I Never Tasted It

1

I HAVE been playing with many sorts of new fruits and vegetables ever since New Year’s, 1897, off Penang, when I promised my old friend Barbour Lathrop that I would stop studying termites and make my lifework the introduction of new fruits and plants into America.

“ Uncle Barbour” was a real gourmet; he had been around the globe twenty times and had tasted the dishes of the distant peoples on this planet. He believed we had a lot to learn; he knew that many of his countrymen were, so far as their taste in foods was concerned, still in the “ham and eggs, grits and bacon” stage. Pie à la mode had not then been invented.

When he urged me to become an introducer of plants, it was not his idea that I should go about tasting and recommending any food that might happen to evolve from plant materials. He knew that appetites differ (he himself never came to like the durian) and that most people are thoughtless about their food. He taught me, for example, not to blunt my appetite with bread when some delicate meat or fish had been ordered. I remember a meal we had in Vienna. He had ordered a sterlet, which he said was the finest-flavored fish in the world, when his eye caught me stuffing French bread — great slices off a loaf two feet long — into my mouth.

“Haven’t you got any sense? Don’t you know I have ordered a sterlet ? Do you know what a sterlet from the Danube costs? If only to respect my pocket book, can’t you control that habit of bread eating? ”

Under the hammering of his sarcasm, I came to pay attention to what I ate. I had already done a little exploring on my own in Italy, where I acquired a surprising taste for Vermicelli à la Napolitaine, Macaroni con Pomodoro, and la Sorba, a favorite fruit of the South Italians which must be almost rotten before it is good. Because of my acquisitions in Italy, my friends in Washington had given me something of a reputation as a connoisseur of foods. I sent them fifty-two varieties of “pastas,” the various forms of macaroni to be found on the Naples market, and had told them how to cook spaghetti. For in those days, which still seem as yesterday, the macaronis were almost unknown to most Americans. The stuff we cooked in a baking dish had little in common with the great macaroni dishes of Italy. The macaroni made in America was not made of the same kind of flour; it was made of soft Fife wheat and had a chalky look and taste about it. But my friends liked the vermicelli and spaghetti I brought them from the other side.

Now forty years have passed and I have been asked by a Boston editor to give an account of “the strange foods” such as those he tasted at our table in Coconut Grove out under the big Ficus tree — the dasheen and Talinum and the Chaya.

His visit reminds me of another editors’ luncheon I attended — when I was the guest of the late Walter Hines Page and his partner, F. N. Doubleday, at Garden City, Long Island. I was trying to stir up interest in dasheens and had sent some ahead for this meal. The cook served them well and all the editors tasted them. Some said they were fine, some said they were inferior to potatoes, and some, seeing that they were covered with fibers, called them “bearded potatoes.” Mr. Page declared he liked them, and I left the table comforted, although not much encouraged. It makes a lot of difference what adjectives you use.

My friend and co-worker, Robert Young, and I decided we should work out some recipes for this new root vegetable. We burned much midnight oil preparing advertising signs; we wrote descriptive accounts of the dasheen and took hundreds of attractive photographs of a field of dasheens in West Florida, of the tubers alone, and of the deliciouslooking finished products, such as dasheen chips, baked dasheen, mashed dasheen, and dasheens used for turkey stuffing. We were ahead of the times with our photographic representations of foods pleasingly served.

But with all our enthusiasm we ran head on into the impossibility of describing the flavor of this thing which we held admiringly in our hands. “What is a dasheen, anyhow?” people would ask. When we tried to tell our listeners, they looked at us with a vacant stare. “Oh, it’s just a kind of potato,” they would conclude. “But it has a different taste,” we would insist. “Is it better?” they would retort. “Well, perhaps not better, but different it has a nutty flavor.” “Who wants a nutty flavor in his potatoes? I don’t.” And there the conversation came to a standstill. “Drat them,” we thought, “they have made up their minds to dislike our dasheen before they have even tasted it.” And at that time there was no radio, no radio chant available — Dasheens, why not try the Delicious Dasheens!

— with which to overcome that distaste. It made no difference that the dasheen was a delicious vegetable upon which whole populations depend for their daily meal; it still is no better known in the United States than our Indian corn is known in Ireland or France — and no more appreciated, let me add.

