The Food Explorer

by Daniel Stone

  Fairchild had written off London and didn’t care to stay long. He couldn’t imagine any crop that, in several hundred years of colonial and political association, Great Britain hadn’t already shared with America. What’s more, the country was agriculturally unenviable, handicapped by a cool climate that was good for beans, tubers, and little else.

  But the short layover did yield one surprise. Late summer was peak season for Windsor broad beans, also known as fava beans, and at the market the day he and Lathrop left for Czechoslovakia, Fairchild deemed the oversized legumes, each as wide as an American quarter, suitable to send back. His package to Washington contained a handful of beans with explicit directions that they required a long, cool spring, like that in the Rockies or Adirondacks. A woman had offered him a puree of the bean, one of his early experiences with the delightful, salty mortar known as hummus.

  After Lathrop sipped alkaline water in Czechoslovakia, he and Fairchild journeyed to Venice. By now he had learned that plants turned up in bizarre places, and there was no place more peculiar than Venice, a city built upon canals, whose tides took perfect turns flooding the city twice each day, leaving life so stunted and strange that the city’s zoo had a single horse to allow children to know what an animal looked like.

  Venice’s agricultural bounty was in its restaurants, where earlier food explorers had dropped delicacies from their worldly travels. Near the Bridge of Sighs, Fairchild watched gondolas haul monstrous squashes, onions, cauliflowers, and tomatoes to Venice’s famed chefs. Taking in the scene, he raised his camera at the same moment several people lifted their eyes for the rare sight of a man taking a picture.

  Dining by himself one night amid boisterous shouts in Italian, Fairchild tried for the first time a curious, stalky vegetable that resembled a small tree. Its crown was full and bumpy, and its young seeds, he noticed, were buried deep in the bushy branches, making them nearly impossible to extract and unlikely to survive the lengthy voyage back to America. But he paid the café’s chef for a handful of them, along with a pile of sweet peppers and a flat squash he didn’t like but tucked into his pockets anyway.

  1898. On the Grand Canal in Venice, fresh fruits and vegetables were the products of centuries’ worth of faraway foods brought back by travelers and explorers returning to Italy. Items such as tomatoes, squashes, and onions were slowly incorporated into Italian cooking.

  The vegetable’s name, he learned, was broccoli, pronounced with emphasis on its last syllable. Broccoli turned out to be a cool-weather cousin of the cauliflower and cabbage. All three of them had their origins in northern Europe, benefiting from the frosty climate that Fairchild had dismissed. Ultimately, Fairchild wouldn’t be the one credited with officially bringing broccoli to America. That would be his friend Walter Swingle, who several months earlier in France had picked up a form of primitive pseudo-broccoli that consisted of more leaf than anything else, and shipped samples back with a note that it needed “more extensive trial.”

  Now that the childhood friends were both botanical explorers, Fairchild and Swingle exchanged postcards documenting their exotic travels. To bemuse each other, they attempted to write in the language of the country they were visiting. As both men moved about the globe, the postmarks were covered with a series of forwarding addresses. Until eventually, the messages that had started as mysterious became indecipherable completely.

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  —

  In Venice, Fairchild wandered for days on his own, which offered, in addition to time to think and explore, the extra benefit of a break from the war brewing between Lathrop and Secretary Wilson.

  Lathrop’s donations, measured in time, money, and plants, had so far been met with ungrateful silence by Wilson, who considered Lathrop eccentric. He blamed the millionaire for Fairchild’s decision to leave the Department to ramble around the world in a way that appeared to him haphazard and unfocused.

  In fact, Wilson’s disappointment and anger at Fairchild were signs of how much he liked the young man. Wilson and Fairchild were both sons of the Midwest who came to Washington for important government work. Lathrop, by comparison, had only money, which he had not earned. Wilson feared Lathrop’s swollen ego might rub off on Fairchild, an earnest young man corrupted by the haughtiness of luxury.

