An Edible History of Humanity (11 page)

By this time, however, the English and the Dutch had appeared on the scene. The English explorer Francis Drake passed through
the Moluccas in 1579 and observed that they yielded an “abundance of cloves, whereof wee furnished our selves of as much as
we desired at a very cheape rate.” Drake’s voyage inspired several follow-up attempts by other English sailors, though all
ended in failure. The Dutch were more successful. For a while Dutch merchants had been the distributors for Portuguese spices
in northern Europe, but they lost this privilege following Spain’s union with Portugal, so they set out to establish their
own supply. Intelligence gathered by Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, a Dutch expert on the Indies who had worked for the Portuguese
in India for many years, indicated that excellent local pepper was available on Java; and since the Portuguese did not trade
there, but bought their pepper in India, they could hardly complain if the Dutch expressed an interest in it. After a successful
expedition to Java in 1595, Dutch merchants, who were amalgamated to form the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) or
Dutch East India Company in 1602, began regular shipments of spices from the region, exploiting Portugal’s inability to control
the supply.

Once they realized how tenuous the Portuguese grip really was, the commercially savvy Dutch decided to try to seize control
of the trade themselves, and they sent a large fleet to the spice islands in 1605. “The Islands of Banda and the Moluccas
are our main target,” the VOC’s directors explained to their admiral in the region. “We recommend most strongly that you tie
these islands to the Company, if not by treaty then by force!” The Dutch ejected the Spanish and Portuguese from the Moluccas,
ordered some newly arrived English ships to leave, and seized direct control of the clove supply. The VOC then set about ruthlessly
enforcing its new monopoly, determined to succeed where the Portuguese had failed. Clove production was concentrated on the
central islands of Ambon and Ceram so that it could be more tightly controlled; the ancient groves of clove trees on other
islands were uprooted, the clove pickers massacred, and their villages burned down.

Where clove production was permitted, the growing of other crops was outlawed, to ensure that the local people would be dependent
on the Dutch for their food. The Dutch sold the food at a high price and bought the cloves at a low price; even so, production
of cloves declined, prompting the Dutch to order that more trees be planted. But by the time the trees came to maturity, supply
outstripped demand, and the growers were told to cut trees down again. A boom-bust cycle followed as the Dutch struggled to
reconcile shifting demand with the supply from slow-growing trees and reluctant growers. Cultivation of cloves outside Dutch
control was forbidden on pain of death, and clandestine trading was suppressed. Makassar, a regional trading center where
the English, Portuguese, and Chinese went to buy smuggled cloves, was shut down.

It was a similar story in the Banda islands, the nearby source of nutmeg and mace. Initially the Dutch persuaded the inhabitants
to sign documents agreeing not to sell their spices to anyone else. But they continued to do so anyway, perhaps because they
were unaware of what they had signed. In particular, they sold to the English, who had established a base on the tiny island
of Run, a little way to the west. A Dutch attempt to build a fort in the Bandas in 1609 provoked a dispute with the locals,
and a party led by a Dutch admiral who went to negotiate was wiped out by the Bandanese, with the encouragement of the English.
The Dutch retaliated by seizing the Bandas for themselves, building two forts and claiming another spice monopoly. Villages
were burned down and the inhabitants were killed, chased off, or sold into slavery. The village chiefs were tortured and then
beheaded by the VOC’s samurai mercenaries, brought in from Japan, where the Dutch were the only Eu rope ans allowed to trade.
The islands were then divided into sixty-eight plots, which were manned with slaves and leased to former VOC employees. The
conditions were brutal—workers on the nutmeg plots were executed in a variety of gruesome ways for the most minor transgressions—but
the flow of the most valuable spices was now in Dutch hands.

The English agreed to leave the spice islands in 1624 and concentrated on commercial opportunities in China and India instead,
though the Dutch allowed them to retain sovereignty over Run, where a small contingent had held out for many years. This tiny
speck of land, two miles long and less than a half mile wide, had originally been claimed by the English in 1603, just as
the English and Scottish thrones were united—so it was the first British colonial possession anywhere in the world, and the
first tiny step toward the formation of the British Empire. Eventually, in 1667, Run was relinquished to the Dutch under the
terms of a Treaty of Breda, one of many peace treaties signed during the on-off Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. As part of the 1667 deal, Britain received a small island in North America called Manhattan.

