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  If the money had arrived from Washington, Fairchild would have had papers to prove his identity, his employer, and his mission, which, at the very least, was less threatening than looking for military secrets. Instead, all he had remaining in the bottom of his pockets was an old reimbursement check for fifteen dollars for work as a government contractor.

  With nothing left to offer, Fairchild tossed the crumpled envelope containing the check onto the desk. But something caught both men’s eyes. There on the envelope was the muscular visage of Ulysses S. Grant.

  “Oo-lissies Grant,” Fairchild said, pointing at the imprint. “Americano!”

  The woman with the baby stared.

  The man held the envelope up to study it. He seemed more taken by Grant’s brawny gaze than by Fairchild’s flailing insistence.

  Then slowly, he pushed the red notebook back at Fairchild and uttered a string of words that sounded like a warning never to come back.

  Fairchild stumbled out of the house, sweating lightly and breathing hard. With his head down he walked past the group of Corsicans watching him, then hoisted himself onto the donkey he had hired and kicked its side. As the animal trotted away, Fairchild peered over his shoulder every few paces, wary of being pursued.

  Halfway down the mountain, when he felt confident he wasn’t being followed, he dismounted. An orchard of yellow fruit had caught his eye, and he dashed into the grove of citron trees. He checked over both shoulders as he crouched in the dirt. Then he broke off four small bud sticks, the part of the tree where two thin branches merge into one. He tucked them into his breast pocket. These cuttings could later be grown into new trees, the Corsican citron mimicked in American soil. Then he plucked three small fruit from the tree’s branches. If the buds didn’t survive, the seeds inside these citrons might.

  Back on the trail, Fairchild slowed the donkey. Success was in reach, but only if he could safely leave the island. The smartest thing he could do was to depart Corsica from a different city, where port agents wouldn’t recognize him or have reason to inspect his camera and search his pockets.

  In Bastia, he hailed another horse-drawn cab to drive him to the west-side city of Ajaccio. There, he asked an old man in an orchard for one of the few French terms he did remember, pommes de terre, potatoes. Fairchild paid for the stolen citron buds with agricultural knowledge: he demonstrated for the man a method he had once read about in a book—he stuck the sticks into the starchy centers of potatoes so that the cuttings would survive the lengthy trip to Washington. The freight bill would be a few cents. And after that, the remaining coins dangling in Fairchild’s pocket were just enough to get him back to Naples.

  * * *

  —

  The United States, barely a century old, was still young. The continent may have been green and vibrant, but as a culinary canvas, it was still fresh and white in 1869, the year David Fairchild was born one April day on the thawing plains of Lansing, Michigan.

  America at one hundred hadn’t developed a culinary identity of its own; there wasn’t anything that could reasonably be called “American food.” The choice of what to eat was most often confined to the items English colonists had brought over from their native land: meats and cheeses. Only the southern states could farm year-round, and when they did, root vegetables sprouted easiest, cabbage and green beans with a bit of extra work. “The fare of the Puritan farmers was as frugal as it was wholesome,” Ben Perley Poore, a newspaper columnist, wrote in 1856 about the food of America’s early days. “Porridge for breakfast; bread, cheese, and beer or cider for luncheon; a ‘boiled dish,’ or ‘black broth,’ or salt fish, or broiled pork, or baked beans, for dinner; hasty pudding and milk for supper.” Slaves tended to get leftovers, and if there were none, they’d subsist on a combination of rice, beans, and potatoes.

  Luck was the most critical factor in cultivating wheat. Bread was the product of corn, wheat, or rye, and in the harshest winters, most households could usually rely on bread, butter, and bacon. People preferred pigs to other proteins for the animal’s indiscriminate diet, low water needs, and high calorie count. Flavor came in a distant fourth.

  Fruits and vegetables were rare, and as a result, all things that sprouted from soil were dubious to medical authorities. “Woody tissue” was harder to process than animal muscle, which more closely resembled human flesh. Besides, the fruits of trees and shrubs were unpredictable, grown on such small scale and rejected by farmers who couldn’t afford risks.

