Hey Mother Nature

Gary Nabhan was recently given the honor of presenting the biennial Vavilov Memorial Lecture in Moscow and offering a similar lecture in Saint Petersburg, and was further honored with the gift of the Vavilov Medal. These are his reflections after years of retracing Vavilov through the centers of food diversity, while writing the book Where Our Food Comes From, and after spending time with the staff of the Vavilov General Genetics Institute in Moscow, and VIR in Saint Petersburg.

I sit overlooking Saint Isaac’s Square, a few hundred meters where Nikolay Vavilov managed the first and perhaps the most massive effort in human history to document and conserve the world’s food biodiversity. I have had the rare opportunity of seeing the seedback in the basement of Vavilov’s institute, and of leafing through the herbarium where one can see the master’s hand on collections of plants from the deserts, the steppes and the rainforests. And I have seen the photos there of those who perished while protecting the seeds for the benefit of all of humankind

I have also spoken with his surviving descendants: his own living son, Yuri; and VIR’s director, Nikolay, who continues to manage the tremendous scientific effort begun many decades ago. They remain committed to Nikolay Vavilov’s vision, but why? Political and economic support for such conservation has waxed and waned over the years, and there are always new challenges and frustrations.

Oddly, it seems that a certain emotional, philosophical and perhaps spiritual commitment to this work has seldom waned among its participants. One quickly realizes that these people are not necessarily in it for the money, the social approval of professional peers, nor the fame, if any!

Instead, they find something inherently and immensely satisfying about saving the remaining living riches of the world’s agricultural landscapes and cultures: the seeds, fruits and roots which feed us. They are working for a higher purposes, for the good of humanity, and if the work is done properly, the good of the earth itself.

Continue Reading »

I feel a familiarity, even a universality, whenever I enter a spice market in any part of the world: an Arabian souq, a Mexican mercado, a Turkish carsisi.  It is not just my familiarity with the spices themselves that makes me feel this way. Many of them have traveled thousands of miles across land by camel, or water by dhow, to reach marketplaces in all for corners of earthly universe. This is the ancient form of the global economy, and to me, one much more benign than we see today, for it is based on moving small quantities of precious goods long distances to surprise our senses, instead of moving large television and ghetto-blasters around to dull them.

I also sense a familiarity whenever I deal with spice traders. These traders use universal means to seduce you into their stalls, to entice you into smelling then sampling a few of their powdered herbs and seeds, and to cajole you into purchasing more of their powders than you could ever actually use over a dozen lifetimes!

Spice merchants are the quintessential cross-cultural traders, for they build an attractive sale pitch from what they know of where the spices have emanated, and use that to connect with where you are from and what satisfactions you wish to gain by taking home their product.

Continue Reading »

Last spring I was invited to join forces with a Turkish documentary TV and film maker named Ardan Zenturk in a retrospective on Hadji Ali, the first Arab of the Islamic faith to become a naturalized citizen on the invitation of the U.S. government. I had already written about his time in Arizona in the Journal of Arizona History and in my book Arab-American, which won the Southwest Book Award; the chapter on Hadji Ali was posted on the internet as a finalist in the OneBookAZ competition in 2009. However, I had no idea of his notoriety in Turkey, or recognition anywhere in the Middle East until Ardan contacted me. And now, with Ardan’s support, I am learning about Hadji Ali aka Phillipou Teodora in his birthplace….

Phillipou and his cousin Mimico first surfaced in historic documents when they were recruited by a man named Heap at the Old Caravan Bridge in Smyrna Turkey around 1854. While Smyrna has changed its name to Izmir and has become Turkey’s third largest city, down by its harbor there are still some 20 caravanserai where spice traders once came in from Africa, from Greece, and most importantly from the Silk Road. Nearly all boys growing up in Smyrna during the era of the Teodora cousins would have gravitated to see and perhaps unload the camels at the Kemeralti Bazzaar and the adjacent Kizlagarsi Han, a historic caravanserai that still stands. The Smyrna harbor was the overland terminus of the Silk Road, and jumping off-point by ship to Athens, Alexandria and Algiers, which at that time was a protectorate of the Ottoman Empire.