Profits from the spice trade helped to bankroll the Dutch “golden age” of the seventeenth century, a period in which the Dutch
led the world in commerce, science, and financial innovation, and the wealthy merchant class provided sponsorship for artists
such as Rembrandt van Rijn and Johannes Vermeer. But in the long run the Dutch spice monopoly proved to be less valuable than
expected. The garrisons and warships needed to protect the monopoly were hugely expensive and did not justify the returns
as the price of spices began to fall in Europe in the late seventeenth century. The falling price was due in part to a more
abundant supply, so the Dutch imposed artificial constraints on it: They burned huge quantities of spices on the docks in
Amsterdam and began to limit the volumes shipped from Asia in an effort to prop up prices. But as trade in textiles became
more important, spices accounted for a shrinking proportion of Dutch returns, falling from 75 percent in 1620 to 23 percent
in 1700.

The lower prices commanded by spices in Eu rope also reflected a deeper shift in the spice trade. Once the myths about their
otherworldly provenance had been dispelled, spices no longer seemed so glamorous; they started to become affordable, even
mundane. Heavily spiced dishes came to be seen as old-fashioned at best, and decadent at worst, as tastes changed and new,
simpler cuisines came into vogue in Europe. At the same time, spices were eclipsed as exotic status symbols by new products
such as tobacco, coffee, and tea. By solving the mystery of the spices’ origins, the spice-seekers paradoxically devalued
the treasure they had so arduously sought. Today most people walk past the spices in the supermarket, arrayed on shelves in
small glass bottles, without a second thought. In some ways it is a sorry end to a once-mighty trade that reshaped the world.

Ideally suited as they were to long-distance freight, spices led to the wiring up of the first global trade networks. The
great distance they traveled was one of the reasons people were prepared to pay so much for them—some people, at least. But
not everyone approved of bringing these inessential, frivolous ingredients all that way: “For the sake of this we go to India!”
Pliny the Elder grumbled about pepper in the first century A.D. Today a similar argument is advanced by proponents of “local
food,” who advocate the consumption of foods produced close to the consumer (within one hundred miles, say) rather than shipped
in from farther afield. They decry the transportation of food that has, in some cases, traveled thousands of miles from farm
to plate; some local-food fundamentalists even try to avoid non local foods altogether. Pliny thought buying imported food
was simply a waste of money, but modern-day local-food advocates (or “locavores”) generally make their case on environmental
grounds: Shipping all that food around causes carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to climate change. This has given rise
to the concept of “food miles”—the notion that the distance food is transported gives a reasonable measure of its environmental
damage caused, and that one should therefore eat local food to minimize one’s impact.

It sounds plausible enough, but the reality is rather more complex. For one thing, local products can sometimes have a greater
environmental impact than those produced in other countries, simply because some countries are better suited than others for
production of particular foods. Tomatoes are often grown in heated green houses in Britain, for example, resulting in a larger
volume of carbon emissions than tomatoes grown in Spain, even when the emissions produced by transporting Spanish tomatoes
to Britain are included. Similarly, a study carried out at Lincoln University in New Zealand found that lamb produced in that
country produced far less carbon dioxide (563 kilograms per metric ton of meat) than lamb produced in Britain (2,849 kilograms
per metric ton). This is largely because there is more room for pasture in New Zealand, so the lambs eat grass, whereas British
lambs are given feed, the production of which is carbon-intensive. Shipping New Zealand lamb to Britain then incurred further
emissions of 125 kilograms per metric ton, so that the “carbon footprint” of New Zealand lamb was much smaller even when transport
was taken into account. It may be that the least polluting way to organize food production would be for countries or regions
to concentrate on producing foods that can be made particularly efficiently given the local conditions, and to trade the resulting
foods with each other.