  Food in every way was bland. Meals had bigger things to accomplish than merely to taste good. The food a person ate had a curious link to every aspect of his behavior, down even to his sexuality. The nineteenth century’s avant-garde dieting theory came from Sylvester Graham, a Connecticut culinary reformer who developed a cracker—named after himself—to calm the body’s “urges,” sexual and otherwise. Women were said to faint at his speeches. Charles Elmé Francatelli, the closest thing the era had to a celebrity chef, warned in his popular 1846 cookbook, The Modern Cook, that “excess in the quantity and variety of spices and condiments . . . is especially to be guarded against. Nothing vitiates the palate more than a superabundant use of such stimulants.” A generation later in 1875, George Napheys, a Philadelphia doctor, warned that highly seasoned food would stunt a person’s development. Cravings of any kind were signs of weakness, he said, omens that a person wasn’t properly “brought up.”

  There were right ways and wrong ways to eat food. Warnings percolated everywhere, in newspapers, in circulars, buzzed about in community centers. Sarah Tyson Rorer, the nineteenth century’s Martha Stewart, issued a series of cookbooks that traded polite suggestion for blunt bossiness. In her most famous tome, Good Cooking, she advised:

  Eat only the proper amount for necessary nutrition; avoid excessive sweet mixtures, fried foods, complicated pastries, acids, such as pickles or foods covered with vinegar, excessively hot or very cold foods, or ice water, which is the most objectionable of liquids. A frequent cause of indigestion is the mingling of too great a variety of food in the mouth. Take one food, masticate and swallow it; then another. Do not take a mouthful of toast and then a swallow of tea, unless you wish to be a still further sufferer from indigestion.

  Indigestion, otherwise known as dyspepsia, was the era’s fashionable disease, which seemed to arrive in America so suddenly that no one could reasonably explain it. Some blamed it on eating hot foods with cold; others faulted the anxiety wives felt when their husbands left home for the workday. Indigestion provided an opening for some people to argue that stomach discomfort was a sure sign the country had degenerated from the greatness of the colonial period. The implied warning was that unless people changed their ways, starting with their diet, America’s grand experiment in constitutional democracy would flame out.

  When young Fairchild was learning to walk in the early 1870s, the purpose of food had begun to shift from survival and sufficiency to something resembling gastronomic pleasure. The American Home Cook Book proposed cooking eels with a little parsley. Another suggested terrapin turtles boiled with salt. The foot of a calf could be salvaged into a delicious jelly (the culinary ancestor of gelatin). Of thirteen million Americans in the labor force in those years, more than half were farmers, most of them small landholders simply trying to live off the land and, if they were lucky, make a little profit. Peaches could be boiled into preserves. A stew could last for many meals—more if one added flour biscuits. Before comfort food made people nostalgic for mom’s home cooking, the same combination of meat, carbs, and dairy helped keep people full.

  Around 1870 new advances started coming led by new companies with names like Pillsbury, Heinz, Quaker Mill, Lipton. A man named Ezra Warner invented a can opener with a handle and a rotating metal blade. Glass milk bottles appeared on doorsteps, along with orange crates. The crown jewel in home cookware was a tightly lidded pot that used pressure to expedite cooking, sometimes cutting th
e time in half. With new inventions food became less a chore and even, at times, an experiment.

  David Fairchild’s mother, Charlotte Pearl Halsted Fairchild, a petite woman just over five feet, was as much drawn to the fads as anyone. She traded tips with neighbors about the ways the kitchen was changing. She asked her husband, George, to fortify their kitchen with gadgets. She had been the first of eight children, and George the last of ten. Now she had five kids of her own, and cooking for an army was more methodical than inspired. Her dishes tended to include dry meats and boiled potatoes, and on special occasions a pie, named after America’s first president, that called for sugar, butter, sweet milk, flour, egg, baking soda, and cream of tartar. “Spread with a nice sauce,” the Washington pie recipe suggested. “It is nice without sauce but the sauce improves it.”