  Meanwhile, Lathrop acted as though Wilson’s lack of respect caused him as much discomfort as his recent bout of fever. He grew upset each time he recalled that the secretary had refused to see him when he visited Washington to liberate Fairchild from the bureaucratic doldrums. In the months that followed, Lathrop had underwritten an entire government research program that required expensive travel for two. A thank-you note would have been nice, or reimbursement for the purchase price of the plants, altogether $338.50 after twelve months in transit. Yet Lathrop had received no recognition, zero. He wrote a pointed letter to Washington, attention anyone at the USDA who might care. “It has puzzled me that no one in the department sent me a line of acknowledgement of services rendered, money expended and plants shipped, to say nothing of any appreciation shown for the subsequent work expected of me.”

  The letter, too, was met with silence.

  His resentment boiled over in Venice. After an informal accounting of his expenditures on nearly every continent, Lathrop angrily came to the conclusion that until Washington acknowledged his contribution, he would refuse to fund any more plant shipments. The decision threatened to kill the project.

  Discreetly, Fairchild wrote to Orator Cook at the control center of the Office of Seed and Plant Introduction, urging that someone, anyone, recognize Lathrop in some small way. Cook never responded, but several months later the Department published its annual yearbook, which included a list of 450 new plants sent by Fairchild from the West Indies, South America, Europe, Asia, and the East Indies. Included in the official document was an unsubtle disclosure:

  Through the generosity of Hon. Barbour Lathrop, of Chicago, the Department of Agriculture has been made the recipient of a large collection of seeds and plants. . . . Some of the many importations of seeds and plants made through the efforts of Mr. Lathrop have already proved to be of decided value to the farmers of the United States. The warm thanks of the Department are due to this public-spirited citizen.

  The shipments never actually stopped during Lathrop’s tantrum. But they had appeared at the Department unsigned—an indication that Fairchild had sent them behind the older man’s back, on his own dime. After Lathrop’s accolades had been published, however, the shipments returned to their regular size and frequency. Except now, in the usual note Fairchild wrote with each shipment detailing each crop and who’d picked it, he credited not just himself, but Lathrop, too.

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  For five days Fairchild wandered Venice’s dark backstreets, as visitors had for a hundred years and would for a hundred to come. Riding in a gondola that wound through the Grand Canal, he stared at the black smoke rising from chimneys and at the fresh flowers on the windowsills. As the tide rose, seawater from the canal lapped up onto Piazza San Marco, driving away the lazy pigeons. The rising water brought in slow-moving swirls of straw, eggshells, and cabbage stalks.

  A white-bearded monk at a Venetian monastery smiled with full teeth when Fairchild said he had come searching for plants. The monk escorted him to his small garden barely bigger than a man lying down. Fairchild took his portrait in front of the only peach tree in Venice.

  As they spoke, the monk told him of a seedless grape variety not far away in Padua. Grapes weren’t unusual in America, but seedless fruit was a growing fad. To be without seeds is to be sterile, and sterile plants can reproduce only by cloning. The seedless grape variety the monk spoke about would be a genetic replica of grapes grown by ancient Romans.

  Grapes were sweet and delicious, but being seedless held potential beyond a single fruit. Could the same method that produced the grape produce a seedless peach
? A seedless lemon? A California horticulturist named Luther Burbank was pursuing answers to these exact questions. Fairchild would later meet Burbank, and not particularly like his mad-scientist ramblings. But Burbank enjoyed the fantastic potential of tweaking genes. He imagined that a plum with no pit would be a delightful ball of juicy flesh.

  Fairchild hardly slept the night before he left Venice to track down the seedless grape. Due to Lathrop’s status as a frequent traveler, Fairchild was able to secure a room in the Hotel Bauer-Grünwald, a posh Venice guesthouse rumored to have once housed Marco Polo. Fairchild bedded in what he was told was the room the explorer once occupied, its ceiling so low he had to stoop when he stepped inside.

