by Daniel Stone
Early agricultural work entailed this type of reactive problem solving, trying to curtail bad things rather than invent good ones. The work of a new scientist involved early-morning trips to places with more farmland than Washington. Fairchild spent two summers in Geneva, New York, trying to figure out why some young pear trees had prematurely stopped bearing fruit. He tied bags around tree branches to protect them from pollen in the air. It was Fairchild’s discovery that blossoms on pear trees were sterile to their own pollen—a genetic revelation later applicable to other tree fruits.
1889. Fairchild’s early days with the U.S. Department of Agriculture involved testing equipment, such as this knapsack sprayer, in search of new ways to help farmers keep their fields healthy and productive.
Fairchild’s flashiest assignment was to man a booth at the 1893 World’s Fair. Chicago had won the honor to host the event, and, not to be outdone by Paris five years prior, opened the fair with a giant 264-foot wheel designed by George Washington Gale Ferris to rival Gustave Eiffel’s sleek Paris tower on the banks of the Seine. Organizers expected more than fifteen million people to visit the fair. More than double actually came.
On a small stage in front of an even smaller crowd, Fairchild was to explain how plant diseases could decimate a crop.
“It’s knowledge people can use!” his boss, Beverly Galloway, said when Fairchild complained that other presenters would have more exciting demonstrations. A giant wheel in the air was spectacular, Galloway conceded, but when people returned to their farms in Kansas, Iowa, and Illinois, Fairchild’s lesson would prove most useful.
Each day as the cold wind blew off Lake Michigan, Fairchild, in a baggy shirt with no coat, showed how pear blight fungus killed one pear seedling after another. The fast-growing fungus would cover the seedlings and starve them of sunshine. Then the plants would lean to the side and droop dead. Hours earlier, he would have contaminated the plants with the fungus so that, at the precise moment the crowd gathered, the plants would begin to visibly die before everyone’s eyes. If he timed it right, the onlookers would gasp. Farmers found it a useful lesson. Everyone else saw a magic trick.
As the wind battered his face and chapped his lips, Fairchild thought incessantly about two things.
One was the Malay Archipelago, and specifically the island of Java. His requests to be sent on assignment to study foreign plant diseases were met with the scoffs of men who saw no need for such irrelevant work and were unwilling to fund it. What insight could Javanese farmers possibly have into American problems? He daydreamed about going to Java on his own—a self-funded research expedition like those of the great explorers of Portugal and Spain who had once set off amid public doubt only to discover earth-changing things. But the daydreams were nothing more.
The other item occupying Fairchild’s daily thoughts was something Charles Wardell Stiles, a young zoologist, had told Fairchild before he left for Chicago. When Fairchild explained his longing for overseas travel, Stiles suggested that he apply to the Smithsonian, which had received a generous government grant to facilitate scientific exchange with several universities in Europe. One position in Naples was still empty.
As Chicago’s spring turned to summer, after another day of shuttling pear seedlings and fungus to and from the demonstration hall, Fairchild returned to his room to find a cablegram from Stiles. He had secured the Smithsonian job for Fairchild—and with it, the opportunity for him to leave his world and enter a new one. Fairchild spent the final days of the fair writing letters to his parents and his aunt and uncle. He imagined them pleased to see him granted the respect of a scientist.
What made Fairchild himself giddy was the idea of taking a steamship across an ocean. In 1893, an age of glamorous travel reserved solely for the most moneyed, crossing the Atlantic even once qualified as the rarest treat of a person’s life. Fairchild would have his own cabin, and his own seat in the dining room. There might be people on board who had visited exotic locales, and would regale him with illustrious stories of their adventures. He would buy a stack of pocket notebooks and jot every detail.
The anticipation tantalized him during the last weeks of the fair. Yet there was one pesky chore that remained. When he returned to Washington, before he headed for the ocean-crossing steamship, before he peered over the railing into the blue Atlantic, before he got to unpack his pocket microscope or try to decipher a menu in Italian, Fairchild would have to go into the Department of Agriculture, the agency that had given him the full sum of his opportunity, and quit.