2

SINCE those days of youthful enthusiasms, many changes, such as that produced by the soy bean, have come about through the introduction of foreign plants into our gardens and our farms. And I am still working at the problem of popularizing them, if it can be called a problem. Instead of describing my Talinum, a summer spinach from the tropics, which hundreds of South Florida growers are eating, or the Chaya from Honduras, the fresh leaves of which sting one’s hands but which have five times as much vitamin C as does the citrus fruit, let me explore for a little this question of taste, which I appreciate more as our guests fly in and out every week from the farthest spots around the globe.

During the days of our dasheen “drive,” my wife and I went one day to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and on the wall of the hotel bedroom I saw a poem which opened my eyes to one of the obstructions in the way of my attempt to popularize foreign fruits and vegetables. It was a British rhyme. I wish I had my copy handy. It characterized the French as “the frog-eating Frenchmen” in comparison with the “beef and ale Britishers.” The inference was that nobody who liked frogs’ legs could be any good

— as a fighter, in any case. For how could frogs’ legs compare with roast beef or beefsteak as food for soldiers?

I little dreamed that one day I should hear from the lips of the French Ambassador to Washington — to whom we had gone with a proposal that we send a team of sweet potato growers to grow sweets in Algeria, and thus help the food situation in France

— that his countrymen would not eat sweet potatoes. He had once tasted one that had been placed on his plate at a dinner party. “But,” he declared, “I would never eat another.” And this while our boys fighting in France were eager for them — “If only I could get my teeth into a Jersey sweet!”

Gradually it dawned on me that there was nothing trivial about these vagaries in taste — that they were evidences of something deeper and more significant than I had dreamed of. The man in the street would say, “You cannot discuss matters of taste,” and if he wanted to be impressive he would say it in Latin. But there was something elemental in this difference and at times this hostility of taste.

My old friend William Morton Wheeler of Harvard gave me a German translation of a book by a Spaniard, Turró, which attempted to show that the origin of consciousness in a newborn babe gathers about the sense of taste. Soon after this, Professor G. H. Parker published a book on the sense of taste, and from it I learned about the functions of the different taste buds which cover various areas of the tongue, each conveying to the brain its distinct sensation, be it of sweetness or bitterness or acidity or salinity. Until this time I think I had assumed that the senses of taste of my friends were substantially the same as my own; and when they refused to like what I did, I attributed their disgust to indifference or plain prejudice.

Much later there came the discoveries of Dr. A. F. Blakeslee, who, by the use of a standard synthetic chemical called phenyl-thio-carbamide, demonstrated that some persons have taste buds incapable of detecting its flavor, which to others seems intensely and even objectionably bitter. Experiments with a “taster paper” (sheets of paper soaked in the chemical) led to a suspicion which seems well founded, that those who are “tasters’ and can detect the bitterness get this sensitivity of their taste buds from their ancestors; that it has a hereditary factor in it. After this discovery, people could no longer be dogmatic and declare that “it is all foolishness, this idea that you don’t like chocolate, or coffee, or the bitter quality of beer.”

In other words, to apply it personally, my taste buds seemed to react to certain flavors in a different way from those of many of my friends. I could enjoy foods which they objected to and said they could not learn to like.

This discovery made me more tolerant. It began to be evident that there was a physical basis for taste; that to insist people should all like the same thing was unscientific; and that to be annoyed when people did not like my new fruits was perhaps unwarranted. How could I have any good idea of just what impression a delicious — to me — canistel was making on my friends’ taste buds when I watched their wry faces as they tasted it?

3

BUT this analysis of taste buds was only part of t he answer. Secretary of Agriculture Wilson refused even to taste the beautiful mango I brought him. He had fixed food habits, I concluded. He was a man from the hog and corn region of Iowa and saw no particular reason for changing his ways. Once, to my discomfiture, he inquired why I was introducing a grass from Brazil — the Capim Gordura — if our cattle would not eat it, as had been reported to him from Florida. I did not then know — and doubt if he did either — that sometimes steers brought in from the range will refuse to eat corn, will almost starve before they will touch it. Nor had I at that time seen the movie film of a fat stock show in Brazil which showed all the animals feeding on this disputed grass. Here there was evidently the question of habit, a resistance to the trying of something new, for we know that cattle in Latin America have become fond of the grass. In Colombia, Capim Gordura now covers thousands of miles of mountain slopes and is looked upon as the greatest single plant introduction made there, worth many millions of dollars annually,

