Near a Thousand Tables (36 page)

It was “a promised land, if one didn't have to farm with gun in hand,” a prospective “image of Nature cultivated by industry.” Philippeville, when Tocqueville first saw it, “looked American” to him, a town in Wild West style, distorted into ugliness by an economic boom. Algiers would become “Cincinnati in Africa.” Tocqueville was blindly convinced that “native races,” whether in Africa or America, were incapable of civilization. He knew that some of them built cities, practiced sedentary agriculture, possessed writing and, in the Cherokee case, even edited newspapers, but he never allowed these facts to modify his opinion. The best the tribes could hope for was “amalgamation” with their conquerors, not survival on their own. He denounced the cruelty and greed with which Americans oppressed the Indians, but commended policies of equal ruthlessness against the Arabs. He opposed “visible iniquities” for tactical reasons but acknowledged that “we burn harvests, empty silos and seize unarmed men, women and children” as “unfortunate necessities.” The proper aim of colonial strategy was “to replace the former inhabitants with the
conquering race
.”

In Algeria, his plan for the country's future was bound to fail. The environment of what was then called the “Great American Desert” was really nothing like the indomitable Sahara. Unlike the American Indians, the tribes of Algeria were irreducible enemies who always had a viable line of retreat. France, with its relatively stable population, could never generate enough emigrants to make Algeria into a convincing metropolitan
département,
while America could fill conquered lands with the demographic surplus of more philoprogenitive societies. Yet Algeria is an example of what America might have become if history had worked out a little differently. Had the Sioux imperial project succeeded, or if the plains had been a bit more hostile to colonization, America, too, might have been a beleaguered seaboard, guarded from the natives of the interior by a broad, highly militarized frontier.

After wheat, the second most important crop to have reached America from the Old World is usually said to be rice. The native rice mentioned in the previous chapter should not be cited in refutation: it belongs to a different genus (zizania, not oryza). In colonial times, rice made a vital contribution in areas where wheat failed. Its introduction in Panama in the late sixteenth century and South Carolina in the late seventeenth made those areas viable parts of the Spanish and English empires respectively. It became part of the culinary heritage of much of the Caribbean, especially where Indian labor was introduced by the British, or where slaves were concentrated from parts of West Africa which formerly grew their own kind of native rice. Though this was rather different from the Asian varieties which became predominant in the New World, palates used to either kind could easily adapt to the other. The hallmark—as it were—of Caribbean rice cookery is the combination of rice with beans: this ensures complementarity of proteins and embodies the “mestizo” principle—mixing native ingredients with a colonial intrusion. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Chinese and Japanese migrants to the Americas formed new markets for rice and introduced new ways of preparing it, such as the glutinous, Japanese-style sweet rice balls now popular as street food in Mexico. Today, the United States is one of the world's major producers of rice, though most of it is exported.

Yet, despite the formidable case that can be made for New World rice, I prefer to give the palm to the banana. Personal prejudice may cloud my judgment on this point. In my youth I spent two years doing research at St. John's College, Oxford. At dinner on Sundays, we wore black tie, often invited ladies, and entertained the visiting preacher who had performed at Evensong. Conversation over
dessert in the Senior Common Room rarely flowed easily and had a habit of returning lazily to well-tried topics which would, at least, be new to the preacher. Since bananas always formed part of the dessert—which in England, and especially in Oxford and Cambridge, is an extra course of fruits and sweetmeats served with sweet wines or claret, after the meal and before the coffee—the subject of the history and mythology of the banana could be relied on to recur frequently. Was it the fruit of paradise, as Islamic tradition has it? Where and when was it first cultivated? How diffused? What were the relative histories and merits of the different strains? When the predictability of the topic and the facilities for research are taken into account, it seems strange that we made so little progress in our discussions over so long a time. Still, I have known rather a lot about bananas ever since.

