The Food Explorer

by Daniel Stone

  PART III

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Lemons, Leaves, and the Dawn of New Light

  Secretary Wilson studied Fairchild’s face for an uncomfortably long time. After nearly two years on assignment—trekking across the sea to South America, Europe, Africa, and the islands that dotted the Indian Ocean—the botanist-turned-explorer was back in Washington, D.C., sitting before his former boss, and for the first time, he had come to confront the mess he had left behind at the Department of Agriculture.

  Wilson had agreed to see him only reluctantly. Any satisfaction the secretary might have felt at Fairchild’s success was overshadowed by the grudge he still held about Fairchild’s untimely and undignified departure. In his absence had come a string of men with poor qualifications to take his place, and thus, the program of seed introduction that Wilson had once crowed about to the president lurched along as Fairchild meandered the globe with Barbour Lathrop.

  In reality, Wilson had every reason to be pleased with Fairchild. In two years, Fairchild had visited every arable continent, shipping back the seeds of an estimated one thousand plants, including foods, shrubs, and trees. Some had been propagated, and others had already been shared with regional experiment stations and given to farmers. The plan to hunt globally for crops and introduce them to the United States was showing unquestionable signs of success. But the Department’s chief, still nursing resentment over Fairchild’s desertion, was loath to admit it was true.

  Wilson’s temper tantrum in Washington had followed Fairchild in letters around the world complaining about the disarray of the Department, until finally, in June of 1900, Fairchild wrote to Walter Swingle that the petulance was unbecoming. “Think what the effect of this petty squabbling among we botanists must have upon a businessman like Mr. Lathrop!” he wrote. Fairchild could take the blame for his hasty exit, but Lathrop’s ego needed nourishment, especially if the pair were to continue their travels. Fairchild cautioned that denying Lathrop ongoing respect would be like killing a goose preparing to lay a golden egg.

  Lathrop’s pride bruised easily. But Fairchild’s annoyance wasn’t unreasonable. The two had traveled together for four years, and in that time, Lathrop had spent thousands of dollars to fuel the operation that was enriching the United States with plants from parts of the world few Americans had been to. Lathrop covered Fairchild’s travel expenses and a small salary, thereby freeing the Department from any cost except that of shipping plant material to Washington, which amounted at most to a few hundred dollars. Granted, it was enjoyable, and Lathrop liked Fairchild’s company, but making a donation to one’s country still came at a cost of money and convenience.

  Even if Wilson didn’t thank Fairchild and Lathrop directly, there were signs that he appreciated Fairchild’s work—and more pressing, that he wanted him to continue hunting for plants of culinary and economic value.

  Fairchild had been in Washington just two days, but when Wilson finished harrumphing in their meeting, he suggested that Fairchild immediately embark for Germany. Fairchild booked passage on the next boat to Europe.

  His assignment was to infiltrate a group of German hops farmers, who held the key to superior beer. Beer had been around for thousands of years. By 1500, Germans were honing their brewing methods, and by 1900, Germany’s ingredients were the envy of beer makers everywhere, particularly in the United States. Master brewers in Saint Louis and Milwaukee were beginning to scale their recipes and were eager to bring high-quality but low-cost beer to millions of people by using better ingredients.

  Hops—which are technically fruit—probably originated somewhere in Mongolia, but the Germans took initiative to grow them best. Over centuries, Bavarian and nearby Bohemian breweries, many with adjacent hops fields, improved their varieties by drawing out and strengthening the smooth, tangy notes that give beer its body. American beer, by contrast, was full of harsh bitterness, a result of inferior hops and barleys. Hops grow best in cool, rainy climates, much like in the Pacific Northwest, where few people lived at the beginning of the twentieth century, let alone visited.