  Around two in the morning, he awoke to beautiful music that floated into the room like moonlight. Peering out the window, he watched the blackened outline of a man in a gondola, a flute extending from his face. “To my delight, the gondola turned into the side canal almost directly under my window,” Fairchild recalled. “The musician was dressed in black from head to foot and was alone except for the gondoliers.”

  As he stared out the window, Fairchild considered his good fortune. On assignment for his government, for the second time in Italy, a land of glamour, charm, and grace. “Those moments,” he wrote of the minutes he spent looking out the window, “still live in memory as an exquisitely perfect experience.” He watched the flute player pass beneath his window and float away, the music growing softer with distance, until all he could hear was the melody in his head.

  * * *

  —

  The first train left Venice at seven in the morning, and by ten, Fairchild was knocking on the large metal door of a monastery in Padua. A monk answered, and after taking one look at Fairchild, summoned the head father who explained in sharp staccato how to walk to a small nursery nearby. The man promised that a single vine flush with grapes would catch Fairchild’s eye.

  He spotted it from several feet away, fluffed abundantly with rose-colored grapes growing on a wooden garden arbor. The bunches, broad shouldered and heavy with fruit, extended sixteen inches to the ground. Fairchild placed a grape in his mouth to confirm the fruit’s sterility, then another, and then a handful. Adding to the pleasantly sweet taste, the lack of pits lent itself to the convenience of volume.

  Seedless fruits had no seed for Fairchild to collect. Instead, he sliced the vine’s stem diagonally and wiggled off several saplings, enough for a sample. He carried them in his pocket back to Venice, along, as was his custom, with a handful of fruit.

  Lathrop’s face stayed motionless when Fairchild showed him the sticks. But his eyebrows rose at the sight of half a dozen purple pearls of sweetness. The older man smiled as he ate one.

  Before Fairchild could send them off to Washington, the cuttings needed two more days to sit in a rooting concoction that he received at the monastery. Preparing his shipment, Fairchild scrawled his impressions:

  This grape should be given the most serious attention, both by raisin growers and breeders of new varieties, as it has remarkable possibilities. That it has not become more generally known in Italy may be explained by the fact that no raisins to speak of are made in this part of the country and the Italian vine grower is bound by tradition and will plant no new sorts. The Sultanina vines thrive in rich, sandy soil, receive only stable manure, resist drought very well, and are pruned and trimmed in the ordinary ways. An abundance of sunlight is required.

  The grape, of a variety known as sultanina, would ultimately grow best in the wet and temperate soil of California, America’s region most climatically similar to the Mediterranean. Fairchild’s sample from Italy was the Sultanina rosea seedless raisin grape, which was a stronger specimen than a green sultanina that had already made it to California as nursery stock. Regardless of who was first to lay eyes on the sultanina, the variety took little time to grow into the most popular grape in America, adored by winemakers, raisin producers, and people who ate grapes by the fistful.

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  Egypt was the birthplace of civilization, the first location where humans gathered under a central government and built some of the world’s first cities. This led to dramatic advances, including written language, the wheel, and eventually, beer. People had never assembled like this before, and it was all because of farming. Farming in a group brought new efficiency and scale. When people worked together, they could dramatically increase their production of wheat, barley, and domesticated animals. Mesopotamia, the early civilization, thrived thanks to lush soil and overflowing water.

  This was assuring news for a plant hunter. Crops in Egypt had to be old, and to be old meant they were hardy. There would be no anomalies, only strong agricultural specimens, tested by time and chosen for their strength.