The best candidate for the ancestor of the varieties we eat today grows wild in Southeast Asia. Though known to Europeans in antiquity, bananas were fruits of strong exotic connotations: Greek and Roman botanical lore traced them as far as India. Theophrastus believed that sages gathered under the shade of the banana plant to eat its fruit. Varieties adaptable to almost every tropical and subtropical climate were developed by what we think of as the high Middle Ages; they grew in southern China and many regions of Africa from coast to coast. They were even a garden plant in Moorish Spain, though their cultivation there was not continued by the Christian conquerors. With this exception, the first European cultivators of bananas were colonists of the Canary Islands, where the fruit was well established by the early sixteenth century. That zealous monitor of the arrival of new cultivars in the New World, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, recorded the arrival of the first bananas from the Canaries in 1516. A clue to the variety is contained in the first English description, left to us by Thomas Nichols, a sugar merchant arraigned before the Canarian Inquisition, who published an account of his experiences in 1583. “It is like a cowcumber,” he reported, “and best eaten black, when it is sweeter than any confection.” Unless Nichols had unusually cloying taste, this suggests that the sour banana was in question—
Musa xparadisiaca
“Dwarf Cavendish”—a variety formerly eaten as a staple in East Africa, where it is presumed to have been introduced in antiquity as a consequence of trade across
the Indian Ocean
. Rather than the varieties popular in the modern West, where people like to “unzip” sweet, firm bananas and eat them raw, it resembles “plantains”—species of banana suitable only for cooking and common, in the West Indies and parts of East, West and Central Africa, in savory dishes, prepared and served in ways closely similar to yams and cassava. Today, the exotic connotations of the banana have been dispelled. It is one of the world's commonest foodstuffs—second among fruits, in
volume of production, only to grapes, most of which go into wine—and it is hard to imagine the day when the greengrocer might say, “Yes! We have no bananas.” This is the result of the banana plantations of the Americas. Although most of the world's bananas are produced and consumed in Africa, three quarters of the world trade originates in and around the Caribbean.

In the Columbian Exchange, the New World gave as good as it got. Maize and potatoes were the real treasure of the Indies, for unlike gold and silver, they could be propagated and transplanted. Before the exchange, however, potatoes were still a regional Andean crop, unacceptable elsewhere. Maize had already migrated from its areas of origin in Mesoamerica across most of the Western Hemisphere, to acquire the status of a staple wherever it could be easily grown and of a sacred crop elsewhere. In North America, before the arrival of maize, the crops on which early agricultural experiments were based were native to the region and ways of developing them were worked out
on the spot
. The conrusingly named Jerusalem artichoke was first cultivated—or, at least, “managed”—in its native North American woodlands in the third millennium
B.C.
Other varieties of sunflower and sumpweed produced oily seeds. Goosefoot, knotweed and maygrass could be
pounded for flour
. Squashes, which were indigenous to the same region, are exceptionally easy to adapt for agriculture.

These products could only be supplements to a hunting, gathering diet without a starchy staple capable of providing major nutrients in bulk. When such a “miracle crop” of tropical origin arrived, it was virtually ignored for centuries: maize spread into the region from the southwest in the third century
A.D.
but did not begin to transform the agronomy until about the end of the ninth century, when a new, locally developed variety with a short growing season became available. When it took hold, it was accompanied by the same tyrannies as in other parts of the Americas: collective effort and elites to organize it. Soil had to be prepared in various ways according to the genius of place: earth might have to be ridged or raised; forest might have to be cleared. Surplus food demanded structures of power. Storage had to be administered, stockpiles policed and distribution regulated. Mass labor was mobilized in the service of mound building, fortification, religions of display and the theatrical politics of rulers who demanded high platforms for their rites. Allotments close to the ceremonial centers can be presumed to have produced ritual foods or to have represented personal property; the large communal fields which surrounded them presumably filled a common stockpile with grain and starchy seeds.

Maize cultivation coincided with these developments: that does not mean it caused them on its own. Even agriculturists who (as far as we know) stuck mainly to a diet of native seeds and squashes, and lived in dispersed hamlets and individual farms, developed in ways reminiscent of the maize cultivators. They, too, created large earthwork precincts in geometrically exact shapes, luxurious ceramics and artworks in copper and mica, and what look like the graves of chiefly figures. Nor should it be assumed that the maize miracle was an unmixed blessing even in strictly dietary terms: when it displaced native cultigens, maize did not make people live longer or stay healthier: on the contrary, the exhumed bones and teeth of maize eaters in and around the Mississippi floodplain bear the traces of more disease and more deadly infections than those of
their predecessors
. When Old World invaders adopted maize, they showed similar reluctance and even worse effects. Slaves fed on it suffered malnutrition through negligent preparation (see above, pp. 35, 48). To the Iroquois, who became dependent on it, maize never lost its foreign flavor: they called wheat and maize by the
same name
.