* * *
—
Two months later, as fall’s leaves disappeared under winter snow, the most important conversation David Fairchild ever had occurred on a seven-thousand-ton ocean liner named the SS Fulda that would cross the stormy Atlantic and leave Fairchild and his ambitions in Naples.
Sea travel at first proved more cumbersome than the notions of calm luxury he imagined. Relentless wind upturned deck tables. Dishes clattered.
It was a pair of pajamas that first caught Fairchild’s eye. Only rich people wore pajamas—and so was the man wearing them. He stood in the doorway of the second officer’s cabin, a space reserved for the star passenger. The man was tall and handsome, with a perfect mustache outlandish enough to make Fairchild stare in crude astonishment. For a brief moment, the man looked back at Fairchild, and then he was gone.
The next evening, Fairchild recalled the odd encounter to Raphael Pumpelly, a Harvard geologist on board with whom Fairchild dined. When he mentioned in a different breath his longing to go to the Malay Islands, Pumpelly’s eyes lit up. The man in the pajamas was one Mr. Barbour Lathrop, esteemed world traveler. He had been to Java.
In fact, Barbour Lathrop had been around the world forty-three times. Perhaps more, perhaps less—the number changed each time someone asked, because Lathrop enjoyed demonstrating that he couldn’t be bothered to keep track. On the long voyages when bored travelers would count days with scratch marks in journals, Lathrop would find any pair of ears with even the smallest interest in hearing stories of his globe-trotting and death-defying adventures. “That reminds me of a time in Japan . . .” he would occasionally say, before describing how, amid great danger, he crossed Japan’s widest latitude on foot. Because of his status as a frequent traveler with deep pockets, Lathrop received the type of onboard treatment even the most regal dignitaries would envy.
In the smoking room aboard the Fulda, Fairchild met the man who would direct his destiny. Lathrop was wearing his formal tailcoat for an evening on board, and sat with a novel in one hand and a cigarette in the other. A forty-seven-year-old millionaire who financed his pleasure for travel on his father’s real estate fortune, Lathrop was a man of intellect, some real, some imagined, whose ego fueled an impetuousness to speak his mind—and, just as often, to ignore the dull. He couldn’t be moved to steal away from his book as Fairchild explained his yearning for Java. The older man nodded, half listening. Fairchild mentioned his meeting with Alfred Russel Wallace, and then his work studying plant fungus. Lacking prestigious credentials of his own, he described his father’s agricultural pedigree.
Lathrop waved him quiet. He had already been to Java two times—or was it three?—and recalled between puffs of smoke the time he hunted rhinoceros on the western part of the island. As he talked, he would pause, empty his Turkish cigarette holder, and fill it with a new Egyptian cigarette.
“Why study microscopic stuff instead of plants that man can use?” Lathrop asked. His speech was impatient, as though his solution were obvious, and yet, only the revelation of a genius. “If you’re a botanist, why don’t you collect plant specimens for the Smithsonian Institution and pay for your trip that way?”
Fairchild stuttered. He wasn’t that kind of botanist, he explained. He wanted to study plants and their diseases, not collect them. For him Java would be a laboratory, not a bazaar filled with goods to be chosen.
Lathrop was a man accustomed to holding court. His usual position was seated, leaning back, regaling curious commoners or anyone nearby with his stories of danger and drama, each one mounting to a punch line demonstrating that he had been omniscient all along. He wasn’t interested in people who didn’t share his brilliant view of himself. And so with a wave of his hand, he ended the encounter.
Lathrop’s attention drifted back to his novel.
Fairchild showed himself out.
Behavior that anyone else would have thought rude made Fairchild feel something different entirely. He found Lathrop’s disinterest to be the mark of a true cavalier, a man who had seen and experienced so much that he couldn’t be distracted by minutiae. “I left quite awed, feeling that I had met one of the most widely traveled men in the world,” he wrote.
