by Daniel Stone
Even so, getting seeds to the United States was the easy part. Convincing Americans to actually grow the fruit, and then eat it, would be the bigger challenge. And this required volume. The work of food exploration wasn’t solely to find crops in their original habitat. No one, not even Fairchild, whose academic knowledge and field experience exceeded that of most people on earth, could truly expect to find the world’s most economically valuable fruits by making short stopovers to small islands. Exploration, and especially food hunting, also required diplomacy. It required finding researchers and enthusiasts around the globe who might serve as correspondents, who might contribute seeds and cuttings as gifts to America, or for the thrill of knowing they’d grow in United States soil.
When he met these people, Fairchild would unfurl his introduction on Department of Agriculture letterhead, which identified him as a culinary diplomat. No one’s eyes lingered on the title “special agent.” The golden seal was shinier. Surprised at how well it worked, Fairchild began to refer to the sticker, the embossed seal of the Department of Agriculture, as a “Dago dazzler.”
Next was Trinidad. Fairchild knew that the island was the land of mangoes, at least the most robust ones outside of the Eastern Hemisphere. Though mangoes weren’t unknown in the US, in Trinidad he found an array of new varieties. At least a dozen grew there, each one slightly different. Fairchild took three, and within weeks the fruit turned up in Washington. His associates at the USDA found the three mangoes to have insurmountable faults. The Gordon mango was large but bland. The Peters No. 1 was sweet but ripened unevenly. And the Pere Louis, while perfect in its native habitat, couldn’t be reliably grown from seed. All three were discarded.
The rhythm of travel was becoming easier, and unlike on their first voyage, Fairchild and Lathrop had a mutual understanding that often required little discussion. The old kinks sometimes emerged, but were less pronounced. Fairchild was happy, wishing he could drag his feet and stay longer. Lathrop was less irritable than usual, preferring only that the two could move a little faster.
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As Fairchild and Lathrop crossed the small inlets between Caribbean islands, back in the States the idea of plant introduction was taking hold. One reason that Secretary Wilson had been so bitter to see Fairchild leave the Department was that he himself was energized by the idea of foreign plants. The secretary felt he was leading something historic, at least until Fairchild departed the office and left the effort in flux. Wilson’s agricultural report for 1897, which came out in 1898, crowed about the exciting new effort. “A scientist has been appointed in the department to have charge of seed and plant importation,” he wrote. “Our country has profited by introducing new seeds and plants, but much of this work has been done in the dark.” The message was clear and boastful. Wilson continued. “The Old World contains many things that would be valuable to the New World.”
This was news that needed to be proclaimed publicly. America was a country built on the idea that hard work and ingenuity would yield prosperity. Yet America’s farmers were finding just the opposite, and they blamed the government. Newspapers crowed about the newest railroad, the newest oil discovery, and the newest boom on Wall Street. But farming seemed stagnant. “There is something radically wrong in our industrial system,” the editorial board of the journal The Progressive Farmer wrote in 1887.
There is a screw loose. The wheels have dropped out of balance. The railroads have never been so prosperous, and yet agriculture languishes. The banks have never done a better or more profitable business, and yet agriculture languishes. Manufacturing enterprises never made more money or were in a more flourishing condition, and yet agriculture languishes. Towns and cities flourish and “boom” and grow and “boom,” and yet agriculture languishes. Salaries and fees were never so temptingly high and desirable, and yet agriculture languishes.
The frustration that poured into Washington from farmers tended to make clear that they weren’t asking for money. Not that they were against a handout, but none were naïve enough to think that free money was a lasting solution.
