The Food Explorer

by Daniel Stone

  Near Miami, Fairchild met Henry Flagler, the wealthy cofounder of Standard Oil, and he was invited to stay at the rich man’s new hotel, the Royal Palm, a five-story temple of modern luxury painted in Flagler’s characteristic yellow. The resort was the first in Florida to have elevators, and its veranda, a wooden boardwalk almost a fifth of a mile around, circled Miami’s first swimming pool. A perfectly circular driveway welcomed visitors in front, and out back, women in long, puffy skirts teed off rounds of golf. Florida had no one bigger than Flagler. In an empty landscape, the millionaire imagined a future of luxury hotels, grand estates, and sculpted gardens that would draw rich Americans. If there was a nineteenth-century disrupter, Flagler was it. After he financed Florida’s first railroad, he transformed a sandy dune north of Miami into Palm Beach, the future home of American billionaires.

  The upstart spirit may have been one reason Fairchild found south Florida so charming. But the region’s potential for agriculture delighted him more. “I was thrilled to find tropical territory in the United States, and a love for southern Florida was born in my heart,” he would write. And the more he thought about it, the more certain he felt that a flood of migration would one day fill Florida with thousands of people, maybe millions. A land in America with the potential to support coconuts, pineapples, and mangoes would be too irresistible to remain a ghost town.

  At the time, however, Florida was a bust. Fairchild returned to Washington excited by the idea of starting an experiment garden in Miami, but was told the government didn’t have the money to buy land, and Washington couldn’t legally accept a donation. The early work of plant introduction came with regular disappointment of this sort. Trying to do something that had never been done, Fairchild met the institutional roadblocks that would forever hamper government efficiency. But Fairchild’s work did become “thick and fast” in his judgment. When winter turned to spring that year, two things happened. Nursery stock had begun to sprout, which brought urgency to figure out where these samples could go. The facilities didn’t exist to take adequate care of them, and more were sprouting each day.

  Adding to his frenetic pace was Congress’ endorsement of the program, and the insistence that more be done—and faster—to help American crop growers. Congress granted Fairchild’s office a new appropriation of twenty thousand dollars—a sky-high sum for a new section run by a young scientist. Fairchild hired a secretary named Grace, who had a braid down her back and wore skirts that stopped at her knees. A decade his junior, she was the first female Fairchild encountered who was interested in plants.

  And yet, despite the help, most of the work still fell to Fairchild himself. He worked evenings and Saturdays, frequently Sundays as well. Secretary Wilson made a habit of checking on him when he left for the day and upon arrival the next morning, chiding him that he ought to find proper housing. Yet with Swingle in Europe investigating table grapes, there was no one close to Fairchild to warn him to slow down. A nervous collapse was a real and dangerous condition brought on by overwork, and Fairchild seemed headed directly for one.

  * * *

  —

  “By god you look awful!” said the man who darkened Fairchild’s door one afternoon. Fairchild, in the middle of writing a letter, looked up to lock eyes with Barbour Lathrop, whose tall build filled the doorframe.

  Lathrop hadn’t gone completely silent after separating from Fairchild in San Francisco. Wondering what Fairchild was doing in Washington, he sent repeated missives, some cogent, some stream of consciousness. The occasional reply from Fairchild pleased Lathrop. Despite the failure of their original plan in Hawaii, the older man was impressed by the ingenuity Fairchild demonstrated in Washington. He had talked his way into a government department and built an office. And somehow, he had managed to keep it running.

  But Lathrop hadn’t come with accolades. In fact, after a year on his own, he had again grown hungry for purpose, and, judging by another surprise visit to Fairchild—this his third—renewed companionship. A blunt man who seemed incapable of giving a compliment, he made no effort to sugarcoat his assessment.

  “David,” he said, “you’re no more fit to build up a government office of plant introduction than I am to run a chicken farm—and I don’t know a thing about chickens.”

  Fairchild leaned back and smiled.

  “You have no contacts with the rest of the world. How do you expect to secure your seeds and plants? You can’t do that sort of thing by correspondence. If you try to run things from Washington, it will be a little pinchbeck affair.”

