In the United States in the 19th century, there was a single variety of food, and people ate only to eat, not to enjoy food. No one would have imagined that before the advent of the new century, a botanist named David Fairchild would bring about a radical change in the American dinner table.
David Fairchild Inside Page of The Food Explorer Unnoticed, the pictures in this article are provided by Guangxi Normal University
Seedless grapes from Italy, kale from Croatia, hops from Bavaria, dates from Iraq, peaches from China, avocados from Chile... These are the "spoils of war" that "food spy" David Fairchild brought back to the United States.
Of course, he discovered not only food, but also the introduction of Egyptian cotton into the United States, which led to the development of new industries. In the 21st century, Daniel Stone, a senior writer in the fields of environmental science, botany, and agriculture in the United States and a special contributor to National Geographic magazine, wrote Fairchild's circumnavigation of the world as "Food Explorer", allowing readers to know the experience of tens of thousands of plants and ingredients introduced to the United States, the anecdotes of the political and business celebrities at that time, the magnificent world history, the unpredictable international situation, and the social picture of most of the world.
The book won the 2019 American Horticultural Society Book Award, won the major media recommendations, in addition to the best-seller list, it carries more important value, as Stone said, "We often see food from the earth as a gift from the natural environment that precedes human existence, as a link between human beings and the original ecology of the earth itself." But what we eat, like the museum displays, is obtained through human effort."
Food Explorer, by Daniel Stone, translated by Zhang Jianguo, Guangxi Normal University Press, January 2020
With the permission of the publisher, the excerpt tells the story of David Fairchild's introduction of avocados from Chile to the United States. The title is as prepared by the editors.
Due to the topographical characteristics of the Andes, Chile's climate is predictable and the land is fertile. For plant seekers in the United States in particular, chile's territory is geographically coincidental with that of the United States. Chile and the United States are located on the north and south sides of the equator, and the distance extending south of Chile is almost the same as the distance extended northward by the United States; the Chilean capital Santiago has exactly the same latitude values as Los Angeles in California, Lubbock in Texas, and Charleston in South Carolina. The climate of either place on Earth will not be exactly the same, but if there is anything good for the United States in Chile, it is that its tried-and-true crops can be introduced to many parts of the United States at any time. The only factor causing the delay is that the introduction of these plants must first be approved by the relevant U.S. government departments.
Of the very few crops that Fairchild sent to Washington for approval from Santiago, only a handful were approved for introduction, and he would have been surprised to learn of that later. One of them is a mountain bamboo called chusquea, which has a slight red glow on the pole. Then there was a tree that grew at a low altitude, which had no common name yet, only the Latin name "Persea lingue," and appeared to be a promising candidate for landscape trees lining the streets of New York or Washington, which Fairchild carefully packed up its saplings and shipped to Washington. His favorite is an ornamental tree called the "mayten tree", whose lazy and slender branches are obedient to gravity and look like long, dangling green threads. The tree did not succeed in reaching Washington.
The main problem is not a lack of botany, but more of a bureaucracy. Fairchild shipped to Washington ornamental trees, many new varieties of pumpkins and watermelons, and exotic Chilean bean plants, but the problem was that there was not enough and qualified space to store and cultivate these plants. Food searching was a new thing, and Fairchild was well aware that the testing stations used to host the plants did not meet the conditions for receiving them.
Plants introduced by Fairchild The Food Explorer Inner page
But one was successfully introduced. History seems to favor the winners, not the losers. The crop that Fairchild later discovered was called a great achievement in his obituary, and it was perhaps the greatest achievement of Fairchild's life.
Fairchild could not have known when he bit the green, oily flesh of a fruit that would be mass-produced in the southwestern United States in the future. But he had a hunch. The black husk of this fruit is a variety of alligator pears that the Aztecs called "avocado," a word derived from the word "testicle" in their language. The fruit of this fruit grows in pairs and is oval-shaped. Its pulp has the consistency of butter and contains a small amount of plant fiber. But unlike other avocados that Fairchild tasted in more northerner regions such as Jamaica and Venezuela, there is a high degree of consistency between the avocados he now holds. Each fruit on this avocado tree is the same size and ripens at the same time, and fruits that grow under the same temperature conditions in subtropical regions rarely have these characteristics.
Avocado Inside page of The Food Explorer
Fairchild and Lethrop disembark in Santiago, where the quality of the avocados is even more unusual. Fairchild listened intently to the fact that the avocado could withstand mild frosts as low as 23 degrees Fahrenheit. Such climatic conditions show that the fruit is fully capable of growing in the United States. The world's avocado originated in central Mexico, and for centuries immigrants transplanted it to Chile, south of the equator. Now, Fairchild is considering doing the opposite, reintroducing the fruit tree to the United States north of the equator. "This is a valuable discovery for California," he wrote, "and this avocado is hardy and the peel is black." ”
During the daytime quest, When Fairchild tastes this avocado, Lethrop is nearby. He also believes that American farmers urgently need novel and low-demand crops - as long as the conditions are suitable, basically can grow independently, and this avocado is cold-tolerant, widely effective, and fully meet the needs of American farmers. Fairchild did not understand the chemistry of the avocado's oily pulp, nor did he know that the fruit was as popular as quinoa 100 years later due to its abundance of vegetable oils and vitamins. But he could conclude that, unlike any other fruit, this peculiar fruit must have an equally peculiar evolutionary history. No mammal on Earth can digest the cores of an avocado, and certainly not all the wildlife of South America can digest the cores.