What they wanted, instead, was acknowledgment that America’s doctrine of expansion and reconstruction completely undercut farming. There was too much land, and on it, everyone growing the same crops. The nation was buried beneath great piles of corn, wheat, and cotton. In 1870, corn sold for 43 cents per bushel. By 1895, it had dropped to 30 cents, and less when sold in larger quantity. A bushel of wheat worth $1.06 in 1870 had lost almost 40 percent of its value by the time McKinley became president. Things got so bad that when corn became cheaper than coal, Kansas farmers began to burn their crop instead of sell it. In the Dakotas, the cost of harvesting and transporting wheat was more than it could sell for, so it was left in the field to eventually keel over.
A few decades earlier, the problem had been easy to solve. If things got bad, farmers could simply travel farther west, where land, opportunity, and start-over stories were still abundant. But by 1898, with land mostly occupied and risk-taking more expensive, farmers were stuck. And being stuck in a business that required new seeds, new labor, and expensive equipment meant constantly digging oneself into a deeper hole of debt.
America wasn’t the first country to confront these problems. People in China had farmed for thousands of years before the United States first broke free of colonialism. Egypt’s farmers had managed land since the dawn of civilization. The difference was that America’s goal wasn’t just to farm; it was to construct an industrial agriculture system bigger and more profitable than any group of people had ever built.
Few farmers could have realized that they were part of this grand experiment in human history. They were too busy being angry at their broken country. The promise that hard work would yield great reward was undercut by the reality that hard work was actually making people poorer.
As William McKinley took the presidency, a Wichita farmer named Mary Elizabeth Lease, a woman of thirty-seven years, four children, and a growing pile of unused corn, was building a reputation for her irreverence toward Washington. “What farmers need to do is raise less corn and more HELL,” she often said. She flayed politicians and their profligacy in the face of suffering on the plains—at the cost of being ridiculed, dismissed, and reviled by those she assailed. But she didn’t care. “The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us,” she told audiences across the Midwest. “We were told . . . to go to work and raise a big crop, that was all we needed. We went to work and plowed and planted; the rains fell, the sun shone, nature smiled, and we raised the big crop that they told us to; and what came of it? Eight-cent corn, ten-cent oats, two-cent beef and no price at all for butter and eggs—that’s what came of it.”
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On the morning his ship landed in La Guaira, the largest port in Venezuela, Fairchild touched the continent of South America for the first time. Lathrop, for all of his travels, had only sparsely visited the Latin countries that altogether constituted more than 10 percent of Earth’s land. South America had been geographically inconvenient, isolated by oceans and far from everything, filled with forested swamps, mountains, and native peoples so unknown that Teddy Roosevelt himself, in the days after his presidency a decade later, hiked through the treacherous jungles of the Amazon on a journey so harrowing, American newspaper writers openly expected him to die. He didn’t, but his later biographers were stunned to learn that the wicked conditions nearly drove him to suicide.
Venezuela had several culinary highlights, chiefly apio, a root vegetable that seemed like a mix between a carrot and celery. Another tuber, which appeared similar to a potato and had the taste of artichoke, flavored every type of Venezuelan soup.
But in the pages of his journals during his first trip to Venezuela, food and botany would not be the foremost things Fairchild would remember.
One morning after eating breakfast alone, he learned t
hat Lathrop, still in bed, wanted to stay behind. Lathrop had woken feeling off, as though his muscles had slept themselves twisted. When Fairchild returned later that day, Lathrop was nearly dead. His head ached so severely that he fell in and out of consciousness. As he lay in bed moaning, the heat from his skin warmed the room. Somewhere in Barbados or in the mountains of northern Venezuela, a female mosquito had bitten him and transferred the virus that caused Caracas fever. The rest of the world knew it as yellow fever—yellow, because of the jaundice that corrupted red blood cells and lit the skin gold.
Fairchild had been at Lathrop’s side for more than two months. The bite just as easily might have been his. “I was badly frightened, for I was totally inexperienced in medical matters,” Fairchild recalled. Unusual for a man of the nineteenth century, he had hardly confronted death. Once, when he was nine, a neighbor boy got his foot stuck in a wagon wheel. Fairchild overheard the news so quickly—fracture, gangrene, funeral—that the occurrence felt removed. Only one other time had he seen a mammal die, and it was a horse.
