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What’s a Zucchini? And Other Questions Americans Once Asked
By Max Watman
April 4, 2018
Image
Barbour Lathrop (left) and David Fairchild aboard a steamer on the coast of Sumatra, Christmas 1896.
CreditFairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Coral Gables, Florida
THE FOOD EXPLORER
The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats
By Daniel Stone
Illustrated. 397 pp. Dutton. $28.
In a photograph dated Christmas 1896, featured in “The Food Explorer,” Daniel Stone’s biography of the botanist and explorer David Fairchild, his subject is sitting with his patron and friend Barbour Lathrop, in what looks like an empty saloon or a lounge on a steamship. The caption informs us that they’re off the coast of Sumatra; both are dressed in white and have mustaches that border on the extravagant. Lathrop is wearing a bow tie; Fairchild seems to be sitting on the bar. For the picture to be any more a portrait of the Gilded Age, it would have to sing the libretto of “The Mikado.”
In one memorable sequence of events, Fairchild took a train across the United States. “The Transcontinental Railroad connected New York to Sacramento at the new, exhilarating speed of 35 miles per hour,” Stone reports, adding that its passengers were fed on grouse and champagne.
When Fairchild arrived on the West Coast, he learned that the boat he and Lathrop were to board had already left, so they hopped on another train and began the two-week journey to catch another boat in New Orleans, stopping in Santa Barbara to meet Dr. Francesco Franceschi, “who cut for his visitor a slice of a curious squash — ‘zucchini,’ he called it.”
This distant age of wonder — an era in which worldliness was hard-earned and Barbour Lathrop circled the globe many times — was full of innocence and promise. In a Washington, D.C., boardinghouse, Fairchild roomed with a former colleague from the Department of Agriculture named Wallace Swingle; together, they brainstormed about building a team that would travel to foreign countries and “administer the introduction of plants.” As Stone explains, they “fancied their title as ‘agricultural explorer’ — a term so whimsical, so obvious, that it came out of their mouths at the same time.”
Soon enough there was a sign on a door and a new government agency: the Office of Seed and Plant Introduction. The results were tremendous. Avocados, soybeans, nectarines and kale, Meyer lemons, hops, seedless grapes and watermelons were all either introduced or improved by Fairchild and his team.
This isn’t another chapter in that old story about how we ate badly until fill-in-the-blank came along and revolutionized American dining. This is a story about a world in which there were no avocados until David Fairchild mailed some home, about a strange and meager period in our past in which no one had eaten a zucchini.
Stone doesn’t editorialize about the consequences. “In 1908,” he writes, “few people had seen a soybean,” adding that within 100 years, “the evolved descendants of soybeans that Meyer shipped back would cover the Midwest of the United States like a rug. Soybeans would be applied to more diverse uses than any other crop in history.” Although Stone wisely keeps himself out of the argument, it’s a safe bet that most of his readers will hear the alarm.
Fairchild lived in optimistic times. Problems of land and crop management, he and his colleagues believed, were going to be solved in an entirely new way: “America’s goal wasn’t just to farm; it was to construct an industrial agricultural system bigger and more profitable than any group of people had ever built.” The bloom, of course, is off that rose, but it doesn’t make Fairchild’s story, and the profound role he played in ushering us into modernity, any less fascinating.
Topic: “The Food Explorer,” Daniel Stone’s biography of David Fairchild (Read 897 times)