An encounter so brief hardly qualified the men as acquaintances. Nor did their eyes meet again for the rest of the voyage. Fairchild saw him one more time, at the customary onboard banquet, as the Fulda passed the Azores. Lathrop played emcee to a room of tuxedos and high-necked gowns. Lacking formal clothes, Fairchild hid behind a pillar in the dining room long enough to hear Lathrop’s witty introduction of every performer, writing down every uttered name in his notebook.
Before he even stepped onto foreign soil, ocean travel had become more exciting than Fairchild’s greatest fantasy. The boy from the Midwest fancied the globe-trotting playboy Lathrop the “most fascinating man” he’d ever meet. Boys dreamed about travel, but gentlemen had the cunning to make such fantasies reality.
Lathrop, too, had been piqued by Fairchild. The young man was one of hundreds of cursory companions Lathrop encountered on the ocean. But there was something about his awkwardness, his inquisitiveness, the way he asked questions with naïve amazement. Lathrop had developed a penchant for people like Fairchild, young men who came to him with submissive awe.
When the ship docked at Gibraltar, the passengers learned that a group of mountain tribespeople in northern Morocco had staged a rebellion against their Spanish colonizers. The Foreign Legion had offered to help quell the violence. Lathrop rushed off to see the action, drawn to the dramatics and prestige of battle. But not before writing down the name of the young man from the steamer to remind himself, on another day, to find him again.
CHAPTER TWO
One Thousand Dollars
There was a time in North America before people ate fruits or vegetables, a time before people ate anything at all, because far enough back, there was no North America.
Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, and life for at least 3.7 billion of them. The planet of that era would be unrecognizable to anyone alive today. Early life was almost entirely aquatic, and a few billion years passed before, about 450 million years ago, creatures started to creep onto land. Time has long ago swept away any record of what these early animals looked like, but they weren’t much to look at, nor could they see very well, and, perhaps as a result, they lived short lives. A hundred million years after that, the planet for the first time had seeds—a part of an evolving form of reproduction in which female spores held their eggs in their outer tissue for the best odds of getting fertilized by male spores.
The planet circled the sun millions more times before two big things happened. One was the arrival of flowering plants, and the other was the arrival of dinosaurs. The asteroid that hit the Yucatán Peninsula sixty-six million years ago was brutal to the dinosaurs, and it was equally cruel to plants. The ash and smoke cloud cut off photosynthesis worldwide and effectively starved the majority of plant species into extinction.
Earth, as we know, is resilient, and once the cloud settled, mammals, birds, and plants began to evolve again, except this time, in a new way: in relation to one another. Plants developed showy flowers—the ones we’re used to seeing—largely as a ploy to attract butterflies, moths, and bees. The success of plants led to more of them, and they spread everywhere that wasn’t too cold.
Such botanical dexterity helped make human life possible. The earliest primates based part of their diets on plants. And plants, in turn, evolved to make themselves attractive (or repulsive), depending on how much they wanted to be eaten (or left alone). The truly wise ones—wise in the judgment of humans—are the plants that made themselves edible. Those include the plants that produce fruit, and often, their sweet flesh is a devious lure to attract something to hunt it, eat it, and spread it.
In a biological sense, a fruit is the developed ovary of a plant (the vessel that holds the plant’s eggs), and examining a fruit gives clues about its past struggles. Before humans, the red flesh of strawberries was a decoy for flyby nibbles from birds. Avocados appealed to elephant-like creatures called gomphotheres, which had intestines wide enough for the animals to swallow the fruit and excrete its hefty seed somewhere else. The day gomphotheres went extinct, thankfully no one told avocados. Nine thousand years passed before the Aztecs invented guacamole.
As for what constitutes a fruit in 2018, sweetness has little to do with it. Tomatoes are fruits, but so are eggplants, peppers, and olives. Peanuts and almonds and walnuts are fruits. So are parts of the world’s six top crops—wheat, corn, rice, barley, sorghum, and soy. Oftentimes, things that masquerade as vegetables, like pea pods, are technically fruits. Which is not to cast shade at vegetables; they are, by definition, almost fruits. To botanists, vegetables are any other edible part of the plant that doesn’t contain seeds. Roots, such as carrots, potatoes, and parsnips, are vegetables. Lettuces are seedless, so they’re vegetables, too, as is garlic.