Lathrop’s panting attracted the attention of two other Anglophones staying at the same inn. Fairchild stood and watched as the men repositioned Lathrop. They forced fluids and soup and elevated the patient’s head and feet. Fairchild sat vigil for two days.
That Lathrop did not die quickly was the clearest sign that he would live. And sensing that, Fairchild wondered whether he might still have time for crop collections. Even if Lathrop died, Fairchild thought, the older man would bristle at an expedition squandered.
The two Englishmen provided such good care that in less than a week, Lathrop, once near death, could stand on his feet. A few days later, his temper returned, bringing immense relief to Fairchild. Having spent a week longer than planned in Venezuela, the country that nearly took his life, Lathrop was ready to leave immediately.
Fairchild helped him hobble from a flimsy wheelchair to a horse cart to a waiting ship. As they traveled west toward the Panama isthmus, Lathrop’s only request was fresh milk. When the boat stopped for provisions at Maracaibo, the final port in Venezuela before moving on to Colombia, Fairchild set off to find some. Cows covered hillsides like patches of carpet, yet no one sold milk. Fairchild found a man willing to deal, provided Fairchild milk the beast himself. The price was exorbitant—five dollars per bottle, or nearly a hundred today—but the milk was warm and fresh.
The north coast of South America was neither man’s favorite, and as a result of such episodes, they never returned there together.
As their steamer hugged the coast, the small shanty huts on shore looked like festering pools for yellow fever and malaria. Lathrop’s continued convalescence and Fairchild’s fear of catching something similar left them both happy to remain on board until a train would take them across Panama to the Pacific.
Happy, except when considering their accompanying cargo. As days passed, Fairchild and Lathrop sat on deck with fifty moaning bulls. The ocean breeze, long in its gusts, proved no match for the growing piles of manure, which covered the ship’s deck and grew taller each day.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Alligator Pears
The Andes, sharp and protruding, were striking at first sight. But even their peaks, which poked through the clouds, couldn’t mask that the mountains presented a large problem. Fairchild spent his days in Lima at markets, polishing seeds of fruits grown nearby and judging which could be suitable for American fields. None were qualified. Crops that thrived five thousand feet up in the Andes would never grow in America’s low-lying plains. Agriculturally, the Andes stood alone: an icy ridge adjacent to a warm ocean; strewn with active volcanoes and geologic faults that could trigger landslides and floods. Other than building mountaintop civilizations like Machu Picchu, the Incas’ most notable accomplishment may have been living with the planet’s most fickle climate, where temperatures could oscillate fifty degrees in hours.
For all of its glamour, food exploration was, as Fairchild was learning, a process not prone to wild success. Finding workable crops demanded educated guesses about growing conditions, but even in favorable environments, the guesses still amounted to gambles. “A pinch of seed may come half around the world for a cost of only five cents,” Fairchild wrote about the tedious process, “but growing the seed will probably require a flat in a hot-house, followed in sequence by a bench of two-inch pots, a greenhouse of six-inch potted plants, half an acre of rich soil in a nursery, and an orchard.”
Provided all of that aligned, the biggest unknown remained people’s tastes. Food, like fashion, tended to appear in trends. An item debuted either with a burst of popularity—like the hamburger in the 1870s, making steak portable and quick—or with a great flameout, like the nineteenth-century delicacy of broiled eels. Even if food producers could preordain innovation, truly transformative popularity came from individual eaters. Early adopters would need to feel ownership, as though they were leading others into a more enlightened future.
