100 Million Years of Food, page 5
From being a seasonal snack in traditional settings, fruits in industrialized countries have become sweet, cheap, and holy: Fruits offer urbanites, weary of the associations of meat with disease and cruelty, the opportunity to detox with spiritually unblemished food, a karmic train that inches forward with every four or five bucks forked out for a mega-sized fruit smoothie. Sadly, our ancestors jumped off the tracks leading to Fruit Heaven 16 million years ago, rendering our genes and livers unsuitable for daily jug-loads of fructose. Such a dilemma, however, only arises when we lose sight of cuisine and obsess instead over nutrition. Unlike the here-today-gone-tomorrow wonders of scientific-pop nutrition, traditional cuisines are products of exquisite culture, symphonies of flavors and complementary foods that arose from the mistakes and insights of generations of eaters. People in traditional societies ate fruits in moderate quantities that their bodies could absorb.
Traditional cuisine, in turn, is intimately tied to ecology, the plants and animals that are naturally suited to a given place. Plants and animals can be grown and raised on industrial-sized operations that require a blizzard of chemicals and automation, but people around the world are experimenting with permaculture, the notion of living in an ecologically sustainable manner. Fruits and nuts are important in this movement because they could provide more food than meat could refurbish for a given plot of land. Soon after visiting my friend Bajish in Kerala, I discovered by chance that one of the most visionary and brave pioneers of permaculture lives in the Indian state of Goa, on the western coast of the country, not far from Kerala.
*
I lean into the turns around Chorao, an island tucked into the hip of the slow-flowing Mandovi River, and sweep past dense fronds on either side of the narrow road, the occasional motorbike or small truck overtaking me. I’m in no rush.
My new friend Hyacinth wrote out the directions last night at her dinner table in her architect’s clear script, amid a medley of banana liquor, stir-fried squash, and bitter melon. A crazy kitten kept jumping on the table and kitchen counter, trying to pilfer food. The directions were to a farm owned by a young woman who was a client-turned-friend of Hyacinth. The next morning, after a breakfast of fragrant, warm homemade naan bread, Hyacinth and her friend Jean chaperoned me to a motorcycle rental shop on an oil-blackened side street. The two ladies haggled with the slicked-hair dealer over the rental price. Jean used her status as a high-ranking bureaucrat to vouch for my name, in lieu of leaving my passport. She whispered at me, in a fierce tone, “You can never trust these people, Stephen. Always keep your passport with you.” I was always happy to know someone local; it was better than having insurance. I bade the ladies farewell, fired up the motor, and puttered out to the little highway running along the coastline. On my way out of the city, I stopped at a liquor store to buy a bottle of Indian rosé wine of uncertain quality (trusting the advice of the proprietress), then buzzed across the two-mile causeway, just making it onto a ferry before it set out across the sluggish brown river like a hippopotamus.
I ride across Chorao Island, appreciating the scenes of dense foliage, quiet streets, scattered houses. Soon I regain the mainland. Hyacinth’s map is a montage of strong arrows, confident circles, bold lettering. The route is roundabout in comparison to the optimal line that Google Maps conjured, but now I appreciate that Hyacinth wanted me to savor the forests of Chorao Island, a welcome respite from the dusty wide roads and manic flow of trucks and motorbikes on the mainland. Two hours later, I arrive in a small village. My cell phone has no signal, so I ask to borrow a phone from the man behind the counter at a grocery store. I call the number that Hyacinth gave me, trying to reach the owner of the permaculture farm. No answer. I call Hyacinth, who is busy conducting exams for architecture students, and she tries the same number and also gets no answer.
I sit down for a lunch at a restaurant, politely turning down the offer of cutlery, because I’m starting to get the hang of scooping rice and curry with my fingers after patient coaching from Bajish. The curry is blistering hot, but after a week of digging into Indian cuisine, I’ve lost my extreme sensitivity to chili heat. The owner of the restaurant tries calling the number. No answer. The brother of the owner of the restaurant tries calling as well, but no answer. I call Hyacinth, and she, still in the middle of conducting exams, tries again, with no luck. The brother of the owner of the restaurant takes me to his roadside shop, which sells packaged snacks and drinks. He offers me a finger-length sweet banana. His wife, standing behind the counter of their shop, calls the number. No answer.