  The expression was new. Pinchbeck was a man who invented a cheap substitute for gold, a knockoff alloy made from copper and zinc. The sentiment, though, was an old one that Fairchild had come to expect. Lathrop believed Fairchild’s botanical background was more useful on steamships and in foreign ports than in a poorly ventilated government office. Lathrop resorted to criticism to shroud his longing, even desperation, that the two might travel together again.

  When he sat down to discuss details, Lathrop vowed that, as before, he would pay every expense, and that they’d visit different ports than on their last odyssey.

  Two sleepless nights passed while Fairchild considered the proposal. His loyalty to Wilson, owing to the secretary’s trust in him, was slowly overtaken by the realization that Lathrop was right. David Fairchild wasn’t an office man.

  “I do not approve of it at all” were Secretary Wilson’s only benign words in a tirade of displeasure. Wilson accused Fairchild of running away from his responsibilities, and wondered who would take over the program Fairchild had lobbied so hard to create and that Wilson had expended political capital to support. Wilson didn’t say it, but he resented Barbour Lathrop, whom he considered a reckless and irreverent influence on Fairchild. In Fairchild, Wilson may have seen a future secretary, a steady, inventive, and hardworking civil servant, who might rise through the ranks if he kept his head down. To Lathrop, such a fate was worse than being eaten by a walrus. Without arguing face-to-face, the two men were sparring over Fairchild’s future. Would he be a man of methodical bureaucracy, or a capricious adventurer and gentleman?

  The meeting ended with a grunt.

  Ultimately, though, Wilson relented. Whether he fired Fairchild may have been a formality, but ties were severed. In exchange for his department receiving the future fruits of Fairchild’s efforts abroad, all he offered was a formal letter with a gold USDA seal, which might help cajole stubborn foreign officials. Wilson stipulated that expenses would be paid by Lathrop, and, to procure plant material from foreign countries, he was granted a maximum budget of one thousand dollars. Even though Fairchild told the secretary that he would likely visit South America, India, and the dark continent of Africa, where unknown crops held millions of dollars of promise for America’s farmers, and even though Wilson suggested that Fairchild look into cotton production in Peru, the cereal industry in Chile, and orange growing methods in Paraguay, the secretary of agriculture refused to pay Fairchild any salary.

  When news reached Lathrop later that day, he, without blinking, agreed to cover that, too.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Crossing Countries

  Silverware and crystal glasses flitted over a white tablecloth as the luxury train holding Fairchild traveled west from Washington, first through Chicago, and then through open prairie toward San Francisco. Taking a train west was a rare American journey in the late days of the 1890s, but it was a luxurious one. For every twenty East Coasters who voyaged to Europe, only one went to California. The novelist Charles Nordhoff made a grand display of riding a train across the country during the era and documenting every detail. “California,” he reported, “is to us Eastern people still a land of big beets and pumpkins, of rough miners, of pistols, bowie-knives, abundant fruit, queer wines, high prices—full of discomforts, and abounding in dangers to the peaceful traveler.” The rush of 1849 gold seekers had slowed to a trickle by t
he end of the century, the easiest nuggets presumed discovered. Now those heading west were pitied by their friends for the deluge of annoyances and dangers awaiting anyone with the audacity to leave the self-centered corridor between Washington and New York.

  It would be years before Secretary Wilson would admit that Fairchild’s decision to leave Washington had been the right one. Fairchild couldn’t be caged; his talent exceeded the duties of a bureaucratic seed recipient. Other twenty-nine-year-old men might have been content with stable desk jobs, working for the United States government in the capital of the world’s rising power with a typist of their own and an annual salary of eight hundred dollars. Perhaps that would’ve been enough for a younger Fairchild, too. But his ambition had grown, thanks to the influence and bank account of one man, for whom office work was a fate worse than death.

  Lathrop, meanwhile, lacked the patience to wait for Fairchild to tidy his affairs in Washington. So Fairchild rode the Central Pacific Railroad across the country alone, passing hundreds of miles of corn, wheat, and oats in fields, all, in October of 1898, approaching the beginning of their slow-growing winter. The summer had brought excessive rains to the Great Plains, covering Midwestern corn and wheat with spots of bright yellow rust.