This inconvenient reality would be clear to Fairchild in the Andes with a crop called quinoa. It was, by any botanical measure, a crop of dramatic versatility. It began with the Incas on the shores of Lake Titicaca, and the Incas built their entire diet around it until the Spanish brought cereals like barley, wheat, and oats that all seemed better. Now, in 1898 Peru, quinoa struck many outsiders as more novel than practical. “A Scotchman told me that he considered a porridge of quinoa better than the finest oatmeal,” Fairchild wrote, before listing all of the reasons it would never work. Samples of quinoa had once circulated at the Department of Agriculture, but it had been quickly dismissed. It was crunchy and fine, and had a confusing glow. No one knew what part of the plant one should actually eat: its leaves—as with its botanical cousin spinach—or its grain, which were its seeds (thus making quinoa a fruit).
Microscopes and refractometers weren’t yet advanced enough to measure a food’s complete nutritional content, which would have revealed quinoa not as a grain but as a protein, with the rare quality of having all nine amino acids the human body can’t produce on its own. That, and not a trace of gluten. Its global popularity today, especially among vegetarians, is based on that finding, which seemed to surprise Peruvian and Bolivian farmers more than anyone. In the years after 2005, when quinoa was granted the highest honor in agriculture—the title of superfood—the global price tripled.
But Fairchild had been too early. Other than pointing out that the Andeans had put quinoa in cakes and beer, and that it might be tested in the South and the mountains of Colorado, all he could suggest to his Washington colleagues was that quinoa could be useful “as a medicine . . . to remedy catarrh,” a great buildup of sinus mucus the world would come to know as the common cold. And so quinoa remained local and indigenous for another ten decades.
During Fairchild’s visit, Peru’s global claim had been over potatoes, which sprouted between the Pacific and the ridge of the Andes with more genetic diversity than human beings. Seven millennia of potato evolution had yielded variety unimaginable in most serious parts of the world, where farming was a business, subject to rules and regimens. If two villages were isolated from each other, the potatoes each village produced turned out as different as snowflakes. Any visitor to the region would have found small potatoes and big ones, varieties with smooth skin and ones with deep eyes. Farmers had bred types that grew on mountains, on hillsides, and close to the sea. Some grew best under harsh sun. Others demanded shade.
To an agricultural explorer like Fairchild, potatoes were old news. The tubers had supposedly already made their way to Europe in 1586 in the satchel of the English circumnavigator Francis Drake. They became such an easy and reliable crop that by the eighteenth century, nearly a quarter of all people in Ireland, the Netherlands, and Belgium based their diet almost entirely on potatoes. British colonists brought potatoes back west to their new colony in North America, first to the Jamestown, Virginia, settlement, and from there, the tube
rs spread across the continent. By 1899, almost an entire century had passed since Thomas Jefferson had served at the White House fried potato sticks sprinkled with salt—a lasting delicacy curiously named after the French, even though the Belgians are believed to have made them first.
As a result, Fairchild’s hunch may have been that potatoes, bland in flavor and agriculturally boring, wouldn’t be surprising or useful to anyone back home. Red corn and yellow squash filled the seed sacks that Fairchild prepared for Washington. Both were uncommon varieties with few redeeming traits—but the colors were novelties, good for, if nothing else, attracting bemused onlookers in pavilions of agricultural fairs. They also had the benefit of being easy to trace. If Fairchild ever passed a field of red corn, as he did in the 1920s in the American South and West, he could know the seeds grew in the United States because of him. For now, the colors would delight his desk-based colleagues back in Washington, and that alone was reason enough to send them north.
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Fairchild’s curiosity was overshadowed by Lathrop’s unbearable discomfort. His symptoms of yellow fever had faded, but in their place rose a deep distaste for Peru. The place held bad omens, and bad memories.
All this time that Lathrop was depending on Fairchild to be the brains of the expedition, Lathrop in fact had botanical experience of his own. Just one episode, really, and of all the stories Lathrop repeated at length to anyone who would listen, this one he retold so frequently that Fairchild had memorized every detail. It wasn’t only boastful; it was personal, indignant, almost rueful, as though the man endowed with stratospheric wealth had in some way been slighted by the universe.