Friday Night: Book Love

I recently read The Food Explorer by Daniel Stone, which turned out to be a delightful intersection of three things that I love: food, horticulture, and adventure stories.

The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats is a biography of David Fairchild who spent the turn of the 20^th century collecting plants from all over the world with the goal of introducing new foods to grow in the United States. What may have been his greatest, or at least his most showy, accomplishment is the introduction of the Japanese cherry trees that bloom so beautifully in the spring in Washington D.C.

Stone takes us through Fairchild’s life from his youthful obsession with travelling to Java to bumping into and bonding with the right kind of people to get him there to being the guy who could send the next food explorers out on their adventures. He was dedicated and affable, the right kind of nerd to get a job done while being attractive to the people who would be willing to pay for his projects.

While Fairchild may have begun as a somewhat obsessive and socially awkward young man, he was taken under the wing of Barbour Lathrop, a wealthy bachelor who made him kind of a personal project. And took him around the world multiple times. Lathrop wasn’t the only influence from which Fairchild benefited (he married into Alexander Graham Bell’s family), but he really seemed to take good care of the resources people invested in him.

As Fairchild settled down and stopped globetrotting, he was responsible for sending out other successful food explorers, such as Wilson Popenoe, who was obsessed with avocados, and Frank Meyer. While few people may have been acquainted with Fairchild (or Popenoe) before The Food Explorer was published, Meyer’s name is more familiar. Meyer, an extraordinarily obsessive, and probably quite clinically depressed individual, is the one who brought the tasty, sweeter lemon from China, the one that was eventually named after him.

It’s hard not to feel like David Fairchild led a rather charmed life. He attracted patronage and made influential connections, but he was no manipulator or freeloader. Sometimes, he seems like a loveable goof, others like a naïve genius. We know what he thought because he wrote so much down. We know what he accomplished because we’re still eating and enjoying a lot of it today.

I don’t like to give too much of the content away when I write about a book I enjoy, but try instead to tell you what I like about it. I try to say what it is about the style or the story that I enjoyed. In the case of The Food Explorer when I think back on the way it was written, I feel like Daniel Stone did the hard work of letting a good tale tell itself. The presence of the author is not in embellishment or sensation, but in the appreciation of a good story, the life of an interesting man who made positive contributions to the world he lived in.

If you like The Food Explorer by Daniel Stone, you might also like The Garden of Invention by Jane S. Smith and The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan.

One year ago: 14 Favorites with Citrus Fruits

Thanks to Jenna, Keith, Cate, and Julia for giving me this book for Christmas!