The Food Explorer

by Daniel Stone

  For most of America’s hundred-year life, agriculture had been for subsistence, or, in the case of the Western states, for setting roots on the lands of native people. In the early nineteenth century, several major land deals had extended America’s waistline. The biggest, the 1803 purchase from France, added almost a million square miles of its Louisiana territory—a bargain for just eleven million dollars. The United States got even luckier in 1848 when Mexico ceded its sleepy 155,000-square-mile California territory to its northern neighbor, along with enough land to make the modern states of Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming.

  Just over seven thousand Spanish people lived in the California territory, and even fewer in the other future states, so it wasn’t a large loss. Except that nine days before the agreement was signed, a New Jersey carpenter found gold in a California creek bed. Despite his tiptoeing, the find became international news. The rush for gold subsided with time, but after that, the bigger claim to fame for the fertile and well-watered slice of land beside the Pacific would become its discovery as one of the most agriculturally productive pieces of earth.

  In the tense days before the Civil War, Congress started discussing a large-scale giveaway of land to the people, both for economic growth and to make sure that America’s new land stayed American. Under the Homestead Acts, anyone—except those who had ever fought against America—could apply for 160 acres, so long as they committed to live on it. And, came the implication, to defend it from Indians. The only other catch was that recipients had to occupy the land for five years before they owned it, which, to most people pursuing a new life in the West, didn’t seem like a catch at all.

  After the war ended in 1865, even former slaves were eligible for land, and not long after, Native Americans, too, the tracts given to families in an attempt to dismantle large tribes and reservations. Over the next thirty years, the government granted two million claims. Ten percent of all government property was given to first-time landowners, many who had no choice what to do with the land but to farm it.

  The result was a flood of wheat, beef, and citrus that was sent east in such volume that supply eclipsed demand. In 1893, the same year that the world looked to the Chicago World’s Fair for demonstrations of America’s bright days ahead, the United States entered its first agricultural depression. Producing food had become a business, rather than a way of survival. Farmers needed to become competitive.

  That competition didn’t make for agricultural diversity. Attempting to grow new crops to outmaneuver your neighbor is simply too risky in farming, where uncertain environmental factors favor the familiar over the unknown. In the early 1880s, Joseph L. Budd, an American eulogized as “the highest authority on horticultural subjects in this country,” had tried to import apple varieties from Russia. The plan might have worked if not for the lack of a central authority to act as a seed bank and help farmers troubleshoot—an authority like the Department of Agriculture or one of the land-grant colleges. Waves of blight had killed early apples, and America’s humidity was stressful to Russian trees. What’s more, apple reproduction is extremely heterozygous, with two parents that produce unpredictable offspring (much like humans), meaning the only way to guarantee consistent fruit is to clone a tree. Farmers who had spent their lives tending corn or cotton were largely oblivious about apples, so the novel fruit from a foreign land was neglected to death.

  Lathrop believed that he and Fairchild were in a position to know better, not just about apples, but about thousands of other crops, too. Traveling gave them a view of rare fruits, but more than that, a reasonable understanding of growing methods they could relay to farmers back home.

  The idea held the potential to kick-start a new era of agriculture in America. Bananas could grow in Florida; mangoes in California; avocados, perhaps, on the rainy shores of the American West. Even the mangosteen, the purple sphere from the Malay Islands no bigger than a baby’s fist, could find fertile soil in the Southeast. Fruits that had never grown in North America and had only been tasted by a fortunate few would find opportunity to sprout on new land.

  The contours of a plan were coming together, but there were still thorny logistics. Anyone who had shipped seeds back to America, as Fairchild had, knew that sending living plant material required someone to receive it. After a long ocean journey, seeds and cuttings would need to be planted quickly, in conditions as similar as possible to their comfortable habitat. Seeds and cuttings from the tropics that arrived in Washington would need to be carried down to South Carolina, or even farther, to Georgia or Florida, both barren lands where few people lived. At the fastest, the journey, start to finish, would take two months.

