The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats (2018) is about David Fairchild in the early 19thcentury.
David Fairchild was a 25-year-old American botanist from Kansas who, from 1894, searched the world for new plants to bring back to his country, specifically new food plants, especially fruit. He thought the food in America was bland, and that there must be exotic fruits and vegetables elsewhere in the world.
His first trip was to the French island of Corsica, then across to Italy, Germany, and the Alps. In 1897, he thought Sydney in Australia was a ‘metropolis of wonder.’ Here he saw the richness of ‘all the grains on earth’ – wheat, rye, oats, rice, corn, barley, and millet. In 1903, his arms couldn’t hold all the dates he found in Baghdad, Iraq.
He found the tropics to be dream locations for unusual plants, and Bavaria was wonderful for hops. In Japan he found the glorious cherry blossom that now blooms in the American capital, Washington DC. He remembers the taste of his first durian, his first pomegranate, his first kale, his first wasabi, and in Jamaica, his first ‘lumpy, reddish fruit called an akee.’
But this is not just about plants – it is about other farmers and growers in the world, and what he could learn from them. And collectibles, such as Javanese batik cloths, ‘pieces of material with geometric designs made by molds of hot wax.’ David Fairchild was interested in everything and everyone.
His aim was, he wrote in 1917: ‘We have only one life to live and we want to spend it enriching our own country with the plants of the world which produce good things to eat and to look at.’ He was talking about his colleague Frank Meyer, but Frank died in China in 1918. Fairchild too had his share of illnesses and diseases, as well as being arrested.
This true adventure tale is deliciously full of exotic places and the diversity of crops, like a global fruit bowl. Just take your pick.
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MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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