It is not uncommon for the significance of historical events to be revealed many years later. As a carriage slowly passed by, Fairchild poured out the Chilean pesos he had brought with him and bought all the avocados it had. He hopes to pack the consignment box with enough varieties of avocados so that the plant can be grown on distant lands. Most of the avocados he bought were hard as stone, but by the time they were packed into small boxes, some had begun to soften, suggesting that they were fully ripe after they were plucked, not on the tree. After packing nearly 1,000 avocados, Fairchild was confident that at least some of them would arrive in Washington intact after being shipped over the ocean. On each box, he capitalized the following shipping address — Washington, D.C., Department of Agriculture, Division of Seed and Plant Introduction. He then watched as the crates were transported away.
On June 10, 1899, Orator F. Cook opened one of the boxes of avocados in Washington. The extraordinary size of this consignment best shows Fairchild's eagerness to introduce avocados to the United States. Cook was so unfortunate that he took the place of Fairchild in the Office of Seeds and Plant Introductions, responsible for receiving the sought-after plants shipped back from abroad. More than a dozen boxes of avocados were placed in Cook's office. He pried open one of the boxes, took a bite out of an avocado, then peeled off the skin to examine the flesh. The avocado was clearly rotten, and the brown mold inside gave off a putrefactive smell. But important parts of it, the avocado core and genetic material, remain intact.
Cook had seen an avocado before, but its peel wasn't as smooth and green as this one. The avocados were quickly sent to a greenhouse, where workers began to grow seedlings from avocado cores—burying them in the soil, then taking them out and gently putting them in the water to float there. A written note attached to Fairchild's consignment states that the avocado tree will not bear fruit until it matures, and that this will take years rather than months. He suggested that avocado saplings should be transported to test sites in California as soon as they grow a relatively solid root system, where farmers interested in testing fruit trees can plant them.
Cook complied, and then basically stopped caring about avocados.
In California, the avocado saplings that Cook transported helped farmers open up an industry. Because travelers or tourists packed oversized avocado cores and brought them home as souvenirs, other varieties of avocado trees also appeared in the United States. There are rumors that avocados have also been found in the United States before, in Hollywood in 1886 or near Miami in 1894. But these avocados are not as potent, colored, and flavorful as the Chilean avocados introduced by Fairchild, which have an unusual origin. It was later confirmed that the avocado introduced by Fairchild was a hybrid of guatemalan avocado and Mexican avocado, which had not been growing in Chile for a long time before he discovered it. But like most favored fruits, the true origin of this avocado no longer matters.
Farmers and early geneticists carefully studied the avocado and the varieties introduced after it to breed new cultivated varieties to suit more specific climates or tastes. The result of this effort was the discovery of a new 20th-century avocado variety known as "Fuerte," which originally means "strong" in Spanish, and was tested to have the coldest climate of any avocado variety. However, it was found that the Forte avocado was extremely easy to scratch when transported at close range, and it fell out of favor.
Another derivative of the avocado introduced by Fairchild has always been favored. 25 years after his first taste of chilean avocados, a postman in Fellbrook, California, foresaw the opportunity to do so, and he managed to collect every avocado core from fields, neighbors, dumpsters in the hotel kitchen, and more. He was not a botanist, dropped out of high school, and had little academic training. He was just an early avid avocado breeder.
There was a garden behind the man's house, and in 1926, his children first saw an avocado seedling breaking out of the ground and growing straight upwards, unlike other varieties. Within months, this small avocado tree was bearing walnut-sized fruit — ripening faster than all avocado varieties. At this point, the postman understood that he had acquired something extraordinary. He knelt next to the small 14-inch-tall avocado tree, and his wife photographed him, a gesture that was later painted as a memento.
Ten years later, on the afternoon of August 27, 1935, the postman patented the new variety, exactly 36 years after Fairchild collected his prototype variety, the Chilean avocado, and 10,000 years after humans first cultivated the avocado. He hired a painter to sketch the avocado from all angles, and one of the sketches depicted an avocado hanging from a branch, very close to the original meaning of the Chilean word "avocado", "testicles". This avocado has since become the most popular variety in the world, accounting for more than 80% of the global avocado market.
Rudolph Hass couple imdb figure
The man is said to have met his wife Elizabeth at a church picnic, whose family lived in La Habra Heights, east of Los Angeles, where the first sapling of the avocado he patented grew. When naming this avocado, he named neither his wife nor his hometown. He was vain, but more so because of his lack of imagination, that he named the avocado after his own name, Rudolph Hass.