The Food Explorer Read online

  David Fairchild

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Daniel Stone

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  DUTTON and the D colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Map and illustrations by Matthew Twombly.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Stone, Daniel (Daniel Evan), 1985– author.

  Title: The food explorer : the true adventures of the globe-trotting botanist who transformed what America eats / Daniel Stone.

  Description: New York, New York : Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017030324| ISBN 9781101990582 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101990605 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Fairchild, David, 1869–1954—Biography. | Botanists—United States—Biography.

  Classification: LCC QK31.F2 .S76 2018 | DDC 580.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017030324

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

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  For Walter, my life’s Lathrop

  Never to have seen anything but the temperate zone is to have lived on the fringe of the world. Between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer live the majority of all the plant species, the vast majority of the insects, most of the strange and dangerous and exciting quadrupeds, all of the great and most of the poisonous snakes and large lizards, most of the brilliantly colored sea fishes, and the strangest and most gorgeously plumaged of the birds. Not to struggle and economize and somehow see the tropics puts you, in my opinion, in the class with the boys who could never scrape together enough pennies to go to the circus. They never wanted to badly enough, that’s all.

  —David Fairchild

  The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add [a] useful plant to [its] culture.

  —Thomas Jefferson

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Fruits of Fairchild

  Author’s Note

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE: Chance Encounters

  CHAPTER TWO: One Thousand Dollars

  CHAPTER THREE: East of Suez

  CHAPTER FOUR: Guest and Protégé

  CHAPTER FIVE: The Listless Pacific

  PART II

  CHAPTER SIX: One Cause, One Country

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Crossing Countries

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Alligator Pears

  CHAPTER NINE: Grapes of a Venetian Monk

  CHAPTER TEN: Citrus Maxima

  PART III

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Lemons, Leaves, and the Dawn of New Light

  CHAPTER TWELVE: On the Banks of the Tigris

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Bell’s Grand Plan

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: A Brain Awhirl

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Cherry Trees with No Cherries

  PART IV

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: The Urge to Walk

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Outlaws, Brigands, and Murderers

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Fly the Coop

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: Sad and Mad and So Utterly Unnecessary

  CHAPTER TWENTY: Wij Zijn Amerikanen

  Epilogue

  Watercolors

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  One of the humbling parts of being an American is the regular reminder that no matter how swollen America’s pride or power, nothing has been American for very long. A few years ago, it occurred to me that the same way immigrants came to our soil, so did our food.

  I was at my desk one morning researching a story for National Geographic when I came across a map showing where popular crops were first domesticated. Florida’s famous oranges grew first in China. The bananas in every American supermarket originated in Papua New Guinea. Apples that Washington claims as its heritage came from Kazakhstan, and Napa’s grapes saw their first light in the Caucasus. To ask when these became American crops seemed a little like asking how people from England became Americans. It was, in a word, complicated.

  But as I continued to dig, deeper and deeper, there appeared to be a moment of clarity, a moment in history when new foods arrived on America’s shores with the suddenness of a steamship entering a harbor. The late nineteenth century—a time known as the Gilded Age, the rise of industrial America, the golden age of travel—was a formative era in the United States. The opening of oceans and countries allowed a young scientist named David Fairchild to scour the planet for new foods and plants and bring them back to enliven his country. Fairchild saw world-changing innovation, and in a time that glorified men of science and class, he found his way into parlors of distinction not by pedigree but through relentless curiosity.

  The way I became obsessed with this story seems, in retrospect, predictable. All my life I’ve been fascinated by fruit, the more tropical the better. When I was a kid, my parents took my sister and me to Hawaii because my dad thought we needed to “see things.” I ate two whole pineapples, followed by a stomachache that burned hotter than Mauna Loa. Sometimes at home my mom would cut me a mango by shaving down the sides, and while I ate the pieces, she’d keep whittling away at the stone. It was mangoes, not my dentist, that taught me the value of floss.

  In college, I worked on a farm, walking the hot rows of an orchard grading peaches. The goal was to find the superior varieties to prioritize for the following season, like performing eugenics on fruit. But distraction came easy. I’d finish shifts with the juice of dozens of peaches soaking my shirt, and, again, usually a stomachache. Before I moved to Washington, D.C., to write about politics, a friend offered me a job on his farm, picking fruit and selling it at the kind of Northern California farmers’ markets where people use words like “varietals” and “terroir.” I declined so I could follow a dream, although I spent years sitting in congressional hearings imagining my alter ego, windows down in a pickup truck, on empty farm back roads.

