From 1900 until the 1930s, pellagra, a disease later discovered to result from a deficiency of the vitamin niacin, was common among poor cotton farmers in the United States whose diet consisted mostly of corn, the least costly food they could buy  Corn does not contain niacin in usable form
Curiously, during the Depression of the early 1930s, when cotton' s price collapsed and cotton farmers' income declined, the incidence of pellagra among those farmers also declined
When growing a cash crop could not generate adequate income, poor farmers in the United States responded by planting their land with vegetables and fruits for their own consumption.