1. Foods
Those early ancestors of ours that roamed over northern and central Europe between the periods of ice invasion, which at times made all that country uninhabitable, tell us by the relics of them found in caves that agriculture was then unknown. Living mostly by the chase and on a few wild fruits picked from the forest these half-wild and savage people wandered wherever game was plentiful and the continental glacier would permit. But there came a day when one of these races began the cultivation of some of the wild plants about them and with that day dawned the real beginning of man’s use of plants. And with that day also these simplest of our ancestors stopped their wanderings in large part and became farmers, albeit very crude ones, as their primitive stone implements show. They did not give up the chase, but their collection into more or less permanent camps or villages began with their cultivation of plants. Just when this happened no one can say, but most estimates of the time since the last ice age indicate that it could not have been much less than forty thousand years ago. And considerably before this, and long before the use of metals by man, we find these stone implements of agriculture and the probable beginnings of that great reliance upon plant life which the modern world has carried to such tremendous lengths. Unfortunately we do not know what plants these “Men of the Old Stone Age” grew in their primitive gardens, and it is thousands of years after this, and after man’s discovery of the use of metals, that we know definitely what plants he grew and how he used them. Unquestionably some of the early uses of plants, such as dyes for the face or for “rock pictures” are very ancient and are found long before any sign of agriculture, but as food in the sense of being produced food rather than that gathered from the wild, there are only the faintest traces until, in the remains of the lake dwellers in Austria, a single grain of wheat was discovered. Their metal instruments showed them to have been familiar not only with this, but with other plants, and it is well to remember that these people lived far longer ago than our most ancient historical records such as the Egyptians or Chinese. Both the latter, so far as our oldest records of them show, were an agricultural people who had enormously developed man’s uses of plants as compared with the men of the stone or bronze ages, whose agriculture must perhaps forever be a secret of the past.
WHEAT
The discovery of the grain of wheat in the remains of the lake dwellers tells us some things about men’s travels even in those early days, for wheat is not a wild plant there and must have come to central Europe from a great distance. Researches upon the home and antiquity of wheat are not very definite, but its occurrence as a wild plant somewhere in Mesopotamia or the vicinity appears to be indicated. The Chinese grew it 2700 B.C. and the earliest Egyptians spoke of its origin with them as due to mythical personages such as Isis, Ceres, or Triptolemus. From its ancient and perhaps rather restricted home it has gone throughout the temperate parts of the earth and now forms perhaps the most important source of food. Although many different kinds of wheat are raised in different parts of the world most of them have been derived from one wild ancestor, Triticum sativum. Forms known as hard and soft wheat and dozens of others suited to different regions or market conditions have been developed by plant breeders. As the most important of all the cereals it has been much studied, and its cultivation in America is on such a tremendous scale that we furnish a large part of the world’s supply. Russia, Argentina, and the southern part of Australia also raise large quantities. The plant is a grass and the “seed” is really a grain or fruit in which the outer husk tightly incloses the true seed.
It were perhaps well to note here that popular stories about the germination of grains of wheat taken from Egyptian mummies are not true. Wheat and even corn are sometimes given to travelers, and it is taken from these ancient Egyptian tombs. But it was not put there by the early Egyptians, as the presence of corn proves only too well. For this cereal is an American plant unknown before Columbus and 1492. Arabs and others have recently inserted various seeds in these mummies, some of which undoubtedly have germinated—hence the fable. The early Egyptians did put seeds in their mummy cases, but none have ever germinated.
INDIAN CORN OR MAIZE
The grass family furnishes this second most important cereal to all Americans and Europeans, although among inhabitants of tropical regions rice is perhaps more important than either wheat or corn. With the discovery of America the early travelers found the North American Indians, the Mexicans, and the Peruvians all growing corn and using it on a considerable scale. It must have been grown for hundreds of years before that time, as its wide distribution and many varieties testified even at that date. Its true home nor its actual wild ancestor has never been certainly determined, but a wild plant very closely related to our modern corn is found in the northern part of South America, and either there or in Central America is apparently the ancient home of corn. So much had corn entered into the life of the early Mexicans that the first Europeans to visit that country found the Mexicans making elaborate religious offerings to their corn goddess. And, as in Egypt, the tombs of the Incas of Peru contain seeds of the cereal most prized, which in the case of corn consists of several varieties. While their civilization is not as old as certain Old World races, the cultivation of corn must date back to the very beginnings of the Christian era. It is now spread throughout the world in warm regions, and as early as 1597 it was grown in China, a fact that led to the erroneous notion that China was its true home. Perhaps no fact is more conclusive as to its American origin than that corn belongs to a genus Zea, which contains only the single species mays, with perhaps one or two varieties, and that until the discovery of America Zea mays or Indian corn was unknown either as a wild or cultivated plant. Such an important cereal, if it actually were wild in the Old World, would have spread thousands of years ago as wheat did, and Columbus and his adventurous successors would not have brought from the New World a food that has since become second only to wheat.