  Bavarian growers knew of America’s troubles with beer making. In fact, all of Europe knew American hops were laughably inferior. An 1892 article in The Edinburgh Review gloated condescendingly, “American hops may be dismissed in a few words. Like American grapes, they derive a course [sic], rank flavour and smell from the soil in which they grow. . . . There is little chance in their competing in our market with European growth, except in season of scarcity.” European fields, however, were sage and worn, their plants honed for centuries to accentuate the smooth bitterness and spicy florals they would bring beer. The harvest method was on equal footing with their taste. After they were picked, the fields were left empty, the trees left dormant, for a full season to repopulate their branches. Ever aware of their crops’ value, Bohemia’s top brewers were known to hire young men to guard the fields at night. This would complicate Fairchild’s assignment. But he’d still find a way to acquire top-tier hops—if not diplomatically, then by outright theft.

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  The beer hall was the gathering center for Bohemian hop growers. That’s what the innkeeper said when Fairchild checked into a two-room guesthouse in Polepy, a village so small its people numbered in the dozens. Even the man, a garden sitter with a pipe between his lips, eyed Fairchild suspiciously. The nearby growers had formed a cartel of sorts to prevent one of the region’s most popular hops, the Semš red hop, from spreading, and here was a foreigner with an American accent who had come to learn about beer.

  Most types of German hops had been grown for centuries, yet the Semš hop was new, the product of a man named Wenzel Semš who grew hops with the help of training poles. In 1853 Semš saw sprouting in his yard a heavy-yielding variety, its hull covered densely in flowers, which turned into cones full of hops. Wenzel Semš took a cutting and propagated it, and then again, and then so many times that within four decades it became the eminent hop of Bohemia. Fairchild learned this history over beers, laughing with the growers in his thick American-accented German, a ploy, albeit genuine, to earn their trust without ever mentioning his motives on behalf of America’s rival industry.

  It wouldn’t have been hard for Fairchild simply to pilfer a few hops, perhaps in the middle of the night when the watch boys dozed off, and leave town immediately, before anyone noticed. He had the skills for such a heist, and the confidence to get away with it. Without DNA or genetic testing, even a well-documented paper trail couldn’t prove American hops had been acquired dishonestly from Europe.

  1901. Bavarian hop growers guarded from foreigners the secrets of their superior hops. Fairchild befriended his innkeeper in Polepy—a man known as Herr Wirth—to obtain information to plot a strategy. Fairchild flattered Wirth by taking his portrait.

  But Fairchild had a different idea—a plan that reveals as much about his character as it does about the attitude of calculated restraint America would eventually develop. In lieu of espionage, he wondered how to win the men over. “How could I hope to convert them to my philosophy of a free exchange of plant varieties between the different nations of the world? It seemed that the best thing was to . . . make friends with the growers. Possibly they might then be willing to let me have some cuttings.”

  One night in the beer hall, when empty glasses covered the table, Fairchild mentioned that he’d enjoy seeing the house where Semš, the prized son of Polepy, was born. Semš was long dead, but his legacy permeated the village as though he were royalty. Flattered by the interest of a visitor, Semš’ son received Fairchild the next day at the house where his father had once lived. Fairchild laid on thick charm. He told the junior Semš how unfortunate it was that no formal record existed of the hop’s discovery, and wondered what would happen to the memory of the Semš’ origin story after several more generations, when younger growers would forget the history completely. “I suggested that a tab
let be placed on Semsch’s house, and offered a generous contribution towards the expense,” Fairchild would later write, phonetically spelling out how “Semš” was pronounced.

  The junior Semš was struck by both the idea and the gesture. News spread, as Fairchild suspected it would, creating in one small town and with a few dozen dollars more goodwill toward America and its inventive and generous people than might’ve been accomplished in a century of German-American trade and diplomacy.

  Whether Fairchild was conniving or earnest is hard to know, but it didn’t matter. One rainy night, he answered a knock on the door of his guest room to find one of the growers soaked to the bone. When the man asked if he wanted cuttings of the Semš hop, Fairchild, feeling bold, said yes, and explained why. The man laughed, then relented.

