Daniel Stone - The food explorer: the true adventures of the globe-trotting botanist who transformed what America eats

One of the humbling parts of being an American is the regular reminder that no matter how swollen Americas pride or power, nothing has been American for very long. A few years ago, it occurred to me that the same way immigrants came to our soil, so did our food.

I was at my desk one morning researching a story for National Geographic when I came across a map showing where popular crops were first domesticated. Floridas famous oranges grew first in China. The bananas in every American supermarket originated in Papua New Guinea. Apples that Washington claims as its heritage came from Kazakhstan, and Napas grapes saw their first light in the Caucasus. To ask when these became American crops seemed a little like asking how people from England became Americans. It was, in a word, complicated.

But as I continued to dig, deeper and deeper, there appeared to be a moment of clarity, a moment in history when new foods arrived on Americas shores with the suddenness of a steamship entering a harbor. The late nineteenth centurya time known as the Gilded Age, the rise of industrial America, the golden age of travelwas a formative era in the United States. The opening of oceans and countries allowed a young scientist named David Fairchild to scour the planet for new foods and plants and bring them back to enliven his country. Fairchild saw world-changing innovation, and in a time that glorified men of science and class, he found his way into parlors of distinction not by pedigree but through relentless curiosity.

The way I became obsessed with this story seems, in retrospect, predictable. All my life Ive been fascinated by fruit, the more tropical the better. When I was a kid, my parents took my sister and me to Hawaii because my dad thought we needed to see things. I ate two whole pineapples, followed by a stomachache that burned hotter than Mauna Loa. Sometimes at home my mom would cut me a mango by shaving down the sides, and while I ate the pieces, shed keep whittling away at the stone. It was mangoes, not my dentist, that taught me the value of floss.

In college, I worked on a farm, walking the hot rows of an orchard grading peaches. The goal was to find the superior varieties to prioritize for the following season, like performing eugenics on fruit. But distraction came easy. Id finish shifts with the juice of dozens of peaches soaking my shirt, and, again, usually a stomachache. Before I moved to Washington, D.C., to write about politics, a friend offered me a job on his farm, picking fruit and selling it at the kind of Northern California farmers markets where people use words like varietals and terroir. I declined so I could follow a dream, although I spent years sitting in congressional hearings imagining my alter ego, windows down in a pickup truck, on empty farm back roads.

Several years later, when I heard about Fairchild, what struck me first was that this was a man who had made fruit his joband not just familiar crops, but things no one had ever tasted. When I told friends how Fairchild had given the United States its first official avocados, people wanted to nominate him for sainthood. I started to enjoy reciting his greatest hitsdates, mangoes, pistachios, Egyptian cotton, wasabi, cherry blossomsand watching peoples eyebrows go up. Almost every time they would say something like, Gosh, it never dawned on me someone brought those things here. We tend to think of food from the ground as a type of environmental entitlement that predates humans, a connection with the raw planet itself. But what we eat is no less curated than a museum exhibit. Fairchild saw the opportunity in a bare canvas to add new color and texture.

Fairchilds life is the story of Americas blooming relationship with the world at the turn of the twentieth century. He visited more than fifty countries, almost all by boat, before airplanes and automobiles shrank the planet. His passions and interests preceded our modern-day fixation on food and what the economic, biological, and ecological effects are of a meals cultivation, transport, and consumption. Fairchild was the embodiment of boundless hunger and insatiable wanderlust, and his lifes work was a quest to answer,