 |
 |
|
|
|
 Carver wanted to improve the lives of Southern farmers and see their farms become prosperous and bountiful. He encouraged farmers to rotate their crops, both to replenish the soil and to provide farmers with alternative crop resources.
Carver was determined to show the world the economic potential of these alternative crops. But first he had to discover it for himself. He moved his focus to the lab and began the research that would make him famous—his experiments with peanuts and other plants.
Cooking Up Chemistry
Chemistry was Carver’s means to an end, and that end was to reduce suffering and improve life. Carver’s chemistry was extraordinary in its creativity and humanitarian applications, not its technical wizardry.
He privately joked that he was a “cook-stove chemist.” But Carver was serious about keeping his techniques accessible to farmers and people in need.
 Producing New Products
Carver used different processes and equipment to break peanuts and other plants into their component parts (fats, proteins, water, sugars, acids, and starches) then recombined them with other ingredients to make products.
Carver’s innovation was to use chemistry to take plants apart and put them back together again as something new. But cultures have always relied on plants to make food, medicine, housing materials, and a wide variety of products—a field of study called “Economic Botany.”
To learn more about Economic Botany at The Field Museum, skip to Research and Collections.
Or, continue to Peanut Products. >>
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
