Spreading his seed
An adventurous young botanist traveling the world gave America some of its best fruit and veg
MAYBE you had some mango slices for breakfast this morning. Maybe the salad you ate with lunch had plenty of kale in it or some avocado slices laid across the top. Did you grab a handful of grapes for an afternoon snack or pick up a six-pack of American-made beer on your way home from work? In all those cases, and plenty more besides, you owe a debt of thanks to David Fairchild.
At the end of the 19th century, American farmers could grow plenty of food, but there wasn’t much variety to it. Eventually the market for staples like corn and wheat began to collapse, and farmers would burn their crops or just let them die in the field rather than waste time harvesting them only to sell at a loss.
Fairchild’s remarkable project to reverse American agriculture’s downward spiral is recounted in “The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats” (Dutton), a new biography by National Geographic correspondent Daniel Stone.
In 1893, Fairchild, a 24-year-old botanist with a low-level job in the Department of Agriculture, heard about a research grant based in Naples, Italy, and successfully applied for the position. On the cruise ship to Europe, he met an eccentric millionaire named Barbour Lathrop, who was spending his inheritance circling the globe over and over. Lathrop seemed to greet Fairchild’s attempts to talk about Java, an island in the Malay archipelago between southeast Asia and Australia he dreamed of visiting, with been-there-done-that boredom, but something about the young scientist intrigued him. A month later, he tracked down Fairchild and offered him $1,000 (more than $25,000 in 2018 dollars) toward a trip to Java, calling it “an investment in science.”
It took Fairchild nearly a year to work up the nerve to go. When Lathrop caught up to him, he promptly got bored and convinced Fairchild to accompany him throughout Asia. They cooked up a scheme to collect plant samples and send them to America, but when it failed to pan out Lathrop sent Fairchild back home, where he took another job at the Department of Agriculture.
Apparently, though, Lathrop couldn’t get Fairchild’s scientific enthusiasm out of his mind. He came to Washington and convinced Fairchild to quit his job again. This time, though, they successfully persuaded James Wilson, the Secretary of Agriculture, to accept the seeds and plant cuttings Fairchild would ship back to DC to be sowed in America. After just missing ocean liners in San Francisco and New Orleans, they finally boarded a ship in Queens at the end of 1898 and set sail for Jamaica, where Fairchild soon discovered the sweet taste of mangoes and dwarf oranges.
Their journey almost came to an end that spring. Shortly after finding a new variety of avocado in Santiago, Chile, the explorers had to cross the Andes mountain range to get to Argentina. Fairchild’s mule slipped on an icy patch and barely managed to regain its footing instead of throwing Fairchild off the side of the mountain.
Europe would prove much safer for Fairchild. He arrived in London in late summer, just as a crop of fava beans was coming in and then stumbled onto broccoli in a café in Venice. A monk there told him about a place in Padua where they grew seedless grapes. Those purple sultanina, along with light-green varieties, would flourish in California, launching Amer- ica’s love affair with raisins. (Much later in his travels, he made a detour to the coast of what’s now Croatia, where he found a particularly hearty variety of kale that flourished Stateside.) Sometimes, Fairchild had to resort to subterfuge to obtain his samples. American beer back then was of notoriously poor quality, and the hops growers of Polepy, a small village in Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), were understandably reluctant to share their superior crop. Fairchild tried to win them over by paying for a plaque honoring a local grower. Finally, one of them offered Fairchild several cuttings from his hops plants — but, just to be safe, he’d have to mail them to another village miles away. Those cuttings helped kick-start a boom in American brewing — and though American hops growers would suffer some setbacks during the Prohibition years, their losses were partially offset by their ability to export the same hops back to Europe, where the growing fields had been devastated during World War I. Not all of Fairchild’s discoveries were as successful, though. The water chestnuts he found in China could grow in southern swamps, but it was a lot of work for a vegetable that tasted fairly bland anyway. Similarly, even though Americans love cashew nuts, it’s actually cheaper to import them from places like India than to grow them in Florida, the only part of the United States with the right climate. Fairchild’s most prominent contribution, however, wasn’t food-related. Once he finally came back to Washington for good, he married Alexander Graham Bell’s younger daughter and bought a house in nearby Maryland. For the garden, she asked him to import some flowering cherry trees from Japan. They were a huge hit with neighbors when they blossomed in the spring and soon caught on with residents of the capital as well. Eventually, arrangements were made for the city of Tokyo to donate several thousand of the “cherry blossoms” as a gift, and they were planted throughout the tidal basin alongside the Potomac River in 1912. The annual blooming of their pink leaves has become one of DC’s biggest tourist attractions.