USA TODAY International Edition
‘Food spies’ cultivate change
When the realization sinks in that avocados, hummus, even Egyptian cotton exist in America because of crafty botanical espionage, one naturally questions who’s responsible — and how he landed the job. The country’s first and most prominent plant spy earned the opportunity through expertise and luck, and lucky for us, he took notes.
In The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of a Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats (Dutton, 416 pp., ★★★☆), Daniel Stone transforms seemingly endless journals, letters and records into a meticulous retelling of how David Fairchild transported thousands of plants to American soil from 1894 to 1904.
Not only did Fairchild have the agricultural know-how to uncover exotic plant species unknown to the young United States — he discovered a reason to travel the world when “crossing the Atlantic even once qualified as the rarest treat of a person’s life.” The budding botanist left Kansas at age 20 for a position as a junior scientist fighting fungus for the Department of Agriculture.
Fairchild’s itch to travel initially was a desire to explore the tropical botany and biodiversity of Java. He offered to bring his experience to the Indonesian island’s botanical garden, and his success visiting the tropics sprouted into a quest covering Italy, South America, Egypt, China and eventually Africa.
His mission to try foreign fruits and ship seeds and cuttings would revolutionize farming, and the arrival of new kinds of citrus, mangoes and potatoes ignited entire industries.
This agricultural infusion into America’s economy was financed by Barbour Lathrop, a wealthy private citizen whom Fairchild met on an ocean liner. The “forty-seven-year-old millionaire who financed his pleasure for travel on his father’s real estate fortune” insisted on paying for Fairchild’s travels when the government wouldn’t.
While we may not realize that the sweetest mangoes first came from the Philippines and nectarines from Pakistan, most of us have tasted the success of German hops and kale — all a result of Fairchild and his sponsor’s missions. Their agricultural adventures wind through world fairs and world wars, and they cross paths with the likes of Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers.
As traveling “spies,” the pair’s misadventures include everything from danger and disease to the importation of cocaine in plant form to the red tape of bureaucracy. (The U.S. government didn’t officially consider Fairchild and subsequent plant explorers spies, but collecting crops required discretion, particularly in areas of unrest, such as China at the time, or where a plant was protected, as with hops in Germany.)
After four years of travel for “seed and plant introduction,” Fairchild’s inventory of imports exceeded 4,000 plants from 11 fellow plant explorers. He started the office of seed and plant introduction for the Department of Agriculture, and by age 34 had settled in Washington to direct the department.
His commitment to American agriculture proves noble, but the pace of the final third of the story slows significantly as Fairfield stays home. Fortunately, his role in bringing Japanese cherry blossom trees to D.C. makes this section worth the read.
The botanist ultimately became “one of the country’s most senior food experts,” and his work proved plants’ economic and geopolitical value during America’s rise on the world stage.
More than a century later, we can indulge in overpriced avocado toast and know that someone before us planted the seed.