  The voyage across America, east to west, left little impression on Fairchild despite the vivid look it offered of the country’s transformation. The western frontier neatly embodied the progress of America’s past—a nation scrappy and hungry. It also offered a portrait of the country’s future. The concept of American superiority was born from revolutionary victory over the British. But as the country’s ego grew, so did its energy, first in a second victory over the British in 1812, and then in exterminating the cancer of slavery in 1865. Each success brought bursts of new patriotism, and the frontier offered the best place to put it, effectively America’s escape valve of ambition.

  Europe, by comparison, had run out of land long before, which helped explain its wars and collapsed empires. But America could travel farther and farther west, until, in the 1890s, all the stakes of land had been claimed. If America’s future could be foreshadowed, Fairchild would have seen it on the plains. A settled frontier meant no place left to put the excess enthusiasm of a growing country. America would have to expand in new ways: overseas, and in industries it had never before dominated, such as agriculture.

  Fairchild was now traveling on Lathrop’s dime, which meant an upgrade from the Nickel Plate Road menu of sliced tomatoes and baked beans afforded cargo-rate travelers. The Transcontinental Railroad connected New York to Sacramento at the new, exhilarating speed of thirty-five miles per hour. Earlier railroad companies judged their success by simply running on time, with no additional frills. Seeing the inelegant way passengers brought their own food on board and how they relieved themselves in shanty huts inspired a man named Fred Harvey to start America’s first restaurant chain, Harvey House, a series of railroad rest stops where young, unmarried women served quick gourmet meals to accommodate frenetic rail schedules. Eventually, by the beginning of the so-called golden age of travel, in 1890, the railroads had mastered onboard food service, which brought the luxury of calm and comfort. Delicacies like mutton chops, veal cutlets, and grouse could be washed down with endless glasses of bubbly French champagne.

  An enviable menu, however, couldn’t mask the endless squeal of steel wheels on steel track. When he arrived on America’s foggy West Coast, Fairchild, well-fed but fatigued, was met in San Francisco by an irritated Lathrop, who announced before any greeting at all that the ship Fairchild had hurried across the continent to catch, the one that would take them to South America, had already left.

  The next available boat taking passengers south would sail from New Orleans, a two-week train ride at least. Fairchild and Lathrop boarded a train heading south, hugging at times the Pacific coast. The train made a stop in Santa Barbara, where Fairchild spent a short layover with Dr. Francesco Franceschi, a long-nosed plant enthusiast who cut for his visitor a slice of a curious squash—“zucchini,” he called it, emphasizing the full whimsy of the Italian name. Zucchini was new to Fairchild, and as a result of his tasting it in California, it qualified for plant introduction to farmers around the country. The squash had originated somewhere in Central America, yet its development as a food crop occurred in advanced laboratories in Italy and France. Nature’s real intent was for zucchini to be eaten small, before its blossoms fell—its name Italian for “little squash.” Chefs of the future would ignore this and value zucchini most for its size. Never mind that larger size brought diminished flavor, if any whatsoever. Nor was any botanist present to remind people that the vegetable zucchini, the enlarged ovary of the zucchini plant, was, in fact, a fruit.

  Fairchild and Lathrop traveled south to Los Angeles, and then, for more than a week, east toward the Gulf of Mexico. A month after he had left Washington for the Pacific coast, Fairchild found himself in Louisiana. Fairchild and Lathrop reached the New Orleans harbor to learn that they had missed the Panama-bound boat by less than an hour. This time Lathrop was utterly disgusted. He bought tickets for the next train to New York, where he was certain a boat would eventually sail south.

  * * *

  —

  After a month spent crisscrossing the country, missing a third boat might have entirely unraveled Lathrop’s anxious resolve. For the best, on December 27, 1898, the men embarked from Queens, New York, hugging America’s East Coast, bound for Jamaica. Ice covered the rigging of ropes and cables, all frozen solid by a cold wind. Each morning a passenger on board made a grand scene to ask the captain for the ship’s latitude and longitude, a request with no practical purpose. Such a meaningless gesture annoyed Lathrop, who had long ago bored of the early novelties of travel.