Hyacinth calls back on the restaurant owner’s phone to tell me the name of the farm, which she learned from a colleague. The restaurant owner gets on my rented motorbike, and I hop on behind. After a few minutes, we take a side road that undulates through thin forests and scraggly fields, reaching a hand-painted sign that announces Foyt’s Farm. We ride along a bumpy lane, fumble with a rickety gate, then come to a low red-tiled bungalow. I go around to the back, where a woman and man are sitting on benches and engaged in rapt discussion. Seeing me arrive, the man departs and the woman rises to greet me.
“Oh, you finally got here. I was wondering when you would get here,” she says.
“I’m Stephen. I tried calling your phone…”
“Ah. I must have turned it off.”
Her eyes sparkle and her chin is held high. However, she also carries an embattled air. Clea is the owner of Foyt’s Farm, a twelve-acre working farm and learning center, and she never seems to stop moving. On the day that I arrive, she has been busy trying to preserve an insect-infested tree by coating its base with a natural pesticide, finding out what happened to all her chicks (“Perhaps a hawk or mongoose got at them”), and directing the workmen who are installing a sink (“It’s crooked!”) in her guesthouse bathroom. Clea has been offering instruction in permaculture and plans to take in more students, but for that to happen she needs to upgrade the bathroom facilities. While my host whirls about her tasks, I take a nap on an inviting outdoor bed, next to a tethered calf that was separated from its mother for medical treatment. Once in a while the calf belts out a loud mooo and is answered by its mother on the other side of the house.
The workers finish at five in the afternoon, and Clea comes over to chat with me, looking much more relaxed. Trained at Cambridge as a plant physiologist, she put her Ph.D. on hold to start a permaculture farm in her native country (the weather and food in England didn’t suit her). With her father’s help, she eventually bought an abandoned farm that she had fallen in love with, a dozen acres deep in the backwoods of Goa. Her self-stated mission is “I want to revolutionize the way that Indians conduct agriculture.”
She and I set off on a tour of the farm. First it’s the chicken coop, where twelve hens (sadly without their chicks) are kept at night to protect them from panthers and other nocturnal predators. Clea doesn’t raise the chickens for their meat; their job is to pick off termites.
“All the wood structures are safe. Ask all the architects in Goa, they say you can’t use wood: ‘All the termites!’ We have termite mounds around the farm, but no termites around the house. I think it’s because of my chickens.”
The chickens also poop in the soil and aerate the earth through their digging and scratching. Once in a while, Clea harvests the hens’ eggs. We approach the cow stall where Clea keeps a few cows and their calves. Like the chickens, these cows have it pretty good; they will be neither milked nor butchered.
“I just want them for their piss and shit,” she says, in her characteristic blunt manner.
Cattle urine and manure make excellent fertilizer. In true permaculture spirit, she also captures the waste from her own toilet to grow her vegetables. She discovered through experimentation a method of treating urine and feces from a regular flush toilet; the toilet output could be used to grow vegetables, with no adverse health effects noted.
We descend into the fruit terrace, which resembles a modern-day Garden of Eden: trees bearing juicy sweet lime-green star fruit, crunchy rose-pink heart-shaped love apples, and a profusion of cashew apples, odd yellow-red triangular fruit with hooked appendages harboring the cashew seed. While I’m stuffing my face on star fruit and love apples, we reach an old concrete dam and the waterfall that runs beneath it. Clea is trying to design her guesthouse bathroom so that slabs of cool smooth gray stone in the shower re-create the ambience of bathing in the waterfall. We ascend a short ridge, just as the last of the light fades from the warm Goan night sky. Clea points out a distant phalanx of trees demarcating the valley. In the middle of her property stands an old crooked tree with menacing spindly limbs raised against the sky, bristling like a gargoyle. “The Devil’s tree,” she says, laughingly.
