Visit any British or American supermarket today and you’ll find a wide range of world foods. Head to the fruit and veg aisles, and you’ll likely find everything from avocados to mangos to kale. Similarly, nuts and grains like quinoa, cashews, soybeans and pistachios are just as commonplace. But were it not for one man, these staples may have remained exotic oddities, little known outside of their countries of origin.
That man was botanist and explorer David Fairchild. Born in 1869 in Lansing, Michigan, USA, he remains relatively obscure. It is certainly not a name we know well in the UK, and even in his home country of America he is a somewhat unfamiliar character. Yet Fairchild shaped the culinary tastes of millions of people in the Western world. Responsible for introducing over 200,000 plants into America, he established not only countless exotic fruits and vegetables but also varieties of bamboo, wheat and cotton that proved to be of utmost importance to the USA’s emerging economy.
Today, we take it for granted that should we wish, we can have breakfast in one country before flying off for dinner in another. But during the late nineteenth century things were very different. International travel was slow, often perilous, and prohibitively expensive, available only to a privileged few. David Fairchild’s parents were not people of means and international travel would have been far beyond anything they could afford. However, David’s father, George Fairchild, was able to bring the world into their Kansas home by hosting visiting academics from all over the globe. Amongst the most notable of these was Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist and explorer. During his travels, Wallace had come up with a theory of evolution by natural selection – quite independently of Charles Darwin. Darwin, of course, went on to publish his seminal work On the Origin of Species. But some say he rushed out the book to cement his name in the history books rather than Wallace’s.
Fairchild was in awe of Wallace, a man who had travelled the world and seen things he could only imagine. Wallace regaled the family with tales of distant tribes and exotic foods. In days before radio, television, or even widespread access to photography, this must have seemed a world away from the corn fields of Kansas. The young David asked question after question, and sensing the boy’s enthusiasm, Wallace left him with a copy of his book, The Malay Archipelago, the land of Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise. The gift was to prove life changing. David became obsessed with reaching the Malay Archipelago to sample the exotic foods like durian, mangos, langsats and mangosteens that Wallace had described in his book.
In fact, the book planted a seed in the fertile mind of young David – one that quickly germinated. He followed a path into botany and remained set on visiting the Malay Archipelago right into his adult life. As a graduate aged just 25, he secured a grant from the Smithsonian Zoological Society to visit Naples and study algae. It was far from the glamorous assignment to the Malay Archipelago that he desired, but it was at least a chance to leave rural Kansas and see the world.
En route to Naples, he met a wealthy traveller by the name of Barbour Lathrop. In contrast to Wallace, Lathrop travelled for fun rather than scientific discovery. David couldn’t believe his luck. He’d never come across anyone quite like Lathrop, someone able to entertain a room full of people with his stories. David saw this meeting as the beginning of his adventures, his first step away from Kansas into a new and different world.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, scientists like Edison, Hertz, Marconi and Tesla were shaping the world in previously unthinkable ways. But on the dinner tables of America, it was a completely different story. Things had changed very little since the founding fathers. Food was unpretentious and utilitarian, reflecting a need for survival over gastronomic delight. Meals were usually plain and simple, based on reliable farming staples such as beef, potatoes, peas and beans, along with easy-to-grow root vegetables like carrots, beetroot and turnips.
The fruit bowls of the United States were filled with European varieties of apples, pears and plums. Exotic fruits would have been just that – unusual oddities from distant lands. In 1876, for example, bananas were sold as an attention-grabbing delicacy at the World’s Fair in Philadelphia. They were served peeled, sliced, and wrapped in paper, as their phallic shape would have upset the sensibilities of the day. Americans ate the fruit with a knife and fork.
There was clearly a public appetite for new and unusual foods. There was also an economic imperative. America’s westward expansion meant that the amount of farmed land was getting bigger and bigger. Yet these new farmers were growing the same staple crops. As a result, the prices plummeted, and the US government recognised the need to diversify.