  And what would happen when the seeds and cuttings arrived? Who would know how to care for them? The motley group of botanists at the Department of Agriculture spent their days researching old crops, not new ones. And the Department of Agriculture had one of the smallest budgets in Washington, reflecting its low regard. Even with Fairchild and Lathrop volunteering, pro bono, to complete the hard work of exploring and selecting, someone back home, likely someone who had never tasted a mangosteen or smelled a rancid durian, would need to complete the process of propagation, distribution, and, ultimately, marketing.

  But the particulars would have to wait for another day. The hour was late and the world, at the moment, was preoccupied. It was December 31, 1896. In New York, where the sun was almost at its highest point in the sky, crowds of people began to assemble around Trinity Church at the south end of Broadway, waiting for a set of chimes at midnight. A new year meant a new day ahead, but before that, a raucous night.

  At the same moment, Fairchild and Lathrop were floating in the dark, on a quiet ship somewhere near Singapore. The talk that began in the evening lasted late into the night. Their conclusion was vague and, in Fairchild’s mind, ill-defined. But finally, they had an understanding and a collective vision that seemed to please them both.

  Drifting in the Indian Ocean, the pair agreed to study plants useful to man, and with one providing the means and the other the brains, finding a way to bring them to America. While they talked, in the middle of the ocean and in the middle of the night, the ship’s clock struck twelve, and 1897 began.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Listless Pacific

  Lathrop took the last guest room, and so the only room left was the ballroom, wide open and boiling hot. An American named Edison had commercialized a heated glass bulb in 1879, but the technology had only recently come to Bangkok, delighting the hotel’s owner so much that he kept his new electric lights on day and night, burning, humming, and radiating heat. After the hotel fell quiet, Fairchild constructed a tower of tables and chairs. He climbed to the top and unscrewed each bulb of the grand chandelier. He found his way down and dismantled his ladder in the dark, then fell asleep to the swishing sounds of cockroaches scurrying along the floor.

  The early days of a new year brought another revelation for Fairchild and Lathrop. Washington wasn’t prepared to receive cuttings of tropical plants, and even if it were, the land around the Chesapeake, which alternated between sweltering and frozen, would be a lousy place to raise plants accustomed to consistent warmth. It dawned on Fairchild first, who had little difficulty convincing Lathrop, that their collection expedition would need a tropical home.

  Looking at a map, one could not have found a more perfect spot than Hawaii. The Pacific archipelago sat conveniently between Asia and North America, and in 1897, the islands were already American territory, if not in law then in spirit.

  The United States had become the biggest trading partner for the Kingdom of Hawaii and its most abundant product: sugar. In exchange for the right to export sugar duty-free, Hawaii’s monarchy in 1876 had granted the United States a military base at the small southern inlet of Pearl Harbor. Native Hawaiians, who numbered just under forty thousand, protested the agreement, fearful that any capitulation would
lead to greater American presence. The people were right. United States marines stifled the protests and by the end of the century, a group of American civilians had begun living on the middle island, Oahu, home of the Hawaiian capital. In December of 1893, during his second term as president, Grover Cleveland publicly discussed annexing the islands to the United States. It would not have been difficult (his successor, William McKinley, eventually did it), but even the fact that people in Washington were thinking about it effectively opened Hawaii for any business America could dream up.

  Fairchild and Lathrop agreed that for the next month, they’d hopscotch the South Pacific, stopping on islands as big as Australia and as small as Fiji. They’d survey worthwhile plants and collect cuttings and seeds. But the real goal would be to find them a tropical home. They imagined that in Hawaii they’d convince a landowner to donate soil for an experimental garden. A donation was crucial. Surely Lathrop could have afforded a plot of his own, perhaps an entire island. But an existing landowner was effectively a recipient, a willing addressee to receive packages from around the world and coconspire in a grand but vague plan of importing foreign plants.

