A convergence of cheap labor and economic need fueled the drive for innovation. When pests, climatic catastrophe, and volatile markets besieged cotton producers, Georgia boosters believed the humble pimento might become the next King Commodity. The future and fortunes of the pimento were already intertwined with the South’s cash crops. Pomona Products Company, probably the world’s largest pimento producer in the mid-1920s, operated alongside eight cotton mills and three hosiery and knitting mills in Griffin on a street once named Pimento Avenue. It packaged pickled peaches right up until pimento season began in the dog days of early August.
It follows naturally, if indirectly, that millworkers would not forever be alienated from what they produced. With the mass production of block cheese and the coming of refrigeration, pimento cheese became a fixture in the palate populi and working-class lunch sacks. Women often peddled sandwiches with the spread at mills, parlaying that into bigger businesses, while Southern mayonnaise companies cranked out plastic tub after tub. As Wallace (whose family members labored in North Carolina mills) explains it, “Pimento cheese has kept its foot in both worlds. I can’t think of a lot of other foods,” excluding fried chicken, that move so seamlessly and successfully across class lines.
Pimento cheese’s history is one of migration and a food’s class-switching. It’s the chronicle of two crackers: the elite’s fancy wafers and the hardscrabble white workers who ate it on white bread when the break whistle blew. A once-imported ingredient became a star in a dish embraced by the Southern proletariat.
I had imagined only an uncomplicated one-way gentrification of the cheese food. In that myth, it transitioned from the workaday lunch pail to the Masters golf tourney menu and restaurants frequented by white ladies who lunch with white men who wear seersucker unironically. But truth be told: The pimento part of the equation was a matter of reverse gentrification from tony import to American fields and mills. The hankering for an exclusive ingredient created a new labor market and a broader appetite.
Pimento cheese’s rise is late capitalism served on Wonder Bread—globalization, movement of commodities, elite adoption, commercialization, its democratizing co-optation by the laboring and middling classes, the growth of corporate agriculture, wage stagnation. Pimento production became increasingly mechanized and subject to regulation (pasteurized pimento cheese is listed in the Food and Drug Administration’s Code of Federal Regulations). And then, there was the recent gentrification. Food pundits such as Bon Appétit editor Adam Rapoport (before being toppled from the post in 2020 for wearing brownface) pronounced in 2011 that pimento cheese would reach a new height in its popularity—decades after Southern and Western producers ramped up their pimento cultivation and women hawked those orange-and-white sandwiches at mills.