  Several years later, when I heard about Fairchild, what struck me first was that this was a man who had made fruit his job—and not just familiar crops, but things no one had ever tasted. When I told friends how Fairchild had given the United States its first official avocados, people wanted to nominate him for sainthood. I started to enjoy reciting his greatest hits—dates, mangoes, pistachios, Egyptian cotton, wasabi, cherry blossoms—and watching people’s eyebrows go up. Almost every time they would say something like, “Gosh, it never dawned on me someone brought those things here.” We tend to think of food from the ground as a type of environmental entitlement that predates humans, a connection with the raw planet itself. But what we eat is no less curated than a museum exhibit. Fairchild saw
the opportunity in a bare canvas to add new color and texture.

  Fairchild’s life is the story of America’s blooming relationship with the world at the turn of the twentieth century. He visited more than fifty countries, almost all by boat, before airplanes and automobiles shrank the planet. His passions and interests preceded our modern-day fixation on food and what the economic, biological, and ecological effects are of a meal’s cultivation, transport, and consumption. Fairchild was the embodiment of boundless hunger and insatiable wanderlust, and his life’s work was a quest to answer, What else is out there?

  And yet his story is also one of frustration and drama, of being on a deadline as America’s excitement for the world turned to a xenophobic fear of the unknown. Fairchild’s star was attached to America’s, and as its attention scattered in the onset of world war, Fairchild’s ingenuity faced the angry criticism of a nation crouched in fear.

  He was a man with a lot to say, and he wrote everything down. I read his love letters, his rough drafts, his ponderings on the backs of envelopes and napkins. I read as he recalled his encounters with Alexander Graham Bell, Teddy Roosevelt, and George Washington Carver. I could sense how much he’d hate to see a book written about him, to receive credit even though, as in so many stories, his life’s path was made possible by other people’s work, money, and sign-off.

  There’s a wistfulness in Fairchild’s story, of seeing a man and a moment no longer possible. A world interconnected by culture, science, and communication, a world where people can travel thousands of miles in a day, can make someone reasonably ask, Is there anything on Earth left unexplored? I’ve spent many hours wondering what Fairchild would say to this, whether he’d see the aftermath of his life as a terminal end to the grand quests of earlier eras.

  Then one day a few summers ago, I found myself in Florida in the living room of Helene Pancoast, Fairchild’s eighty-one-year-old granddaughter. She used to take long drives with her granddad from Miami to Nova Scotia, during which he’d pepper her with questions and encourage her curiosities. She now lived just a few blocks from where she grew up, and her backyard had the palms Fairchild had fallen in love with in Indonesia. I asked her about what I’d been wondering so long: whether Fairchild would still find new questions in a world full of answers. She grabbed my arm and looked me square in the eye. “He used to say, ‘Never be satisfied with what you know, only with what more you can find out.’”

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE

  Chance Encounters

  The trip had been punishing, a rocky overnight voyage over rough seas. Humid air, the kind that clings to one’s face, stifled romantic visions of the Mediterranean. Even David Fairchild, a twenty-five-year-old from the prairielands of Kansas, was surprised by the small town of Bastia, Corsica’s eastern outpost where the boat docked. “I had been accustomed to a certain degree of dirt but the town of Bastia appeared unbelievably filthy,” he wrote of his first impression. Shabby dogs circled him on the dusty street as he stumbled around, disoriented, in the early light of day.

  Had he been closer to home, he’d have found the scene easier to stomach. But here, on the French island, Fairchild was as far as anyone in his family had ever ventured. His journey had taken him from Kansas to Washington, across the Atlantic to Italy, north to Germany, and then south again across the Alps to the port where he met the boat. Such distance might have filled him with pride or pleasure if the last leg hadn’t stirred a deep ailing in his stomach.

  Sometime during the night, it had become December 17, 1894. Fairchild had spent his youth dreaming of traveling overseas, and now, finally, he was on his first assignment. He waited for the post office to open, and when it did, a man handed him an envelope crowded with forwarding addresses, and inside, a short message.

  Secretary refuses authorization.

  As an agent for the United States government, Fairchild had been cautioned to keep secret his mission in Corsica. This sort of undertaking had rarely been tried, and without a treaty or informal diplomatic agreement, or even the definitive knowledge that such a visit was legal, the best Washington could hope for was that its man could get in and out without causing a scene.

  Fairchild had little direction and, as had now become clear, even less money. The order from the secretary of agriculture to go to Corsica had been nullified by the same man, who refused to cable money for his agent to complete the job. Fairchild liked the idea of espionage, but he was as skilled at covert action as he was at ballroom dancing, having done neither. He was a botanist, an agent of plants, and not a good one.