According to the previous farmer and local folklore, the property was cursed by this tree and crop yields were consequently low. The farm was abandoned, and Clea was able to buy the property, one step closer to realizing her dream. Clea notes that the true value of her long scientific education was that it equipped her with a skeptical mind and a love of experimentation. The farmer’s principal error, to her way of thinking, was that he used crude rice monoculture practices, stripping the land of its natural cover and exposing the nutrients to leaching and erosion. It was this practice, rather than the Devil’s tree, that doomed his crops. Clea takes me to a patch of earth on the farm that is caked, dry, and barren, as if it were the boot-print of a giant. Clea says that when she bought the property, all the earth looked like this. Over a span of four years, with the help of her students and hired workers, Clea has slowly brought the land back to life by analyzing the soil chemistry and water runoff patterns, using plants with matted roots and weeds to hold the soil, and employing a variety of other ingenious techniques. Foyt’s Farm is an example of a self-sustaining ecosystem, whose general strategies can be used in other places to return to a more locally efficient method of farming.
In the remaining eerie dusk light, we gather fallen cashew fruit in our hands, the smell of the soft, broken fruit lustful and cloying. Clea planted trees on her property that give off strong perfumes, to confuse insect pests as they try to home in on the scent of their preferred host plants. This lessens the need for chemical pesticides and provides a natural fragrance.
The strenuous beating of drums can be heard in the distance.
“It’s India. There’re always festivals going on,” she tells me.
I follow the thin swath lit by Clea’s torch as we head back to her dwelling. Clea harvests arugula and lettuce from the greenhouse (ratlike bandicoots have been breaking in and wreaking havoc) next to her open-air kitchen. She pulls out a package of homegrown cashews from a freezer and pulverizes them into a cream with a countertop blender. One of her workers fetches a strand of black and green pepper from a vine growing around a tree near the house. A squirt of homegrown lemon into the cashew cream, a sprinkle of fresh peppercorns. We tuck into the meal. The heat of the peppercorns and arugula and sour lemon sets off the cashew cream perfectly. I ask for another helping. And another.
“Have some more dressing,” Clea says. “Every day I eat this and every day I get excited!”
“You’re living in paradise,” I respond, overwhelmed by the feast.
“I think so, but no one else does. They think I’m crazy.”
We happily eat, slurp, and grunt. Clea sighs, indicating her ample waist. “I eat far too much, though, way more than I should. I have a lot of healthy meals, but when the bananas are ripe, I eat six or seven a day. I eat cashews, all fattening!” Clea notes my empty bowl. “Shall I get you another star fruit? This is a meal!”
It’s remarkable to think of what Clea has achieved on the strength of her determination, ingenuity, and passion for sustainable farming. By comparison, Clea’s sister is the model of Indian respectability: educated at Berkeley in economics, then Harvard Business School, and now employed at one of the biggest management consultancies in the world. Clea’s sister is married, has two kids and a big house in Belgium, and employs a maid. Clea expresses not the slightest iota of envy for her sister’s life. Clea recalls that she never played with dolls; she once asked her parents for an elephant and horses but was given instead a dog, ducks, rabbits, tortoises—anything her parents thought she could handle.
I bring out the rosé wine. It is terrible—never trust these liquor store owners—but as we sit there in the utter darkness, Clea becomes expansive. Her parents wanted her to get married, but Clea’s relationship is on the rocks.
“Who wants to live with a crazy woman in the jungle?” she says.
We listen for the sounds of a panther that roams the perimeters of the farm, stalking the chickens. Clea seems unperturbed. “You can sense its presence, the way a twig snaps … not like a wild boar blundering in the bush.”
It’s unnerving to think that a large predator is roaming beyond the circle of feeble light emitted from the house; I think I might have to pee soon. A tiger had been spotted before in a nearby village, and a twelve-foot cobra was caught on the property once. Clea says this is when she is happiest, alone at night, sharing the jungle with wild animals, soothed by the entrancing perfume emanating from her trees, living on a farm that had been abandoned but has now begun to heal, yielding the sweetest, most satisfying fruits that a human could possibly ask for.