  Around the same time, “balanced” nutrition began to creep in as a reasonable factor in overall health. For those who could afford a visit to the sanitarium that John Harvey Kellogg was building in Battle Creek, Michigan, food innovation was under way, but primarily with existing ingredients, not new ones. In 1884, Kellogg, a doctor, was clumping together oats for something he’d later call granola. He pureed peanuts into butter, and soy into milk. Visitors to Kellogg’s dining room found potatoes baked, mashed, or boiled. Eggs, for the most elite, came with the deluxe option of being poached, floated, runny, scrambled, made into cream, or drunk as nog. Food companies brought new products that demanded, for the first time, a type of culinary marketing. Chocolate milk and root beer excited young people in the summer of 1872, followed by margarine, its original name “butterine” (a name producers of real butter fought until it was changed). In 1876 at the World’s Fair in Philadelphia, a delicacy called a banana, originally a crop of the Malay Islands, made its public debut in the United States, selling for a dime apiece and wrapped in tinfoil to prevent its phallic shape from offending the crowd’s Victorian sensibilities. How else to eat one but with a fork and knife?

  He didn’t know it, but America had a need for David Fairchild. The bare agricultural landscape at the beginning of his life would transform by its end into a colorful portrait: yellows from tropical nectarines and Chinese lemons, reds of blood oranges from Mongolia, greens from Central American avocados and grapes from the Caucasus, even purple from dates, raisins, and eggplants that sprouted first in the Middle East.

  Fairchild watched them all come to the United States, because many of them he carried himself or shipped from unexplored corners of the globe, mingling with indigenous people, outrunning police, and flirting with diseases that killed millions. By the time Harry Truman became president, the crops brought to North America to kick-start the United States’ fledgling farms had helped create the most dominant system of agriculture the world had ever seen.

  * * *

  —

  The insistence of his aunt Sue Halsted had pushed David Fairchild to Europe. But it was the influence of his father that had predetermined his life in agriculture. In 1878, the year before Fairchild turned ten, his father, George Fairchild, was named president of the State Agricultural College of Michigan, the recipient of the nation’s first government land grant, provided the school teach the practical aspects of growing food. Nine million people were farmers, and more were needed. The land-grant system expanded, and a year later, when George was offered the presidency of Kansas State Agricultural College, the only sensible thing was to put his family on a train to Manhattan, Kansas.

  The Fairchilds arrived in Kansas in 1879, a “grasshopper year.” The groggy insects emerged from subterranean hibernations to mate with such volume, they darkened the sky. Fairchild was a slender blue-eyed boy, and having left Michigan’s old-growth forests, he found new friendship in Kansas’ limitless orchards and cornfields. He wandered through the neighbors’ rows of apples, their names no more difficult to remember than his classmates’. He filled his hat with grapes as he walked, spitting the seeds in deference to the botanical cycle of rebirth.

  A series of visiting professors and scientists who stopped in Manhattan to meet George Fairchild shaped his son’s early years. The most important visit occurred by accident, in the sense that it almost didn’t happen at all. One of Fairchild’s friends, a boy named Charles Marlatt who was curiously obsessed with the grasshoppers and other insects, had heard that a white-bearded British naturalist with thin-rimmed glasses named Alfred Russel Wallace would be visiting Kansas. Marlatt told Fairchild, who then told his father. George Fairchild, the university’s president, with a degree of influence, quickly offered to put up the famous scientist. Wallace accepted, and this chance encounter was enough to spark young Fairchild’s ambition. “When Wallace came he stayed at our house, and charmed us with his simplicity,” Fairchild recalled. Wallace had once competed with another Brit, Charles Darwin, to be the first to publish on the theory of natural selection. Wallace researched how species changed over time in the Amazon River basin, and then later in the Malay Archipelago. Water provides isolation, so each of the archipelago’s twenty-five thousand islands demonstrated how organisms diverged from their neighbors. Wallace completed his papers before Darwin did his, but Darwin’s opus On the Origin of Species was more extensive and marketed better, thus solidifying his perch as the historical patriarch of evolution.