  Like train travel, ocean voyages in the 1890s had reached the height of glamour. Ships crossing the Atlantic bore names like Mauritania and Majestic and boasted expensive paintings and first-class libraries, lounges, and wood-paneled dining rooms. Routes servicing the Caribbean were more pedestrian, their ships outfitted more as shuttles than as floating hotels. Even so, on any given boat, Lathrop was always granted the best cabin. Fairchild slept with the masses, often sharing a small room or bunk bed with another passenger. Lathrop had a desk; Fairchild wrote on the floor.

  Fairchild began to explore the moment he stepped off the boat. “Kingston, Jamaica, was the first foreign port in which I began a serious study of the marketplaces,” he wrote, “tasting the new fruits and vegetables, packing and shipping both seeds and cuttings of those which seemed desirable for introduction into the United States.” At busy markets, he sampled everything for sale, including small red and yellow tomatoes that grew on a bush so large it resembled a tree. The fruit, he wrote in his pocket notebook, was “Eaten after peeling off the thick rind, with sugar and cream or salt and pepper, or as an apple would be.” He also came across a lumpy, reddish fruit called an akee, originally from Africa but brought to the Caribbean on slave ships and adopted quickly as a side dish with fish. “It has a fine flavor and is highly esteemed. For Puerto Rico and Hawaii,” he scrawled.

  After Fairchild’s year as a Washington bureaucrat, his dispatches had acquired a new efficiency. If his first world tour was slowed by imprecision and uncertainty, to his second he brought the confidence of knowing what was worth his time and what wasn’t.

  His attention turned quickly to the brighter colors and sweeter tastes of mangoes, dwarf oranges, even cacao. Fairchild tasted them all, sometimes navigating through crowded markets as Lathrop sauntered behind, taking each sample and giving it a verdict. At this Lathrop was unusually helpful. “Mr. Lathrop had an extraordinary palate for flavors,” Fairchild noticed. “Everything we introduced would have to run a gauntlet of sarcastic criticism when it reached Washington, but, when Mr. Lathrop had said that a food was ‘good—delicious in fact,’ I [would be] able to tell those who declared ‘the stuff wasn’t fit to eat’ that evide
ntly they had uneducated palates.” More exciting than the new tastes was the logistical convenience that anything that grew in Jamaica, an island just over five hundred miles from the United States, could reasonably be expected to thrive in Florida.

  The two were invited to dine with the governor one night, the high-water mark of any unannounced visit. And so the next morning, Lathrop wanted to move on. He rarely missed the opportunity to remind Fairchild that if they wanted to see the world, they couldn’t linger anyplace too long. Fairchild convinced him to stay another few days so he could travel to the outskirts of Kingston, where small farms grew subsistence crops not seen anywhere else on earth. When he arrived at one farm, the fruit Fairchild observed was strange in shape, bulbous at one end and pointed at the other. Vegetable pears, people called them, a member of the cucumber family with crisp flesh and inoffensive flavor, akin to chomping an apple with a numb tongue. The vegetable pear would later be known in Washington as the chayote. “Mr. Lathrop was enthusiastic about the chayote,” Fairchild said. He liked its taste and its versatility, like squash’s, of being served either raw or cooked. Perhaps most compelling, the abundance of the chayote on hundreds of trees suggested they’d be easy to grow.

  While Fairchild and Lathrop sailed south to Grenada and then to Barbados, a bundle of seed with written instructions made its way to Washington. With every new sample, Fairchild was constantly refining his packing method, alternating between potatoes and wet moss to keep cuttings moist. Swingle had experimented with wet cigarette paper, banana leaves, and sorghum moss. Fairchild tried all of these, and asked local people for advice on shipping plants. Most farmers were oblivious. Even botanical expertise couldn’t overcome the fact that seeds had to move by boat, stopping at one port after another like a city bus. There was no express service, nor any assurance that the samples would stay alive in transit, if they reached their destination at all.