  The tensions between Lathrop and Fairchild were slowly becoming unkinked, a little every day as each assimilated more to the other’s sensibilities. Lathrop’s impatient outbursts were becoming less frequent and Fairchild reminded himself daily to make snappier decisions. Lathrop’s style had grown more predictable, and Fairchild began to admire the man’s demeanor, even his incessant storytelling.

  “Uncle Barbour was a great raconteur,” Fairchild observed of their early days together in the Pacific. “His seat was always at the Captain’s table on shipboard and at whatever table he sat there was one continual round of fun and intellectual sparkle. His stories were always on a high level. He never indulged in off-color ones. I recollect how he burned up with sarcasm at a stranger in the smoking room once who prefaced a story he proposed to tell by saying, ‘Well, as long as there are no ladies about . . .’ He could make his audience listen to him without that low subterfuge. He never discussed such things with me and he never told or listened to such sex appeal stories.

  “He was, in his time, the world’s greatest reformer of those things that had to do with travel and he would spare no expense and stop at nothing if he thought there were graft or a lie hidden away somewhere in the makeup of anyone he met. If he suspected a steward or a purser of double dealing, he would hound him out of his position and spare no pains to do it. He considered this a plain duty to society.”

  One of Lathrop’s helpful lessons to Fairchild was that peppering someone with questions could yield more plants than if he searched for them blindly. At a dinner party hosted by an American doctor one night in Bangkok, Fairchild passed around the table his name card, on which he had written, “What’s the finest fruit in all of Siam?”

  A scrawled sentence came back to him on a card he’d keep for the rest of his life: “It’s the wampi.”

  This launched Fairchild on a quest for a wampi, or wampee, a small citrus fruit with rough, pale skin that would pass for a yellow grape if it didn’t grow on a tree. It took less than two hours for him to find a grove and fill his pockets with cuttings, this time resolved not to ask for permission but, if caught, for clemency. Owing to this strategy, the wampi would one day live in California and Florida, although its botanical sibling the kumquat, less of a diva about soil and water, would end up with more market share in the United States.

  In each part of the world he visited, Fairchild wrote to his friends back home, regaling them with stories of Lathrop’s peculiarities and inscribing written portraits of the remote locales. In one letter he described an “incomprehensible” scene in Bangkok. He witnessed a man fall into a river and then, unable to swim, splash hysterically and beg people on the banks to pull him out. But as Fairchild watched, himself too far to help, every person that was in a position to save the man’s life refused. According to the era’s Buddhist philosophy, anyone who rescued the man would be responsible for his future behavior, including crimes he might commit. Saving him was too great a risk, and so, after a few minutes, the man drowned.

  * * *

  —

  Even in 1897, Sydney was a metropolis of wonder. The entire eastern half of Australia had been parched by a winter drought. But in the spring, buckets of rain turned dust into blankets of foliage, made even brighter in contrast with the deep blue of the harbor. Lathrop and Fairchild landed in Australia aboard a ship operated by North German Lloyd, a line of such luxury, it once won Mark Twain’s endorsement as “the delightfulest” way to travel.

  Their steamer, the Sumatra, had smoking rooms for men and drawing rooms for women and was so well built that in low water, it could scrape the muddy ground and proceed undamaged. This Lathrop knew but Fairchild did not. When Fairchild shook him one night, panicked that the vibrating ship must be sinking, Lathrop rolled over. “Pshaw, I don’t believe it,” Lathrop said, half-awake. “We’re crossing the bar and the water is a bit low, go back to your bunk.”

  Australians had a habit of being short on words. If someone didn’t know how to answer a question, they stared straight and walked away. It took considerable time for Fairchild to find his way to a grove of eucalyptus trees, the only species of plant he knew for certain existed on the expanse of land the British had once used to banish prisoners. The trees were bigger than he imagined, almost as tall as the great sequoias of the American West. As he looked up at them, a small lyrebird with the tail of a peacock passed by. Fairchild stopped to gawk at the bird.