Whilst Fairchild was still occupied with the laborious job of collecting and studying Neapolitan algae, he received a telegram from the United States Department of Agriculture. The message requested that he travel immediately to Corsica to retrieve a sample of the ‘Citron’ – a large, rough lemon with a thick rind that was one of the ancestors of modern commercial citrus fruits. At this time the American stock of citrus fruits was struggling, as many trees were succumbing to disease. So, new specimens of citron plants were vital to improve the failing genetic diversity of the American crop.
This was a time of unresolved European conflict, driven by imperialist wars in North Africa. Corsica’s position in the middle of the Mediterranean meant it was on the front line for international espionage. So, when Fairchild started taking photographs in a busy marketplace, it was perhaps unsurprising that he was promptly arrested as a spy. Unable to speak the language, he struggled to explain his actions, but eventually the authorities let him go. Fairchild may have been an agricultural spy, but he was not seen as a threat to Corsican national security.
Despite this, the police were still riled. They told him to leave the island as soon as possible and never to return. Fortunately, on the way to the boat, he spotted a citron growing in a field, and unwilling to go home empty handed, he took a number of cuttings and some seeds from the plant. Placing the cuttings inside a potato, in an effort to keep them alive (a trick he would continue to do throughout his career), he sent them back to the US and made it out of Corsica. The citron proved to be worthy breeding stock, bolstering the burgeoning American citrus market – only surpassed by the Californian orange some decades later.
Shortly after Fairchild’s success with the citron, Barbour Lathrop, the man he met on the steamer, got back in touch. He offered Fairchild $1,000 to travel to Java to find new food plants and send them back to America. Lathrop saw this as an investment, as well as a way to secure his name in the history books. After his sobering Corsican adventure, David was understandably sceptical. It took him a full year to come round to this idea. But in time, he and Lathrop developed an unlikely friendship, travelling the world in search of exotic food plants.
Lathrop was far more generous than the US government, whose grants sometimes didn’t even stretch to food or onward travel. But in Lathrop’s company, Fairchild ate fine foods in the first-class dining rooms of oceangoing steamships and transcontinental trains, as well as enjoying the hospitality of some of the world’s best hotels.
However, the duo’s trips were a curious mix of luxury and danger. On a trip to South America, Lathrop almost died of yellow fever and swore never to return to the region. In Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Fairchild caught typhoid and only just left the country with his life. On a mule ride between Santiago and Buenos Aires, when crossing the high Andes, Fairchild’s mule kicked and lost its balance, almost sending him down a 1,000ft ravine to his death. Despite this setback, Fairchild discovered a protein-rich crop endemic to the region called quinoa. The crop was the main staple of Andean farmers. Ultimately, it would take off in America too – but not until a lifetime later.
On another journey, this time to the South Pacific island of Fiji, they met with a tribal chieftain who complained that he was no longer able to eat his favourite food of ‘long pig’. He bemoaned the fact that roast pork, a meat introduced by white settlers, was a poor substitute. Fairchild learned that long pig was best baked in pits of banana leaves, along with starchy roots like yams and taros. Back then, Fiji was known as ‘The Cannibal Islands’ and the ‘long pig’ that the chief was no longer allowed to eat was in fact human flesh. Despite being told that the thumb and palm were the choicest ‘long pig’ cuts, Fairchild declined to sample the meat!
Alas, not all of Fairchild’s imports were of benefit to America. He is largely responsible for an invasive species of mangrove, a large flowering shrub able to thrive in salty water. Unfortunately, Fairchild’s mangrove escaped cultivation and has now spread throughout Florida. The problems with the introduced mangrove are twofold – it not only out competes the native mangrove, it also fails to support the variety of local wildlife species in the same way as the native plant. This has proved catastrophic to many indigenous species of bird and fish in the state.
Viewed through a modern lens, Fairchild might be seen less as an explorer and more as a bio-pirate, pillaging and exploiting the natural resources of developing nations. His work can be seen as an abuse of colonial power. Yet Fairchild felt he was simply helping his emerging country thrive and prosper – after all, the United States was not then the huge economic power that it is today. Fairchild may have been fallible, but you cannot deny his impact on world cuisine. So, next time you tuck into a lunch of quinoa salad with a side of avocado, perhaps washed down with a mango smoothie, spare a thought for the man who made it possible.
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