Field corn of several different sorts, pop corn, and sweet corn were all developed by the Indians from the ancient stock, but comparatively recently the juice of the stem has been used for making corn sirup. The use of the leaves for cattle feed is known to all farmers, and from its solid stems it is now likely that some fiber good for paper making will be extracted.
RICE
Both wheat and corn are grasses that are cultivated in ordinary farm soils, but rice is derived from a grass that is nearly always grown for part of its life in water. It is taller than wheat, but not so tall as corn, and its wild home is in the tropical parts of southeastern Asia. It is still grown there in greatest quantity, and in the Philippines, while only a small part of the world’s supply comes from the New World. There are perhaps more people that rely upon rice for food than upon wheat and corn combined. It still is the principal article of diet of the inhabitants of China, Japan, India, and dozens of smaller Old World regions, while its use as a vegetable in tropical America is practically universal. A considerable part of the starch manufactured in Europe still comes from rice, and in India the intoxicating beverage arrack is made from it. The Japanese saké, a sweetish intoxicating liquor, is also made from rice. Notwithstanding its wide use it is not as nutritious as wheat or corn, being much lower in proteins than either of them.
More than 2800 years before Christ the Chinese cultivated rice, for at that time one of the emperors instituted a ceremony in which the grain plays the chief part. It has been grown on land useful to almost no other crops as it is usually subject to inundations. Some varieties, however, have been developed which will grow on uplands and these are grown even on terraced land both in China and the Philippines. It needs a heavy rainfall, however, and grows best in lands that are flooded. It is occasional dry seasons that produce the famines of India when the crop fails. The botanical name of rice is Oryza sativa, and it is known now as a wild plant in India and tropical Australia. Its introduction into Europe must have been long after wheat, for rice is not mentioned in the Bible, and was unknown in Italy before 1468, when it was first grown near Pisa. Rice paper, which some people think is made from this grain, comes from the pith of Aralia papyrifera, a tree of the rain forests of Formosa, related to our temperate region Hercules’-club.
SUGAR
In the chapter on what plants do with the material they take from the air and soil we found that sugar was one of the first fruits of that process. In at least two plants the overproduction of sugar is on such a great scale that our chief supplies of this substance now come from these two plants—the sugar cane, which is a tall grass, and the sugar beet. Hundreds of other plants produce surplus sugar, but for commercial purposes these two, and the sap of the sugar maple (Acer saccharum), are our chief sources of supply.
Cane sugar is an Old World grass known as Saccharum officinarum, frequently growing twelve feet high, and with a solid woody stem, quite unlike our ordinary grasses. It looks not unlike corn on a stout stem, and it is the stem which is cut and from which the sweet juice is pressed out between great rollers. The pressed-out juice goes through various processes in the course of which first molasses, then brown sugar, and finally white granulated sugar are produced.
Our consumption of sugar is now on such a scale that we scarcely realize that before the days of Shakespeare it was very scarce and expensive. Even as recently as 1840 it regularly sold in England for forty-eight shillings per hundred pounds, wholesale. At that time the total consumption in the world was only slightly over a million tons, while to-day it is over fifteen times that amount. The plant is native in tropical Asia, but just where is not known, nor are wild plants found in any quantity. It has been much modified by long cultivation, and has been reproduced by root-stocks for so long a period that it is rare for the plant to bear flower and seed. It has been known in India since before the Christian era, and was taken from there to China about 200 B. C. Neither the Greeks nor Romans knew much about it, nor do the Hebrew writings mention it. Somewhere in the Middle Ages the Arabs brought it into Egypt, Sicily, and Spain. Not until the discovery of the New World was it cultivated on any considerable scale, when the climate of Santo Domingo and Cuba and the African slaves imported to those islands afforded conditions that resulted in Cuba at least being one of the world’s chief sugar-producing countries. Sugar cane is now grown all over the earth in regions with a hot, moist climate, India and neighboring countries producing over half the world’s supply. Practically all the sugar produced in India is used there, however, so that the American tropics furnish to Europe and America about one-third of the world’s total consumption of cane sugar.