  “There are some members of the society who won’t approve, so I cannot do this openly, but I will ship you one hundred cuttings to a station down the line,” the man said.

  A few days later, the hops arrived at a small inn several miles away where Fairchild waited. Exactly three weeks after that, on December 18, 1900, the Semš hop was on American soil.

  This was either good timing or bad, depending on who you asked. Hop growers reacted with predictable jubilation at news that a long-elusive European variety was newly theirs—in the sense that what the government owned was effectively their property, too—and that government officials had begun testing it for distribution.

  Owing to this success, as well as to the confidence of a country starting to do things right, American hop growers began to produce better hops, and eventually, better beer. This was the business that brought people, money, and attention to Oregon’s Willamette Valley, a future ganglion of American hops.

  But to a group of outspoken women, the Semš hops, and all hops, were unwelcome. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union had spent decades arguing that there was corrosive power in alcohol. The women’s group urged schoolkids to take the so-called Blue Ribbon Pledge, swearing off alcohol for life. The fight against alcohol was part of a larger struggle over civil rights. Alcohol was consumed mostly by men, in saloons where women were excluded, and in meetings of local government, where women weren’t welcome to vote.

  It’s easy to see temperance as a crucial and meaningful movement in American history, when an oppressed group pushed painfully but successfully for empowerment and inclusion. Yet one of the temperance movement’s lamentable effects was that, as the country crept toward the full Prohibition of the 1920s, fields of prized hops, including the ones that Fairchild acquired through espionage, were plowed up and replaced with crops few could protest, like tobacco, corn, peaches, and pears.

  The eventual devastation of world war, however, yielded other opportunities. Temperance eliminated the need for many hops, but not all. The American hops that European growers ridiculed in 1900 became the best hops on the market two decades later when fighting left Europe’s fields in ruins. Europe’s wartime thirst for suds provided American farmers a much-needed bridge to keep their operations running through Prohibition. For when Prohibition whimpered to a close in the early 1930s, Europe’s pause amounted to a lucky head start for an American industry that would one day produce the top-selling beers in the world.

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  As a country, America was changing, slowly, but with the quickening pace of a waltz giving way to a rumba. By 1900, the giants of American innovation, the visionaries who would put people in automobiles, in airplanes, and on television—the Henry Fords and the Wilbur Wrights—had already been born, and were showing their imaginations to be proportional to their country’s swelling pride. The United States entered the new century with the largest industrial economy, the largest agricultural economy, the highest per capita income, and the highest level of education humans had ever seen. The days after January 1, 1900, had been filled with news of firsts: the magic of telephones began to trickle to normal people with nickel-in-the-slot public telephones in drugstores and hotels; a growing number of moviemakers began to populate a town in California called Hollywood where, if they violated New Jersey patents held by Thomas Edison’s motion picture company (which they intended to), they could abscond to Mexico; and the Washington Monument, the erect symbol of America’s upward spirit, was upgraded with an electric-powered elevator that crept at a single mile an hour for a thrilling five-minute ride to the top.

  The presidential election of 1900 had shown the biggest leap of all—the campaigns had collectively spent an astounding three million dollars. The widespread feeling that everything was getting bigger delivered immense pride, as Chauncey Depew, a senator from New York, proclaimed. “There is not a man here who does not feel 400 percent bigger in 1900 than he did in 1896,” Depew crowed in Philadelphia at the century’s first Republican National Convention. “Bigger intellectually, bigger hopefully, bigger patriotically, bigger in the breast from the fact that he is a citizen of a country that has become a world power for peace, for civilization and for the expansion of its industries and the products of its labor.” To excite the crowd, organizers arranged for an enormous elephant to shuffle down the aisle, a motif of the Republican party and indication that, truly, the old bounds of reality no longer applied.