  While Lathrop spent his days reading in the hotel and entertaining guests with stories of his latest life-threatening triumphs, Fairchild explored. He took cuttings from branches of several different species of eucalyptus—there were more than five hundred—curious if they’d grow anywhere in the United States. They could provide shade, and in North America they’d lack natural predators.

  A man in Australia stared at Fairchild, drawn first to the way he talked. Nathan Cobb was a Yankee, too, and in a far-off corner of the world, it was rare to meet a fellow American. Cobb was a specialist in nematode worms, but he had been lured down under by the newly created Australian Department of Agriculture, to figure out how to grow better wheat. Developing governments, especially those, like Australia, endowed with money from a foreign crown, had begun to consider growing food more efficiently.

  As both an American and a scientist, Cobb found Fairchild and Lathrop’s plan riveting. He quizzed Fairchild on all the places they had been so far. Then he brought Fairchild into his lab. He presented a small wheel that stood on a wooden stand. The wheel spun horizontally around a kernel of wheat, held in place by a sharp dental pick. A camera took pictures at eight different angles, which were then printed, catalogued, and studied to help farmers learn to recognize superior varieties.

  So much was unknown about wheat in those days, and it had never been studied at a scale as small as this. No one knew why, of all the grains on earth, wheat, rye, and oats would make bread, and why other grains, such as rice, corn, and millet, refused to rise. Cobb had dismantled the cell of a grain of wheat. This revealed a protein that helped the dough hold bubbles of carbonic acid that let it increase in size before it was baked. By doing this, Cobb became the first man to identify gluten.

  It would have been rude not to invite Cobb to dinner, so Fairchild informed Lathrop that the professor would be joining them at their hotel. On special occasions, Australians ate meat pies of mutton, curry, and lamb chops. The three sat with steaming bowls and full glasses, and for once, Fairchild directed the conversation while Lathrop sat silently and listened.

  * * *

  —

  The people of Fiji had never met ice. For most of human history, frozen water had been a contemptible symptom of winter, and it hardly existed near the equator. In the nineteenth century, a Boston man named Tudor became a millionaire by introducing
it to the tropics. But he never made it to Fiji, where cool breezes kept the climate more consistently comfortable than anywhere else on earth.

  The first person to bring ice to a group of Fijian warriors was David Fairchild. He carried it from the ship’s icebox as a token of goodwill.

  “Katakata!” the chief yelled, the Fijian word for “hot.” He dropped the piece of ice, then had to be persuaded to pick it up again. It wasn’t hot, he realized, but extremely cold. Someone suggested he put it in his mouth, and when he did, he smiled. He passed the shrinking cube down a line of Fijian men; each held it on his tongue and then passed it along. Every one of them grinned; some even giggled.

  Fiji’s nickname, the Cannibal Islands, was given for the most literal reason. Far from a source of shame, eating other humans had become one of the islands’ many cultural traits. On long stretches at sea, the Polynesians who settled there had turned to eating human flesh out of necessity, which continued when they reached the islands they later named Fiji. Eating human meat became as much a part of being Fijian as making fine pottery or woodcarvings. Lose a battle, and your bones would wind up under the victor’s home. Upset the king, and you could end up in his stomach.

  A Fijian defense of cannibalism—the oral history of how it started and why it continued so much longer than in other early societies—is a rationale largely lost to time. The clearest view of cannibalism comes from Westerners, several of whom visited Fiji during its nineteenth-century heyday and seemed to take great pleasure in demonizing a culture and its people.

  “Murder is regarded as a gentlemanly accomplishment by them, and no young man is fitted to take his place in society until he has committed at least one homicide,” the Sacramento Daily Union reported of Fijians in June of 1875. The wealthy partook most often. Common people received occasional invitations for the scraps from a human head or arms, known as bakolo. Flesh was so sought-after that the highest gastronomic praise one could give was to say, “It is as good as bakolo.”