The Ballad of Pellagra is a punk rock murder ballad that seeks to help listeners better understand the complexity of pellagra, a nutritional deficiency that killed over 100,000 people in the Southern USA during the late 1800's. Pellagra presents with diagnostic criteria that have come to be known as the "Four D's of Famine,” diarrhea, dermatitis, dementia, and death. The real world story of pellagra is taught in medical schools and schools of public health around the world. It is considered to be a landmark case in understanding economic epidemiology, which is the study of how disease progression in populations is connected to economic conditions. In the case of pellagra, the symptoms were originally blamed on the "filth" of sharecroppers and other poor southerners who were dying of the disease. This stigma persisted for years, and southerners continued to die. Many researchers helped to address the pellagra outbreak, with Dr. Joseph Goldberger and Edgar Sydenstricker being standout leaders in the movement to properly diagnose and treat the condition. They noticed that the condition was not transmitted to nurses and doctors, so they began to examine the diets of sharecroppers, which they found to be quite poor. They went on to identify that pellagra was specifically a deficiency in niacin and tryptophan that quickly resolved with an improved diet. Economic conditions found to have contributed to the outbreak of pellagra were ultimately systemic functions of poverty and oppression. Specifically, the cotton monoculture, which required sharecroppers to plant the cash crop of cotton rather than to grow vegetables, grain, or to raise cattle; the extremely limited access to healthy and affordable food options from local markets; and the cornmeal they used that had been milled in a way to make it shelf-stable for transport to the south on trains, but that also robbed it of all nutritional value. Researchers found that women suffered the most from pellagra, often because they provided the best food to their men and children. Ultimately, the case led to federal policies requiring processed foods to be enriched with essential nutrients. As this has played out across time, we once again find that poor southerners are suffering from population-level health epidemics fundamentally tied to their poor access to quality food. Referred to as food deserts, too many areas where southerners live in poverty provide very little access to healthy food options, while very often providing things to fill the belly with synthetic nutrients and other junk food products. Stigma persists and poor people continue to suffer and die. A stop-motion animated music video (coming in 2021) complements the song, which tells the story of Eshe, a sharecropper who dies from pellagra and the central character in the song. The video release includes accompanying student assignments and reflections for use by faculty teaching pellagra in their courses that wish to do so by providing an opportunity for their students to apply a critical race lens in understanding how pellagra was connected to systemic functions that exacerbated the condition including racism, sexism, classism, and the evolution of slavery in the USA.

Pay what you can folks!
View our full merch site at www.graduatesRise.com/merch