  The man those Republicans were there to see, William McKinley, would end up winning a rematch that year against his 1896 rival, William Jennings Bryan, this time by a wider margin than four years prior, thanks to the country’s victory, on his watch, over the Spanish and, if one held his nose, America’s new ownership of the Philippines. McKinley had much to take credit for, including America’s progress with plants, led by the most seasoned and senior agricultural explorer for the USDA. In his State of the Union address in December of 1900, McKinley gloated, “The Department of Agriculture has been extending its work during the past year, reaching farther for new varieties of seeds and plants,” as though tipping his hat to Fairchild himself.

  James Wilson, whom McKinley had asked to stay on for another term as agriculture secretary, read the speech the next day in his office, aware that he had made the president look good. Wilson could be a grumpy man but he was an honest one, who must have admitted to himself that the idea of food exploration, and credit for its success, weren’t entirely his.

  The first sign Fairchild had of the past giving way to an unrecognizable future was a telegram that reached him in Europe with news that his father was dead. He had acquired some disease, gone in for surgery, and died on the operating table. George Fairchild had been a product of the nineteenth century, a nearly perfect metaphor for its sorrow and antiquity. George had grown up in a strict atmosphere of Puritan dogma, in which dancing, smoking, swearing, drinking, cards, and theaters were all taboo. Even though George had been fired from his job, had watched his house destroyed by arson, and had seen his five offspring leave his home, in the final year of his life, he finally saw his life’s work published, a tome on life in America’s center, monochromatically titled Rural Wealth and Welfare. With the growing excitement for days ahead rather than those behind, the volume was outdated almost the day it was published.

  David Fairchild was struck by the news, by the “grief and loneliness” of sudden loss, of ascending from his family’s second generation to its first. But the sadness natural in any man who loses his father didn’t slow him. If Fairchild, now thirty-two, had developed a philosophy, it was that life, no matter its pleasures or misfortunes, requires the constant work of “pushing on.”

  The sunshine fell on his face, glaring and golden with opportunity. And so, with telegram still in hand, he stood up to find something new.

  He found a boat bound for Italy, where, like last time, he took quick cuttings of wine and table grapes, almost all seedless. He gazed at a towering carob tree, attractive as a shade provider in gardens and for its pods of seeds that tasted as sweet as honey. A botanist near Trieste helped Fairchild acquire superior filberts, or hazelnuts.
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br />   The coast of Austria-Hungary yielded what people called capuzzo, a leafy cabbage. It was a two-thousand-year-old grandparent of modern broccoli and cauliflower, that was neither charismatic nor particularly delicious. But something about it called to Fairchild. The people of Austria-Hungary ate it with enthusiasm, and not because it was good, but because it was there. While the villagers called it capuzzo, the rest of the world would call it kale. And among its greatest attributes would be how simple it is to grow, sprouting in just its second season of life, and with such dense and bulky leaves that the biggest challenge of farming it seemed to be how to make it stop growing. “The ease with which it is grown and its apparent favor among the common people this plant is worthy a trial in the Southern States,” Fairchild jotted.

  It was prophetic, perhaps, considering his suggestion became reality. Kale’s first stint of popularity came around the turn of the century, thanks to its horticultural hack: it drew salt into its body, preventing the mineralization of soil. Its next break came from its ornamental elegance—bunches of white, purple, or pink leaves that would enliven a drab garden.

  And then for decades, kale kept a low profile, its biggest consumers restaurants and caterers who used the cheap, bushy leaves to decorate their salad bars. Kale’s final stroke of luck came sometime in the 1990s when chemists discovered it had more iron than beef, and more calcium, iron, and vitamin K than almost anything else that sprouts from soil. That was enough for it to enter the big leagues of nutrition, which invited public relations campaigns, celebrity endorsements, and morning-show cooking segments. American chefs experimented with the leaves in stews and soups, and when baked, as a substitute for potato chips. Eventually, medical researchers began to use it to counter words like “obesity,” “diabetes,” and “cancer.” One imagines kale, a lifetime spent unnoticed, waking up one day to find itself captain of the football team.