Marvin Pitts, a professor of horticulture at Cornell University, estimates that 99.9% of Americans have never tasted a blackcurrant. The reason? For nearly a century the US government conducted a war on currants and gooseberries.
On Louisiana highway 1, just south of the leeway bridge in Jefferson parish, not far from where the road ends, is a marker for the Cheniere Caminada cemetery, all that remains of a once thriving town that disappeared virtually overnight.