How we have better veggies

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, scientists, botanists, adventurers, agriculture

Had your kale lately? How about some quinoa in your soup? Do you like navel oranges, mangoes, or avocados? Have you been to Washington, DC (or several other cities in the region) in the springtime to see the cherry trees in bloom? Thank David Fairchild. His life and adventures are shown in The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats by Daniel Stone.

As a young scientist in the 1890's, David Fairchild caught the interest of a wealthy, globe-trotting dilettante and raconteur, Barbour Lathrop. The rich man claimed to have circled the world many times (the number varied with the telling, usually around 20-40), but his life was otherwise aimless.

Fairchild had met Alfred Russell Wallace, who entranced him with tales of his travels in Malaysia and Indonesia, particularly Java, and the strange and wonderful plants and animals he'd encountered in the tropics. For a Kansas boy, it seemed a faraway planet. A few years later he spoke of it to Lathrop—when he could get a word in edgewise—and Lathrop remembered it; later on he visited Fairchild with an offer to sponsor a plant-collecting trip to Java. Fairchild was at the time in the employ of the infant Department of Agriculture; he eventually quit his job in favor of globetrotting plant collecting, but retained ties to the Department so as to have somewhere to send his discoveries.

Eventually, Lathrop and Fairchild traveled together for several years, giving more purpose to Lathrop's life, and affording Fairchild the opportunity to gather new species and new varieties of plants, in hopes that American farmers and orchardists could enrich the variety of foods on offer.

I didn't know that all the citrus fruits we enjoy, in such amazing variety, were all bred from just four progenitor species: citron, pomelo, mandarin, and papeda (a bitter fruit, but one parent of the Key lime). Nor that there are hundreds of varieties of avocado—yet only a few that can be shipped—or mango—ditto. I'd heard of Meyer lemons, and even had a dwarf Meyer lemon tree in a container for many years, but in this book I read about Frank Meyer, hired by Fairchild to scour China for plant varieties, including new citrus hybrids.

Every good story has a nemesis. The best man at Fairchild's wedding, his boyhood friend Charles Marlatt, serves the rôle here. He was an entomologist, fighting crop pests, particularly those that came from elsewhere. When Fairchild arranged to have Japanese Yoshido flowering cherry trees brought to Washington, D.C.in 1910, Marlatt found them infested with at least 8 pathogenic insects and a fungus or two. The entire shipload (2,000 young, mature trees!) was burned on orders of President Taft. The Japanese were very apologetic, and prepared a new shipment of trees, grown in "virgin soil" and carefully tended, that were brought in 1912, 3,000 this time, and planted around the Tidal Basin, along the Mall, and extras sent to nearby cities. The real "damage" incurred from Marlatt, in Fairchild's eyes, came with legislation such as various Quarantine Acts. They restricted plant exploration by requiring so much paperwork and inspection that most of the plant explorers that were following in Fairchild's footsteps went on to other pursuits.

However, there is a certain amount of right on both sides of the introduce-versus-ban dichotomy. After all, Fairchild introduced Kudzu, grew it in his own yard, then found he had to go to a lot of trouble to exterminate it! Too bad he didn't get it all. It is a scourge in the southern half of the U.S. But more good than bad has come of plant exploration and introduction. We need both Fairchild (and Meyer et al) and Marlatt.

Kudos to Daniel Stone for reminding us of David Fairchild and others, who may have been famous in their generation, but are nearly forgotten. Remember him the next time you enjoy a mango.