  During that visit, Wallace gave a copy of his new book, bluntly titled The Malay Archipelago, to Fairchild, whose eyes widened at the imagery and wonder of such a faraway place. To an Englishman like Wallace, the islands between Asia and Australia were the least known parts of the world, and were more consistently wet than anyplace else on the planet. Wallace told Fairchild that they teemed with diverse animal species, rich plants, and wild fruits.

  Most maps had neglected the region due to incomprehension, but Wallace explained that at least one island, Borneo, was bigger than France. And unlike anywhere in Europe, it was largely untouched by travelers, who considered the area too remote, too dangerous, and too prone to earthquakes. Fairchild found this fascinating, and later observed of his childhood, “When the formative years of one’s life are spent among men such as these, it is little wonder if one becomes ‘agricultural-minded.’ Personally, I cannot imagine existence in a family where the parents are interested only in a social life, but I feel sure that it would be very boring.”

  Wallace’s stories were magical. But to a young boy from Kansas, the Malay Islands may as well have been Jupiter. Fairchild was a boy who had never seen mountains, never heard a riverboat whistle, never listened to music beyond a church choir. He spent his days in a carpenter shop earning pennies and nickels laying shingles and cutting doorframes. Any Kansas boy could find work pulling weeds or raking hay, but never enough to fund a journey to the ocean, let alone across it.

  So, out of practicality, the desire to see the Malay Islands would lie dormant in Fairchild’s mind. His parents agreed that it was more sensible for him to spend his teenage years with his aunt and uncle in New Jersey. Uncle Byron had more connections to the grand thinkers along the corridor between New York and Washington, D.C. And Aunt Sue, who kept Beethoven, Chopin, and Dickens at her fingertips, would be his liaison to culture. New Brunswick, New Jersey, was a Dutch-influenced town with sloped roofs that poured sheets of rain onto the streets. Life there would be a useful shock to a boy from the plains, everything bigger, faster, and flush with high-minded attitude that demanded a certain way of doing things.

  Fairchild would adapt, at least a little. But the indelibility of his childhood on the plains would steer his curiosities for a lifetime. At nineteen, pushed by his uncle and in letters from his father, Fairchild turned to courses in botany. He spent evenings studying agriculture journals so thoroughly he memorized the names of the researchers. Around the dinner table, he could recite who studied wheats, tubers, and fruits, and, perhaps more important, the elusive question that would vex farmers for a century to come: How could you inoculate an entire field from a pest without con
taminating the crops with unhealthful sprays?

  * * *

  —

  The decision to leave Kansas had turned out to be a smart one. A friend of Uncle Byron granted Fairchild the chance to move to Washington for a job as a junior scientist with the Department of Agriculture. The work wasn’t glamorous, and neither was the building, four stories of old brick that reflected Washington’s low regard for matters of food and farms. Agriculture was one of the country’s biggest industries, along with steel and textiles, but the power lay with farmers, not the government.

  For the majority of American history, affairs of agriculture had occupied a small office at the Department of State. Only on May 5, 1862, did President Abraham Lincoln create a Department of Agriculture all its own, which, despite its lack of cabinet-level status, he nicknamed “the people’s department.” Its first goal was to increase the number of calories Americans ate each day. And its first leader was a modest farmer coincidentally named Isaac Newton, a man said to have won the job because he delivered Lincoln’s butter.

  Eighty workers, all of them men, filled the headquarters of the Department of Agriculture at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Independence Avenue. The five men working on matters of plant pathology arrived to greet Fairchild on his first day, each presenting his name and the problem vexing farmers he was trying to solve. The reception was formal, particularly for a junior scientist, but the Division of Plant Pathology was small, and any newcomer notable. The men devoted most of their attention to viral diseases, such as one called peach yellows that made fruit ripen too fast while the flesh stayed bitter. One man, Theobald Smith, was investigating the cause of Texas cattle fever that inexplicably killed thousands of cows (it was a bacteria, he would discover, transmitted by a tick). Not long before, the Department had identified an infection responsible for destroying entire orchards of pears and fields of sweet potatoes.