Life's Pleasures Quote by David F. Houston

“Only recently” is doing the heavy lifting here: it flatters the nation’s sense of progress while quietly indicting its laziness. David F. Houston, a politician steeped in the machinery of early 20th-century American governance, frames cowpeas and soybeans not as trendy novelties but as belated common sense. The line reads like a mild agricultural note, yet it carries a policy-maker’s impatience with cultural lag: we had the crops, we had the knowledge elsewhere in the world, and still the American diet (and farm economy) behaved as if protein had to come wrapped in meat or imported wheat.

The intent is pragmatic and strategic. Houston isn’t praising culinary curiosity; he’s selling an adjustment in national habits. In an era of war pressures, market volatility, and the push to modernize farming, legumes are a quiet solution: cheap protein, soil-friendly rotation crops, and a way to make rural production look like national strength. Calling their recognition “recent” casts the shift as inevitable and rational, not ideological. That matters coming from a politician: persuasion works better when it sounds like a neutral report.

The subtext is also cultural hierarchy. Cowpeas and soybeans were long familiar in other foodways and communities, including Southern and Asian cuisines, but “recognized” implies validated by mainstream institutions - universities, departments, boards, the kind of authority Houston represented. It’s a sentence about food that reveals how power decides what counts as knowledge, and how the “new” often means “new to people who run things.”