In 1840 under fifty thousand tons of beet sugar were produced, while in 1900 more sugar from this plant was made than from sugar cane. Considerably more than half this beet sugar was grown in three countries, Russia, Austria, and Germany, which explains what the great war has done to the sugar market. The plant from which beet sugar is derived is botanically the same as the common garden beet, Beta vulgaris, which is wild on sandy beaches along the Mediterranean and Caspian seas, and perhaps in India. Much cultivation has made this slender-rooted plant into the large-rooted vegetable we now have and its sugar content was much increased by Vilmorin, a French horticulturist. Many garden varieties are known, and some of these are grown in the United States, where beet sugar is produced, although in 1910 less than half a million tons were made here as against over four million tons in Europe. While the beet as a vegetable was known perhaps a century or two before the time of Christ, it was not until 1760 that its sugar content was understood, and it was nearly eighty years later before beet sugar became commercially important. Its cultivation in England on any considerable scale did not begin before the beginning of the present century.
THE BANANA
Among the largest herbs in the world are the ordinary banana plants, now cultivated throughout the tropical regions, but originally native in the Malay Archipelago. From there it spread into India, and the early Greeks, Latins, and Arabs considered it a remarkable fruit of some Indian tree. It is actually a giant herb with a tremendous fleshy stem, formed mostly of the tightly clasping leaf bases, the blade of which is frequently ten to twelve feet long. In nature the blade splits into many segments due to tearing by the wind, a process that the plant not only tolerates but aids. The leaf has a thinner texture between its principal lateral veins, and along these weaker parts the leaf tears so that normal plants are usually almost in ribbons. The leaf expanse, without this relief, is so great that tropical storms would doubtless destroy the plant.
Many wild species of the banana are still found in tropical Old World countries, the genus Musa to which the banana belongs having over sixty-five species. There are at least three well-marked types of banana used to-day, two of them, our common yellow one and a smaller red sort being fruits of almost universal use. The remaining type is usually larger than the kinds sent to northern markets, is picked and used while still green and is always cooked before using, usually boiled as a vegetable. In this form it is known as the plantain, and is a good substitute for the potato in regions where the latter cannot be grown. Plantains are used on a large scale in all tropical countries, much more so than the yellow and red bananas which are familiar enough in northern markets. These are too sweet to be used as a staple diet, and the plantain is practically the only such diet which millions of the poorer people in the tropics ever get. There is almost no native hut but has its plantain field.
The flowers of the banana plants, all of which appear to be derived from the single species Musa sapientum or possibly also from Musa paradisiaca, are borne in a large terminal cluster which ultimately develops into the “hand” of bananas familiar in the fruit shops. The plant then dies down and a new one develops from a shoot at the base of the old stem. For countless ages this has been the only method of reproduction, and usually the banana produces no seeds. The plant is easily grown in greenhouses, one in the conservatory of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden producing 214 pounds in a single cluster consisting of 300 bananas.
POTATO
Sir Walter Raleigh is usually credited with the introduction of the potato into Europe, although it appears as though the Spaniards were the first to bring the plant from America. It was brought to Ireland in 1585 or 1586 and from its wide use there became known as the Irish potato. Its native home is in southern South America, and although Columbus did not mention it after his first and second voyages, subsequent Spanish adventurers found natives on the mainland making extensive use of it. There are now several wild relatives of it in South America, but their tubers are not so large as those of Solanum tuberosum from which all the different varieties of potato have been derived. The plant is too well known to need description here, but its edible tuber, actually a stem organ, is often wrongly called a root. Figure 8 shows the tubers and true roots of the plant.
The sweet potato, which in early writings was often confused with Solanum tuberosum, is a very different plant. Its edible portion is the root of a vine very like our common morning-glory or convolvulus, and its Latin name is Ipomœa batatas. The specific name is taken from a native American word, which due to early confusion was corrupted into potato, and applied to the “Irish” potato. No one certainly knows where the sweet potato is native, but probably in tropical America. It belongs to a section of the genus Ipomœa, all the other species of which are American, and before Columbus and his followers its cultivation was unknown in the Old World. It was very soon carried by the Portuguese to Japan and other parts of the Old World, and for a time it was thought to be native there. America, however, is in all probability its ancient home, although no really wild plant has ever been found there or anywhere else. Its cultivation from very early times in America is indicated, and Columbus upon his return from the New World presented sweet potatoes to Queen Isabella.