I was also forced to recognize another factor in taste in foods — the food allergies. I used to think they were overestimated, though I could not deny that many people were made ill by certain foods, such as cucumbers or oysters. When, however, I was suddenly hit over the head — I might almost say stunned — by an allergy against fish, a food which I had eaten freely for over sixty years, I opened my eyes wide to what appeared to be a change in my old body. David Fairchild of yesterday was not David Fairchild of today; something in the chemical make-up of his body had changed. I was very loat h to believe it, but five successive trials on various kinds of perfectly fresh fish resulted almost immediately in the recognized signs of my allergy — sneezing and nausea and all the rest.

So, instead of becoming simpler, things have become more complex in this field of new foods to which I have long devoted myself.

While we in the Office of Plant Introduction in Washington were bewildered by the various difficulties of popularizing such fruits as the mango and the avocado, the vegetable udo, the various root crops and the shoots of the bamboo, not to mention dehydrated vegetables, other researchers were studying the meaning of words and the effects of distaste with its accompaniment of frustration and hate.

It was in the house of William Morton Wheeler that I met Count Alfred Korzybski. He is one of the most striking-looking and intense persons I have ever met, and Morton and I listened to him for an hour or more. I have kept in rather close touch with Korzybski since that morning in Wheeler’s drawing room, studying his great work, Science and Sanity, and watching the progress of his Institute of General Semantics in Chicago. The conviction has grown on me that our abysmal ignorance of the use of words is not likely to lead us into a world of better agreements, personal or political.

I realized that I was in the realm of general semantics as soon as I attempted to get my friends to see that it was unscientific to blurt out that they did not like mangoes when they had tasted only one of the rank, turpentine-flavored, stringy seedlings which have been responsible for t he labeling of this superb fruit as “a ball of tow dipped in turpentine and molasses, which must be eaten in a bathtub.” This statement, which is true of Mango 1, a turpentine seedling, is utterly false when applied to any of the fine, fiberless, East Indian mangoes. Unfortunately, for a generation the whole American public has been prejudiced — even many otherwise careful scientific men.

Everywhere I turned with my new fruits or vegetables I met the same careless, false-to-fact evaluation of their qualities and their possibilities. Namecalling, ignorant insinuations, even reflections on those who said they were good, universal caricature, unscientific diagnosis of the effects of eating them, and an amazing conservatism have tended to restrict agriculture, not to the food plants which could be grown in a country, but to those which the inhabitants of that country have deigned to learn to eat.

The unreasoning vagaries of taste are, I suspect, one of the many unreasoning prejudices with which all of us fill our short lives and mess up our existences, ending often in that most unscientific behavior known as hate.

4

LISTEN for a moment to our tabic conversation here on The Kampong,

Joe is devouring pigs’ knuckles and dilating on the delicious character of the jelly-like substance under the skin. “But I just can’t eat pumpkin pie; it has something revolting about it. I like sweet potato pie, but pumpkin pie — bah!” “Do you like kidneys?” I inquire. “No, I can’t bear them,” he replies, whereupon Tom states that he is very fond of kidneys, particularly pork kidneys — in fact he likes almost any part of the pig.

In the soup which had just been served, the cook had put the shell-less eggs taken from the ovaries of the hen we were to have for dinner, and we all liked them. But when I described what is one of the great delicacies of the Filipinos (who are good cooks and gourmets), the balut, which is a young unhatched duckling boiled in the shell, both of my guests shuddered and declared they could never eat such a thing. “Think of its feathers and little scaly feet and its eyes,” they said. “No balut for us, thank you.” I could not help wondering how they could eat the stubbly neck, the greasy fat tail or “Pope’s nose,” the legs, the gizzard, the heart, the liver, everything but the crop of a chicken and yet be unable to stand the thought of tasting a little duckling on the half shell.

What is the matter here? What is wrong with the balut? Why this violent, prejudice against it? Had I stayed longer in Manila, I should have studied this balut and might have learned to enjoy it, as has one young Englishman who is interned in Santo Tomas. On a diet of baluts and bananas he is reported to be thriving and to have the appearance of a “well-fed gourmet.”