  Without money, Fairchild couldn’t afford to stay long. But already on the island, he figured he might as well try to complete the objective. He flagged a cab drawn by a single horse that trotted south along the coast. To think clearly, he needed to eat. He also needed a lead. Corsica was hilly, hot, and too big to wander blindly.

  He stopped at a roadside restaurant, where he was the only customer. While he waited to eat, he mentioned casually to the restaurant’s owner that he was interested in plants. Where, he asked in a mix of English, broken Italian, and arm gestures, could he see some of the island’s trees? Perhaps its famous citron?

  The man lit with purpose. He took Fairchild behind the restaurant to sample figs he had grown, each one a mouthful of syrup. He suggested that Fairchild see the mayor of Borgo, a town at the top of a nearby mountain in the center of the citron region, and gave Fairchild a note of introduction. “There I was, with an adventure on my hands, and I enjoyed it,” Fairchild wrote. He walked outside and hired a donkey to carry him up, observing the view at every switchback up the mountain, oblivious to the fact that Corsicans could be wary of outsiders.

  The mayor of Borgo was a red-faced man, skin baggy and sagging, “a bandit of a fellow,” Fairchild jotted in his red pocket notebook. The mayor’s house sat on wooden stilts atop a pigsty caked in mud. Fairchild had to navigate the snorting beasts to deliver the note from the man who had served him lunch.

  As he might have expected, the mayor spoke no English and Fairchild knew almost no French, but the mayor made it understood that he had to leave for a funeral. He poured Fairchild a glass of wine and told his guest to wait. When the mayor left, Fairchild noticed a gray patch of mold floating on the wine and emptied it through a crack in the floorboards onto the pigs. Then he moved to the window, where he looked for a long moment at the deep valleys and orchards filled with fruit. It occurred to him: So long as he was waiting, what difference would it make to wait outside?

  Efforts to be inconspicuous were betrayed by his large camera, an Eastman Kodet that folded like an accordion and had a cloth curtain. On the street, a small crowd gathered around him murmuring about the peculiar contraption and the man holding it. He stopped to photograph a group of women in long black skirts. A man urged Fairchild to photograph the view off the side of the mountain. Another woman asked him to take an image of her daughter. He obliged the woman’s request but ignored the man, who turned and marched away.

  While his head was concealed by the curtain, he felt someone grab his arm.

  “Vos papiers, s’il vous plaît.”

  It was a policeman. Or perhaps a soldier.

  Fairchild had no papers to show, nor could he respond in a way the man understood. The minimal French learned in school left his head at the precise moment it might have been useful.

  1894. A large camera identified Fairchild as an outsider, as did the way he pointed it at women on the street. Moments after he took this image in Borgo, Corsica, he was arrested.

  In just a few hours on the island, two hours into his first assignment working in a foreign land on behalf of the American government, Fairchild found himself arrested. If he knew anything about this type of work, he demonstrated the opposite. He had made his mission known to a government official. He had drawn attention to himself in the streets. And worst of all, he would now be interrogated. If he c
ouldn’t hold his resolve, the man would compel him to divulge what he had come for, and who had sent him.

  The gendarme escorted Fairchild to a small house that doubled as the town’s jail. He gestured for Fairchild to empty his pockets. The man picked up Fairchild’s red pocket notebook and began to thumb through its pages. He asked in staccato what each word meant. Some of the scratches were in English, others in German and Italian, his attempt to practice languages he didn’t know. Fairchild was filled half with fear, half with indignation, neither of which compelled him to cooperate.

  In the corner of the room sat a woman in a black robe with a baby perched at her breast. As she rocked, she barked orders in Corsican French to the man. He paid her no attention, his gaze affixed on the notebook.

  It struck Fairchild that the man mistook him for a spy, which he technically was, but the kind seeking more serious secrets. How else to explain the notebook with suspicious writings? Why the camera? Owing to the heat, his growing annoyance, and the creeping fear that he could spend his life in a Corsican prison, blood began to rush from Fairchild’s face. “On an errand that was not likely to be pleasing if explained to the guard, with no papers in my pocket, with a captor whose very look was enough to terrify anyone, and in a jail that would rival in filthiness any that the Inquisition ever had, I think there are few men who would not have paled,” he later wrote.

  The policeman was familiar with the game of espionage, with foreigners arriving innocently but looking for political or economic secrets—or worse, to survey the land’s value. The island had been war-torn for centuries, a plaything of European empires that fought for the rights to a Mediterranean oasis rich in crops, water, and fertile soil. America wasn’t a threat, but the superpower Spain was, as was Italy, France’s neighbor, which saw rich promise in a nearby island. A European spy hoping to steal strategic secrets from Corsica would be wise to impersonate a bumbling American who could barely speak French.