It is not therefore surprising that the spread of maize beyond its native hemisphere should have been a slow business. In Europe, which had privileged access to New World agronomy, maize was unsuitable for the climate of much of the best land, and unpalatable to the people of much of the rest. Wherever it went, it was called by names which denoted extraneity: Spanish corn, Guinea corn, Turkey wheat. People rarely knew quite where it came from but they felt its provenance was tainted. It was more suited “for swine than for man” and even today, most European production goes into cattle feed. Most American production goes into the making of corn syrup, and much of the remainder for feed; relatively little is produced for direct human consumption. Gradually its virtues became known and resistance diminished. Maize yields impressively, harvests easily and, provided there is plenty of sunshine, grows at relatively high altitudes compared with wheat. Its period of “takeoff” into widespread, large-scale acceptance was the eighteenth century. It was adopted by hill farmers, bringing new uplands under the plow, in southern and southwestern China at a time of rapidly accelerating population growth. In the Middle East, it became the staple of Egyptian peasants, who grew other grain only to pay their taxes, but it remained a marginal crop in the rest of the region. The politics of the Balkans since the eighteenth century would have been very different without maize, which enabled communities to grow at new altitudes of settlement in the eighteenth century out of the grasp of the Turkish elite. Beyond the reach of tax gatherers, it nourished effectively autonomous settlements, weaning the future political independence of Greece, Serbia and Romania from mountain cradles. Thus in this corner of Europe, an American product
really did
nurture freedom
. By the end of the eighteenth century, an Italian agronomist living near Rimini could write of maize,

Now my children if you had met in the year 1715, which the old folks have always called the year of the famine, when this foodstuff was not yet used, then you would have seen poor families of peasants go off in winter to feed on the roots of grass to dig up arum roots or as they call it here zago or “snake bread,” and cook them and eat them without seasoning and make buns of them. There were even some who chopped up vine shoots with an axe, ground them and made bread. Anyone who could get bread made of acorns or beans was not one of the unfortunate. Finally it pleased God to introduce this foodstuff, here and everywhere. If there are years with little wheat, the peasants can use a food which is basically good and nourishing; and moreover by the grace of God people are beginning to sow certain foreign roots like white truffles, which are called potatoes (and I want to
introduce them, here
),

Those words of Battara's suggest that different New World biota spread or stopped together, with interdependent reputations. In China, it was not the potato but the sweet potato that seemed to advance in alliance with maize. As in Europe, the new American foodstuffs rapidly became known in the East but took a long time to win acceptance. Maize appeared in China so quickly after its discovery in America that some scholars insist on an undocumented earlier transmission. Two independent routes seem to have been effective: overland from the west maize was borne as a tribute plant by Turkic frontiersmen and first recorded in 1555; meanwhile it came by sea to Fukien, where a visiting Augustinian saw it cultivated in 1577, It was welcomed as a curiosity, not a serious source of food: it rated no more than a footnote in a standard agricultural compendium of the early seventeenth century. The sweet potato, first reported in Yunnan near the Burmese border in the 1560s, may have come overland from the south. Its flavor had a bad reputation with Han Chinese but it was favored in hill country by immigrants and settlers who were obliged to occupy land previously thought marginal: first in Fukien and later in Hunan, In 1594 it was said to be a governor of Fukien who recommended sweet potatoes when the conventional crops failed. In the eighteenth century, in tandem with maize, the sweet potato transformed vast areas of China. In the I770s, officials in Hunan, urgently promoting double cropping oh rice paddies, advised that the lack of available wasteland for increased output could be compensated by growing maize and sweet potatoes on the hills. In the Yangtze basin,
the uplands, formerly covered with forest, were developed for cash crops—indigo and jute—by “shack people” who lived off maize planted on the sunny side of their slopes and potatoes on the shady side. Similar results flowed from the complementarity of these crops in Fukien, Szechuan and Hunan. By the end of the century sweet potatoes had conquered palates sufficiently to be widely sold boiled and roasted by street vendors in Peking. Today in terms of quantities consumed, maize has overtaken sorghum and even millet as an item of human diet in China. Even here, however, maize and sweet potatoes have only ever been a supplement—not a substitute—for the native staple, rice. They had the effect of extending, not replanting, the cultivated soil. In the rest of the East, their effects were even more limited. India spurned them both and nowhere did sweet potatoes get taken up
as in China
.