COCONUT
It has been said many times that there are more uses for this plant than there are days in a year. Wood, thatch, rope, matting, an intoxicating beverage, and scores of other things are derived from different parts of this palm, but it is as a food and beverage that its chief value lies. The coconut palm is a tall tree with a dense crown of feathery but stout leaves and inhabits all parts of the tropics. It is found apparently wild along sandy shores, but its ancient home, while still unknown, is probably America. Each year the tree bears from ten to twenty fruits which are at first covered with a green and very tough fibrous husk, inside which is the seed, the coconut of commerce. In the early stages of the fruit the white meat is preceded in large part by a delicious milky liquid much used by the natives, but only rarely found in any quantity in the coconuts shipped to our markets. The meat is highly nutritious and is used on a great scale as food by millions of tropical peoples. Within the last few years a method of taking out the meat of the coconut and shipping it in a state of arrested fermentation to the north has been discovered. This product, known as copra, is produced in enormous quantities, both in the Old and the New World, particularly in India and the Philippines. From this copra a palm oil is refined, which is the chief source of the nut butter now so widely sold. Some idea of the extent of the cultivation of coconuts may be gleaned from the fact that in India and the Philippines the trees are counted by the hundreds of millions. The oil from the nuts is also largely used in cookery, in making candles, for burning in lamps, and in making certain kinds of perfume. The tree belongs to the Palmaceæ, a monocotyledonous family of plants of great commercial importance. It is known as Cocos nucifera, and the genus has over a hundred species, all of tropical American origin. Whether Cocos nucifera is American or not is still a disputed point. From the fact that it will float in sea water without injury to the seed it has been supposed that it was carried great distances by currents. It is found both wild and cultivated throughout the tropical world, and its use appears to have been known to the Asiatics probably four thousand years ago. The curious fact remains that it is the only palm that, in its wild state, is known both in the Old and New World, all others being peculiar to one hemisphere or the other. Perhaps its capacity for floating in the sea without injury may explain what is otherwise still a good deal of a mystery.
There are many other foods derived from plants, besides all the fruits and vegetables too numerous to be noted in detail here. One fact of significance seems to stand out from a study of the uses of plants by man. There are three distinct regions from which the great bulk of our food and many other useful plants have apparently come. One is the area of which Indo-China is approximately the center, and which is the ancestral home of rice, the banana, tea, sugar cane, and many other valuable plants. Somewhere in this southeastern corner of Asia there must have been a highly developed agriculture which rescued these plants from the wild, and from which they have spread throughout the world. The second region, somewhere near Mesopotamia, appears to be the cradle of wheat and a few other useful plants. And the third region is the western part of America from southern Mexico to northern Chile, where corn, tobacco, the pineapple, sweet potato, potato, the red pepper, and the tomato were all discovered with the discovery of this continent.
Alphonse de Candolle, from whose studies much of our information on the origin of cultivated plants is derived, once prepared a list of our common vegetables showing their ancient homes, their wild ancestors, and the length of time during which they have been in cultivation. With some recent additions and corrections by Dr. Orland E. White of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the list is printed below:
The letters indicate the probable length of cultivation.
(a) A species cultivated for more than 4,000 years.
(b) A species cultivated for more than 2,000 years.
(c) A species cultivated for less than 2,000 years.
(d) A species cultivated very anciently in America.
(e) A species cultivated in America before 1492 without giving evidence of great antiquity of culture.
(f) A species or subspecies of very recent domestication.
The following list of the common fruits also gives their native country, period of cultivation, and some additional notes about them. Those marked with a star were found in the markets of New York City by Dr. White, who also revised this list. The letters for the dates are the same as in the list of vegetables:
A Banana Plantation in Fruit. The banana is now grown throughout the tropical world, but native in tropical southeastern Asia. (Courtesy of Brooklyn Botanic Garden.)
Rice Terraces in China. In many regions where the forests have been destroyed and all the soil washed into the valleys, agriculture has to be carried on under conditions of great difficulty. Soil is brought up these slopes and held there by the artificially made terraces. (Photo by Bailey Willis. Courtesy of Brooklyn Botanic Garden.)