Focusing on food’s transport-related emissions may also be picking the wrong target. An American study found that transport
accounted for 11 percent of the energy used in the food chain, compared with 26 percent for processing and 29 percent for
cooking. In the case of potatoes, the emissions associated with cooking them far outweigh those involved in growing and transporting
them. Whether or not you leave the lid on the pan when boiling your potatoes has more of an impact on the total carbon dioxide
emissions than whether they were grown locally or far away. Another complicating factor is the wide variation in the efficiencies
of different forms of transport. A large ship can carry a ton of food 800 miles on a gallon of fuel; the figures are about
200 miles for a train, 60 miles for a truck, and 20 miles for a car. So the drive to and from a shop or market can produce
more emissions, for a given weight of food, than the whole of the rest of its journey.

Of course, not all the arguments made in favor of local food are environmental: There are social arguments, too. Local food
can promote social cohesion, support local businesses, and encourage people to take more of an interest in where their food
comes from and how it is grown. But there are also social arguments in favor of imported food. In particular, an exclusive
focus on local foods would harm the prospects of farmers in developing countries who grow high-value crops for export to foreign
markets. To argue that they should concentrate on growing staple foods for themselves, rather than more valuable crops for
wealthy foreigners, is tantamount to denying them the opportunity of economic development.

There is undoubtedly some scope for “relocalization” of the food supply, and if nothing else, the food-miles debate is making
consumers and companies pay more attention to food’s environmental impact. But localism can be taken too far. Equating local
food with virtuous food, today as in Roman times, is far too simplistic. The rich history of the spice trade reminds us that
for centuries, people have appreciated exotic flavors from the other side of the world, and that meeting their needs brought
into being a thriving network of commercial and cultural exchange. Hunter-gatherers were limited to local food by definition;
but if subsequent generations had limited themselves in the same way, the world would be a very different place today. Admittedly,
the legacy of the spice trade is mixed. The great spice-seeking voyages revealed the true geography of the planet and began
a new epoch in human history. But it was also because of spices that European powers began grabbing footholds around the world
and setting up trading posts and colonies. As well as sending Europeans on voyages of discovery and exploration, spices provided
the seeds from which Europe’s colonial empires grew.

The portrait of King Charles II of England, painted around 1675, is not as simple as it looks. The king is shown wearing a
knee-length coat and breeches, and standing in the elaborate gardens of a large house. Two spaniels attend him, and nearby
kneels John Rose, the royal gardener, who is presenting Charles with a pineapple. The symbolism seems clear. At the time,
pineapples were extremely rare in England, since they had to be imported from the West Indies and very few survived the voyage
without spoiling. They were so valued that they were known as the “fruit of kings,” a connotation strengthened by the leafy
crown that adorns each pineapple. In England, the pineapple’s association with kingly wealth and power dated back to 1661,
when Charles had been sent one by a consortium of Barbados planters and merchants who wanted him to impose a minimum price
on their main export, sugar. Charles received more than ten thousand petitions from various interest groups during the 1660s,
so the gift of a pineapple, one of the first ever seen in England, was a clever move by the Barbados consortium that made
their request stand out. It worked: Charles agreed to their proposal a few days after the pineapple’s arrival.

The pineapple in the painting was more than simply a status symbol, however; it was also a reminder of England’s rise as a
maritime trading power, and of its ascendancy in the West Indies in particular. Charles had passed the Navigation Acts during
the 1660s, which banned foreign ships frosm trading with English colonies and so encouraged a dramatic expansion of the English
merchant fleet. In 1668 a pineapple had served as a reminder of En gland’s growing naval might at a banquet held by Charles
in honor of the French ambassador, Charles Colbert. At the time, England and France were fighting over colonial possessions
in the West Indies, so the appearance of a pineapple as the centerpiece of the dessert course emphasized the king’s commitment
to his territories overseas. One observer at the feast recorded that Charles cut the fruit up himself and offered pieces of
it from his own plate. This might sound like a gesture of humility, but was really a demonstration of his power: Only a king
could offer his guests pineapple.