  Fairchild was as eager to see the place where farming was invented as a matador might find a pilgrimage to Spain. On October 31, 1899, Fairchild and Lathrop registered at Shepheard’s Hotel, a grand six-story palace in Cairo that attracted deep-pocketed travelers from the United States, Europe, and Russia. The crème-colored building, boxy and modern with a luscious veranda that allowed diners and drinkers to peer down at the dusty street, was flanked with manicured gardens and palm fronds that pointed upward toward the symmetrical steeple, which was monogrammed with the hotel’s initials, “SH” that were designed to look unsubtly like a dollar sign. Considered the greatest outpost in the world, Shepheard’s was known among wealthy tourists as the place to see and be seen by the world’s most interesting people, and to watch Eastern life on display. From the wicker tables covered with white tablecloths on the veranda, guests witnessed Egyptians ride donkeys so small that the riders’ feet dragged on the road, and water vendors who hawked sips from bloated goatskin canteens. Turkish soldiers passed by in gold-embroidered uniforms, and dervishes strolled under large, red headdresses.

  For once, Lathrop consented to a lengthy stay. Egypt was among the world’s most fashionable destinations, a rare land that mixed ancient history with modern gusto, the midpoint where East met West. Lathrop couldn’t deny the region’s importance, even if he was still fatigued by his recent illness. If the goal of their odyssey was botanical discovery, the lessons of the Fertile Crescent couldn’t be rushed.

  Unencumbered, Fairchild felt his curiosity piqued not just by Egypt’s crops, but by the roots of agriculture itself. Their expertise in farming also led to Egyptians being first to experiment with irrigation, and their system, which took advantage of slight slopes in the land, worked swimmingly. The biggest concern in farming—when will it rain?—could be circumvented by digging basins that would fill when the Nile River overflowed. The basins, in turn, emptied into canals, which trickled the water on fields in a steady, consistent stream.

  Over thousands of years, this method yielded a multitude of crops, which now found their way to Fairchild. Someone offered him sesame seeds, which few Americans had ever seen. “The seed is used as a medicine,” he wrote. “Put in water (soaked eight to ten hours) it becomes mucilaginous, and when sweetened to taste and with a small quantity of lime juice, is said to be a refreshing drink.” The same day, he made acquaintance with the chickpea, also known as the garbanzo, also known as the Egyptian pea. The red bean was roasted like a nut and tasted like popcorn. The Spanish used the garbanzo as a substitute for coffee, and a lucrative one: an Egyptian landowner reported to Fairchild that an area known as a fedan—roughly an acre—would yield a bumper profit of twenty American dollars every year. Fairchild built a stockpile of seeds, beans, and cuttings, along with notes, for an eventual shipment.

  Of all of Egypt’s ancient crops, there was one that seemed new, and it was cotton. Over the country’s six-thousand-year history, Egypt had had little experience with the crop. It had originated sometime around 3000 BC in Pakistan, or perhaps Mexico—no one knew for sure. Upland cotton, the yellow-flowered relative of hibiscus, came to the United States in 1790, and by th
e 1820s it had become America’s most valuable export, thanks entirely to slave labor in the South. That, and Eli Whitney’s creation of a machine called a cotton engine, a “gin” for short, that separated cotton fiber from seeds.

  Egypt only started planting cotton in its rich soil around 1800, but over the century cotton alone would allow Egypt to grow from an economic infant into a global force. Its dynastic leader, Muhammad Ali, had been given cotton seeds by a Frenchman who promised they would yield a cash crop easy to plant and cheap to harvest.

  He was right. After Ali died in 1849, his successors tried to grow the cotton industry bigger with loans from Europe, which taught the country’s leaders lessons in foreign economics and debt. The next lucky thing to happen to Egypt was America’s Civil War, which stalled American cotton exports. Distracted Americans meant Egyptian farmers could meet the global shortfall and become a major producer. In the 1840s, America had been exporting cotton to Egypt. A generation later, the direction reversed.

  With money pouring in, the new ruler of Egypt commissioned the construction of a railway throughout the country; it would be the most extensive in the world. He expanded the bounds of Alexandria, Egypt’s port city on the Mediterranean. Even more bullish, he decided to turn Cairo into a culture capital by emulating another one: Paris. He widened the city and built a new neighborhood known as “Paris on the Nile.” It had large verandas, cafés with sidewalk seating, and Parisian-style buildings. Visitors to Cairo would be pleasantly surprised to find English bookshops and fashionable boutiques.