THE TEMPTATION OF MEAT
I shot a large roan antelope which was divided among twenty-two adults and forty-seven children in a community where there had not been much meat available recently.… [An] old lady cried light-heartedly, hitting her stomach, “I have been turned into a young girl, my heart is so light.”
—AUDREY ISABEL RICHARDS, Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia: An Economic Study of the Bemba Tribe
Fruits have their devotees; in modern times, some people have subsisted largely or even entirely on fruit. However, in the long history of food, our affection for fruit pales in comparison to our worship of meat. It’s true that some people abstain from meat, many of them repulsed by meat’s taste and associations, but instances like this represent triumphs of mind over body. Human babies are not so complicated. A few days ago I watched my nine-month-old nephew in action during lunch. Arrayed on his plastic tray were diced bits of carrots, green beans, and stewed pork. His pudgy little hand reached out and vigorously swept aside the green beans, seizing instead the morsels of pork, every last one. In the years to come, he might ponder his relationship with meat and spurn it for a spell, as many of my friends and family have done, along with myself; for now, his genes have programmed him to target meat over veggies. In the turbulent religion of food, infants dwell peacefully, having no inkling of sin. The puzzle over meat goes beyond morality, though; even from a biological or archaeological viewpoint, many researchers grapple with why and how humans developed a taste for meat, the hallmark of the Paleo or caveman diet.
*
Dominic looks me up and down. A former rugby player twice my girth, he could quash my toothpick frame at a moment’s notice. An overhead fan spins sluggishly, not enough to churn and dissipate the thick heat coiling around us and the other waiting passengers. “You’re a student?” he asks. “You can visit my village, if you wish. I live in the rainforest. It won’t be what you’re used to.” He steps out into the sun to buy me a Coke from a vending machine, sealing our agreement in a stream of ice-cold fizzy brown soda.
I’m in Papua New Guinea to scout a future site for my dissertation research. Before writing their dissertations, anthropology graduate students are required to undertake fieldwork. Papua New Guinea has long been a magnet for anthropologists, because the region’s steep mountain ranges and thick jungle terrain led to the evolution of a profusion of cultures and more than eight hundred distinct languages.1 I selected the province of West New Britain for my fieldwork site because from satellite and atlas maps, only a single spindly road could be seen worming into the interior, which meant that I would have a better chance of observing more intact cultural traditions. However, the lack of infrastructure in West New Britain also meant that it was impossible for me to arrange contacts in advance. To my great fortune, after I caught a lift to an airport on the northern side of West New Britain in the back of a pickup, my driver happened to see his friend Dominic in the waiting room and introduced us, giving me a precious contact in the interior.
An hour or so later, our bush plane shudders over a forested mountain range. The pilot boomerangs over a cove and drops us swiftly onto a grass landing strip. Dominic leads me through the dusty lanes of the town of Kandrian to stock up on tinned mackerel, rice, batteries, kerosene, and tarp. We lug the boxes to an outboard boat. When enough passengers are gathered, the craft skims out of the cove like a flying fish. We endure numbing sea spray, but after nightfall the waters are lit by glimmering bioluminescent plankton. Eventually we spot flickering torches and huts on stilts. Dominic’s name is taken up by a chorus piping in the night. Villagers wade out to the boat and hoist our belongings to shore.
At daybreak, the outboard boat is maneuvered into the maw of a mangrove channel. We pole through shallows, then hike two hours along a slippery trail to the hedges of bougainvillea bordering Dominic’s village. Dominic introduces me to his nephews Aloish and Frank, two easygoing New Guineans in their early twenties. Dominic quickly organizes a work party to build a hut for me next to his house. The walls consist of three panels of aluminum siding, with another piece as the roof. Branches are lashed together to make my bed, and two other beds are fashioned for Aloish and Frank. I hang my mosquito net over the bed. Aloish and Frank build up a fire in the middle of the hut. I have a thin blanket to keep me warm and a mosquito net to keep off the bugs, unlike the two young men shivering in the cold.
