pace too tedious. “But that’s the beauty of it for me,” Mitchell says. “You have more respect for that ingredient because of the time it took you just to process it. It brings you closer to its stories.” And for a tiny, pea-sized bloop, the Carolina African Runner Peanut has a big tale to tell.
They may hang out with cashews and pistachios at the grocery store, but technically, peanuts are legumes. An ancient hybrid of two wild ancestors, they’re thought to have originated in what’s now southern Bolivia and northern Argentina, where Andean civilizations domesticated the plants over thousands of years. The peanut’s global spread is due in part to its hardiness: its epithet, hypogaea, means “under the earth,” referencing its smart reproductive strategy. After flowering, the plant pushes fertilized ovules underground, protecting the seeds from harsh conditions, where they develop into pods.
Spanish and Portuguese colonizers came across peanuts in the New World and promptly ferried them to Europe, Africa, and Asia. By the 1500s, they’d arrived on West African shores, where the plants loved the sandy soil and were quickly integrated into local cuisines. In countries like Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, and Mali, cooks worked the legumes—often called groundnuts—into dishes like maafe, a rich, comforting stew simmered with creamy peanut paste, tender meat, tomatoes, onions, and veggies; they’re also featured in kuli-kuli, a crunchy, deep-fried snack made from roasted peanuts and spices.
Carolina African Runner Peanuts first took root in what’s now the United States in the 1600s, likely carried across the Atlantic by enslaved West Africans. Stashed on ships, the seeds were then planted in small garden plots behind slave quarters and often grown in secret. “People knew they were about to go somewhere and they wanted to be able to have something that they were familiar with when they got there,” says Mitchell.
From those covert gardens, this supremely delicious little peanut quickly won fans. Charleston, South Carolina, became an early cultivation hub, while Wilmington, North Carolina, grew into the major processing center. The crop was exported from there to France, where its oil became castile soap. Meanwhile, in the US, Black cooks drew from homegrown traditions—mashing, grinding, boiling, roasting, and candying them—to turn the Carolina African Runner Peanut into an icon of the American South.
By the 18th and early 19th centuries, the peanut was thoroughly embedded in Charleston’s bustling street food scene. Free Black women, called maumas, perched on three-legged stools from dawn to dusk selling groundnut cakes: candies made from parched peanuts, molasses, butter, egg whites, and lemon peel. The treats gave them a short-lived pathway toward economic autonomy; by the early 1900s, city sanitation campaigns and wartime policies forced the maumas off the streets.
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Though the first known commercial peanut crop was grown in 1842 in Virginia, the legumes remained more of a novelty than a staple until the early 20th century. It was the work of Black innovators—like George Washington Carver, who developed hundreds of applications for the peanut while at the Tuskegee Institute, and Benjamin Hicks, a farmer and inventor who patented a gas-powered harvesting machine in the 1890s—that helped usher in a national peanut boom.
But industrialization rarely favors nuance. The larger Virginia peanut, which had descended from Bolivian stock and was used to make the all-American roasted ballpark snack, was easier to harvest and sell. Nudged to the side, historians believe that the last fields of Carolina African peanuts probably withered out in the 1920s. And by the end of the 1950s, the country’s original peanut was thought to be extinct. It wasn’t until food historian David Shields spotted an archival photo in the Sloane Collection at the British Library, a vast archive of early botanical knowledge, that the hunt for this long-lost legume began.
A handful of unlabeled seeds—stowed during the 1930s at North Carolina State University under the generic name “Carolina #4”—looked like a match for the runner peanut. In 2013, horticulturist Brian Ward of Clemson University planted 20 of them. According to National Public Radio, 12 sprouted: small, rust-colored, and oil-rich, just as described in historical records. Through successive plantings, that initial handful yielded 1,200 seeds, then 60,000 the following year, then a million by 2015. In 2016, the first crop of 15 million peanuts was harvested.
Mitchell is one of the lucky few who’s been able to try these elusive flavor bombs. The Carolina African Runner might be half the size of its modern cousin, but it’s wildly more flavorful. Nutty, vegetal, dense with oil, it tastes like someone took the supermarket peanut dial and cranked it up to 11. “It’s going to sound crazy, but I guess it’s more peanutty; it’s a lot more intense,” he says.
But Mitchell knows that reviving a crop is not the same as restoring its cultural and economic context. The Carolina African Runner is hard to grow, lower-yielding, too small to be harvested and processed by conventional equipment, and a real pest to shell. Basically, no one has figured out how to make the peanut profitable enough to compete with its commercial cousin. For now, efforts to bring it back seem to have stalled.
Mitchell describes feeling caught between two worlds. As a trained chef, he wants to see the Carolina African Runner featured on restaurant menus, championed by cooks who will tell its story with care and respect. But as a Black educator, he recognizes a troubling irony: if this peanut remains nothing more than a small-batch luxury item, many people from his own community will be priced out of accessing the very ingredient their ancestors brought to this country.
“It’s my opportunity, my responsibility, to inform the people around me about the story,” he tells me. “And I tell my students all the time, ‘For you to become a better chef, you have to be connected to the food that you’re cooking.’”
