STRANGE BUT TRUE

Q: Avocados, dates, kale, mangoes, Meyer lemons, nectarines, peaches, pomegranates, quinoa, seedless grapes, watermelon — what do these foods have in common?

A: They were not part of the American diet until globe-trotting botanist and “food spy” David Fairchild (1869-1954) introduced them around the turn of the 20th century, says Anna Diamond in Smithsonian magazine, reviewing David Stone’s book “The Food Explorer.”

Before that time, American meals were about subsistence, relying on wheat and potatoes. Fairchild’s mission, “sanctioned by the president and the secretary of agriculture, was to find exotic crops and bring them back,” and that he and his team did: avocados from Chile, dates from Iraq, kale from Croatia, peaches and citrus from China, pomegranates from Malta, quinoa from Peru and much more. Under the auspices of the new Office of Seed and Plant Introduction, Fairchild and the Department of Agriculture created a system to distribute seeds, cuttings and growing tips that changed the face of American agriculture.

Beer lovers can also credit Fairchild for traveling to Bavaria, where he befriended German growers that had the world’s best hops. Because of his covert work, he eventually brought them back to the U.S.,, “helping balloon America’s hops-growing industry.”

Likewise, visitors to Washington, D.C., in the spring to see the flowering cherry trees can thank Fairchild, who on a trip to Japan first saw them and arranged to have them shipped to his Maryland home, attracting many sightseers. In 1912, the trees were planted on the National Mall.

Q: What do the following natural elements have in common: flower petals, seed heads, a snail’s shell, butterfly wings, a starfish, a snowflake and the Milky Way?

A: They’re all examples of “hidden maths,” reports How It Works: Book of Amazing Science. Seed heads and many flower petals, for instance, are structured according to the Fibonacci Sequence, where each number is the sum of the previous two: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so on. Seed heads are often arranged in intricate Fibonacci spirals.

The complex pattern of the spiral of a snail’s shell, on the other hand, expresses the ratio between subsequent numbers in the Fibonacci Sequence (close to 1.618), known as the “golden ratio.”

Finally, from the arrangement of a snowflake to the vast structure of the Milky Way, symmetry reigns. Notice that butterfly’s wings are bilaterally symmetrical, while a starfish is radially symmetrical.

Now, at least these hidden maths are hidden no more.