In a busy market in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, the botanist David Fairchild, sporting a pith helmet, white suit, and large white mustache, ate a halved bael fruit with a tiny spoon. He examined betel nuts and grabbed the arm of a passing vendor to inspect the large bunch of coconuts balanced on his head. It was 1925, and Fairchild was leading an expedition to Ceylon, Sumatra, and Java on behalf of the United States Department of Agriculture in search of foreign plants to introduce to American growers, a trip documented in a silent film. After the market, the plant explorers visited a village where locals demonstrated various uses of the Palmyra palm, “a handsome and extremely valuable plant,” and carved open gigantic jackfruits.
Fairchild was the head of the Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction, a section of the USDA founded in 1898 to search the world for plants that could boost commercial agriculture at home and reduce economic reliance on imports. Atelier Éditions recently published a book documenting this project to expand the American palate: An Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits & Nuts, a sampling of watercolors from the department’s pomological collection. In a time before color photography was widespread, USDA artists, many with decades-long careers at the agency, created 7,584 technically accurate illustrations to record this cornucopia of the new. Along with short essays, including excerpted musings on fruit from Michael Pollan and John McPhee, the catalog contains the most visually striking of these images, from the incandescent King tangor to the dusky, green-fleshed Tragedy plum.
While fruits have never contributed as much to the economy as staples like soybeans, which last year brought $25.7 billion in exports as a result of varieties found by USDA explorers, they evoke more passionate cravings. Pineapples, native to South America and costly to grow in hothouses in northern climates, became a status symbol in Europe and colonial America; it was possible for middle-class households to rent individual fruits to show off as centerpieces at dinner parties, even if they could not afford to eat them. Until recent methods of refrigeration and transportation, fruit cultivation could defy even royal command: Queen Victoria was fixated on tasting a mango, but the fruit could not survive the six-week sea voyage from India.
Though we now eat fruits from every part of the globe in every season, the selection we enjoy is far more limited than the one promised by the USDA’s mouthwatering collection. The concerted efforts of plant explorers, researchers, breeders, marketers, government officials, entrepreneurs, and giant corporations enabled fruit to flow around the globe—but at a human, ecological, and ultimately gustatory cost.