When she was 13, Fannie Lou Hamer came across a scene of death and destruction. It never left her mind. A stranger had snuck onto her family’s property in Sunflower County, Mississippi, one evening as the Great Depression loomed over America. He poured a gallon of Paris green, an arsenic-laced insecticide, into the feeding troughs of their livestock, poisoning them until their stomachs swelled. Some of the animals were dead by the time Hamer returned home. Others perished soon after. To celebrate Juneteenth this week, Gastro Obscura and guest editor…