Tom Barbour and I like the fat grubs which are found in certain forest trees. We have both eaten fried grasshoppers, and Tom has eaten a very long list of animals, including ratt lesnakes, lizards, armadillos, turtles of all sorts, and of course many kinds of game birds and animals from bears to hippopotami and tepesquintli — indeed there seems to be little that moves about and can be caught which he would not taste. In Zanzibar he shocked his family by serving a durian (the fruit that he describes as “a mixture of peach, garlic, and almonds”), upsetting the ladies almost to nausea. But let me put before him a delicious bael fruit, which is the favorite fruit of the Kings of Kandy, and one which the sonnoisseurs in India declare is one of their great fruits, and he will thrust it away at once!

When I sat in the famous Sun Ya restaurant in Shanghai and tasted the strange foods on its menu, I could not but be aware of the enormous richness in the variety of Oriental plants compared with those of our market gardens. A new cookbook just out advertises “ 750 Dishes from Overseas.” The recipes have been gathered from Belgium, Norway, France, Holland, Sweden, Canada, New Zealand, and Africa it says. But on examination I find that in these 750 new dishes only the fifteen commonest garden vegetables are involved, I have on my shelf here Ochse’s Vegetables of the Dutch East Indies, in which more than 300 species of vegetables — not recipes but distinct botanical species — are beautifully illustrated with drawings by Javanese artists.

It may be healthy to recall some of the early prejudices which the grapefruit, the avocado, and the mango had to overcome before they reached the stalls of the ultra-conservative dealers of our great cities. Years ago my friend Joshua Chase, on a chance, sent a couple of crates of grapefruit with his shipment of oranges across the continent to Seattle. He didn’t hear from them until years later when he met the dealer and learned that he had had only one customer for them. This person had bought one of the crates and after eating the fruit had come around and bought the second crate. Nobody else who came to his store had the curiosity to try a grapefruit.

I recall vividly the hours I spent pleading with the managers of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, the Touraine in Boston, and the New Willard in Washington to give the avocado and the mango a chance on their menus; to do their share in advertising and popularizing them. “But that’s the fruitgrower’s business,” they always maintained, not realizing the snags in the way of the grower who tries to promote his small crop of a new fruit.

The more familiar I became with the workings of a large hotel, the more clearly I perceived the difficulties which the chef has to meet in teaching his assistants to prepare any new fruit or vegetable. As one of them expressed it: “I would have a strike on my hands if I tried to get my men to prepare the dasheens you want us to serve.”

There are many strange cases of food prejudice. I recall my old friend George Kennan’s graphic account of the Wandering Koraks of Kamchatka; of how they would guard their reindeer herds through the bitter Arctic night, with temperat ures of 50 below zero, protecting them from the wolves; of how they ate every part of the animals, even the horns and half-digested contents of their stomachs — but never drank their milk. And this in contrast to the Lapps of Norway and the farmers of Alaska, who milk their reindeer regularly.

Eugene André, the orchid hunter of the Orinoco, whom I knew well, once made a disastrous trip up the river Caura in Venezuela to the land of the Waiomgomo Indians. Although half starving, his Indian companions threw away the tripe of the tapirs they shot. They saved the hoofs and scratched carefully on them the sex of the animal.

“For,” they explained, “we use the scrapings from these hoofs for medicine, but to give the scrapings of a male tapir to a man, or of a female one to a woman, annuls its value.”

I once spent a summer at the St. Andrews Biological Station on the Bay of Fundy, watching the fertilization of the sea alga, Fucus. The male cells as they swarmed in their sporangia before darting out to fertilize the eggs floating under my microscope seemed to have personality, and I recall watching one cell whose activity made me single it out as a super individual. I wonder if it beat the others to the egg cell and got into it before they did.

As I am writing these lines, there comes a paper from St. Andrews, in which the author, M. W. Smith, seems to prove that the Chilodon, a species of ciliated protozoan, “selects its food.” At least, when put into a vessel where five million cells of one species of Scenedesmus are all about it and only a hundred thousand of a different genus, Chlamydomonas, the protozoan gorges on the rarer food and hardly touches the more abundant one.

Instinctively we shrug our shoulders and say:

“Well, he just didn t like the one — he preferred the other. Yes; but the mystery remains.