Perhaps even more probable was that Phillipou and Mimico learned how to manage camels while watching and helping with high-stakes camel wrestling matches. These wrestling matches between two male camels still occur every January and February in the villages surrounding Izmir. They serve grilled sujuk camel sausage at these events and drink lots of anise-flavored raki.

It appears that the boys learned enough about camels at a young age that they were recruited to work with the French Foreign Legion in Algiers in supplying French and Ottoman troops there. Phillipou converted to Islam around then, made a had to Mecca, changed his name, then returned to Izmir. An American named Heap recruited the cousins and several camels from Izmir to travel to Texas to begin the U.S. Camel Corps, the first of its kind to cross the Great American Desert from Texas to California. Hadji Ali continued to work with camels the rest of his life in Arizona, and spent several years near where I now live in Patagonia Arizona, the only Western town that has its own Camel Parts shop. No kidding….

Stay tuned for Ardan’s documentary next year, which may include Doug Baum and I guiding a camel ride in the Las Cruces area for several days… And next time you come visit, ask me to show to how to spice up some sujuk camel sausage made from the losers in the wrestling match…

When one travels, it bis hard not to be struck by just how much of the world’s food biodiversity has found new homes and adapted to new places over the centuries. Visiting markets in Turkey for the first time in my life, I am amazed at how many Old Friends from the New World show up in th Turk’s souks or spice bazaars: cayenne, bell, paprika and cherry peppers, Jamaican allspice, chocolate, vanilla, tomtoes, squashs, fint corns and beans.

Soon after Columbus got lost and found the Americas, he brougfht some of these crops bacvk to Spain. But Columbus did not really disatribute them past the royalty.

What got these foods into European, African and Asian cuisines was the work of Arab, Moor and Berber spice traders who had been booted out of Spain by the Spanish Inquisitors, but who resetlled in Morroco, Portugal, Egypt, Syria and Turkey at other waypoints along the ancient Spice Routes.

Indeed, many of these food crops were traded back to Turkey, and then entered Europe from the Southeast. Thats why so many New World crops are now called Turkish tobacco, Turkish wheat (maize), Turkish pepper in parts of Europe.

These process have not stopped. There remains fasdcinating remnants of the Sephardic Jewish trading community here in Istanbul, and their synagogue is still visited by Jewish tourists from around the world.

And in the Misr Carsisi spice market today, I saw a more recent arrival from the New World: a spice blend named Cajun Baharat, in case you want to make gumbo with the fish or shrimp from the Bosphorus waters here on the shores of the Old City, Sultanhamet.

While the Chinese will be celebrating 2010 as the Year of the Tiger, we in America have historically had no tigers except those in zoos and circuses. But what we once have had many of—heirloom apples—are now in danger of becoming as rare as tigers are in Asia. Of some 15,000 to 16,000 apples varieties that have been named, grown and eaten on the North American continent, only about 3,000 remain accessible to American orchard-keepers, gardeners, chefs and home cooks. Four out of five apples varieties unique to North America) have been lost from commerce as more Americans but trees from the “pseudo-nurseries” at Walmart and Home Depot, and most of these were lost just since World War II. It is the members of grassroots organizations like NAFEX that still hold most of the remaining unique apple materials on the continent.

Of the remaining fifth of the varieties still available, 81 percent are now “endangered” in the marketplace, with only one to three nurseries offering for sale to growers. If we also considered the “threatened varieties” offered by only four to six nurseries, 94 percent of the commercially-available apple diversity in North America is either threatened or endangered. Roughly nine out of ten apples varieties historically grown in the U.S. are at risk of falling out of cultivation, and falling off our tables.

These are not just abstract statistics, for they affect not only our health, but the health ofour landscapes, and because apple trees sequester much carbon, the health of the planet as a whole. Not even one fourth of the 20 million apple trees grown in the U.S. in 1900 remain in our orchards and gardens. Home apple production in the U.S. peaked between World War I and World War II, and now much of the apple juice, puree and sauce consumed in the United States is produced in other countries. One apple variety, Red Delicious, comprises 41 percent of the entire American apple crop, and eleven varieties produce 90 percent of all apples sold in chain grocery stores.

Continue Reading »