Chefs and bakers have their own definitions for what separates a fruit (something sweet or sour) from a vegetable (everything else). But there’s no central authority to keep things consistent—no Supreme Court of Plants. Federal judges have tried to give vegetables their day in court. In 1893, the United States Supreme Court classified tomatoes as a vegetable so the government could collect higher tariffs than if they were fruit (which they are). If judges can change botanical laws, then anyone can. Spend an afternoon plucking every speck off a strawberry, and your fruit just became a vegetable.
Once North America became known as North America, the continent had rich botanical diversity. Yet such success was again interrupted. Glaciers of the last ice age, eighteen thousand years ago, pushed life south. When they retreated, the ice rivers left behind a chilled land mass slow to repopulate itself. Just as two people would take longer than one hundred to grow a civilization, North America took longer to botanically rebound than a bigger continent like Asia.
For a long time, wherever animals pooped out seeds, unique things grew. But that changed when modern humans arrived. Agriculture was the greatest advance in human history, but until it had a name, it was simply the process of domestication, of taming a wild species to help humans. Domestication let people produce food for unfavorable seasons and form a steady source of nutrition that allowed them to settle down and form villages. In places like North America with few humans, however, hunting and gathering was easier than organized domestication. The earliest North Americans rarely domesticated crops, leaving the continent a disorganized patchwork of loosely related plants.
In the thousands of years before European colonists landed in the West, the area that would come to be occupied by the United States and Canada produced only a handful of lasting foods—strawberries, pecans, blueberries, and some squashes—that had the durability to survive millennia. Mexico and South America had a respectable collection, including corn, peppers, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, pineapples, and peanuts. But the list is quaint when compared to what the other side of the world was up to. Early civilizations in Asia and Africa yielded an incalculable bounty: rice, sugar, apples, soy, onions, bananas, wheat, citrus, coconuts, mangoes, and thousands more that endure today.
If domesticating crops was an earth-changing advance, figuring out how to reproduce them came a close second. Edible plants tend to reproduc
e sexually. A seed produces a plant. The plant produces flowers. The flowers find some form of sperm (i.e., pollen) from other plants. This is nature beautifully at work. But it was inconvenient for long-ago humans who wanted to replicate a specific food they liked. The stroke of genius from early farmers was to realize they could bypass the sexual dance and produce plants vegetatively instead, which is to say, without seeds. Take a small cutting from a mature apple tree, graft it onto mature rootstock, and it’ll produce perfectly identical apples. Millennia before humans learned how to clone a sheep, they discovered how to clone plants, and every Granny Smith apple, Bartlett pear, and Cavendish banana you’ve ever eaten leaves you further indebted to the people who figured that out.
Still, even on the same planet, there were two worlds for almost all of human time. People are believed to have dug the first roots of agriculture in the Middle East, in the so-called Fertile Crescent, which had all the qualities of a farmer’s dream: warm climate; rich, airy soil; and two flowing rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. Around ten thousand years before Jesus walked the earth, humans taught themselves how to grow grains like barley and wheat, and soon after, dates, figs, and pomegranates.
The next seismic era comes with Christopher Columbus. Credited and cursed for stumbling upon the Western Hemisphere, the Italian explorer had a little-known side gig as the father of globalized agriculture. Until the 1490s, the Western and Eastern hemispheres hadn’t formally met. And Columbus’ arrival on a Caribbean island in 1492 led to a frenzied exchange of crops. Potatoes, tomatoes, and corn from Central and South America became staples in Europe and Asia. Crops from the Old World, like bananas, coffee, sugar, and citrus, found fertile growing conditions in the New World, so much so that within a few hundred years, the Americas became top producers of them all. Historians call that period the Columbian Exchange and mark it the official bridge to modern times, when two worlds fused into one.