Lending further meaning to the painting was the fact that the pineapple shown was an unusual fruit: It was, according to the
painting’s title, “the first pineapple raised in England.” It seems most likely that the pineapple in question had been imported
as a young plant and had merely been ripened in England, rather than being grown from scratch—something that only became possible
later, in the 1680s, with the invention of the heated greenhouse. Even so, to have ripened a tropical fruit in En gland was
quite a feat, and it signaled the expertise of En gland’s horticulturalists at a time when European nations were competing
to discover, categorize, propagate, and exploit the wealth of plants from Asia and the Americas that had suddenly become available
to them. In this new field of “economic botany,” the pursuit of scientific knowledge went hand in hand with furthering the
national interest, and botanical gardens were being established around the world as colonial laboratories.

The undisputed leaders in the field of economic botany in the late seventeenth century were the Dutch, who had pushed aside
the Portuguese to become the dominant European power in the East at the time. The Dutch wanted to understand new plants for
two main reasons: to find cures for the tropical diseases that were afflicting their sailors, merchants, and colonists; and
to find new agricultural commodities, beyond the known spices, from which to make money. The Dutch set up botanical gardens
at their colonial outposts at the Cape, at Malabar, Ceylon and Java, and in Brazil, all of which exchanged specimens with
similar establishments back home, in Amsterdam and Leyden. These were much more ambitious than the botanical gardens established
in Europe during the sixteenth century, starting in Italy in the 1540s, which had been chiefly medicinal in purpose. As England
and France raced to emulate the Dutch and establish colonies and trading posts of their own, they also discovered an enthusiasm
for economic botany. The history of the spice trade had shown that vast fortunes awaited anyone who could control the supply
and trade of valuable foodstuffs; who knew what other plants were waiting to be exploited?

As if to emphasize the link between botanical and geopolitical mastery, some botanical gardens were even laid out to represent
the world. Most were square, and were divided into four parts, one each for Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. These
areas were then further subdivided, right down to individual beds for particular plants. The botanists who established them
dreamed of being able to gather the whole world’s plants in one place. As the catalog of the Oxford Botanic Garden put it,
“as all creatures were gathered into the Ark . . . so you have the plants of this world in microcosm in our garden.” But this
ambitious goal proved to be hopelessly unrealistic as the number of known plants mushroomed. The “Enquiry into Plants” by
Theophrastus, an ancient Greek author, included only five hundred plants; the “Pinax Theatri Botanici,” an epic work published
by the Swiss botanist Caspar Bauhin in 1596, listed six thousand; and by the 1680s John Ray’s “Historia Generalis Plantarum”
listed more than eighteen thousand. In botany, as in so many other fields, the knowledge of the ancient authorities was found
to be incomplete or plain wrong.

So the botanists served two masters: On the one hand they were members of an international research community, working together
to add to mankind’s understanding of nature, participants in a scientific revolution in which direct observation finally triumphed
over received wisdom. On the other hand, they were expected to do their best to ensure that their own country would benefit
the most from the new plants. Robert Kyd, a British army officer stationed in India who founded Calcutta Botanic Gardens in
1787, summed this up when he wrote that the gardens were established “not for the purpose of collecting rare plants as things
of curiosity or furnishing articles for the gratification of luxury, but for establishing a stock for disseminating such articles
as may prove beneficial to the inhabitants, as well as the natives of Great Britain, and which ultimately may tend to the
extension of the national commerce and riches.” Colonialism, commerce, and science went hand in hand; the number of plants
a nation had at its disposal, and its botanists’ ability to grow them outside their usual habitats, demonstrated that nation’s
technical prowess. Botany was regarded as the “big science” of its day, an indication of a country’s might and sophistication,
just as mastery of nuclear science or space technology is thought to be today. All this meant that the pineapple presented
to Charles II was more than a mere fruit; it was a vivid symbol of his power.

As European explorers, colonists, botanists, and traders sought out new plants, learned how to nurture them, and worked out
where else in the world they might also thrive, they reshaped the world’s ecosystems. The “Columbian Exchange” of food crops
between the Old and New worlds, in which wheat, sugar, rice, and bananas moved west and maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes,
and chocolate moved east (to list just a handful of examples in each direction), was a big part of the story, but not the
only part; Europeans also moved crops around within the Old and New worlds, transplanting Arabian coffee and Indian pepper
to Indonesia, for example, and South American potatoes to North America. Of course, crops had always migrated from one place
to another, but never with such speed, on such a scale, or over such large distances. The post-Columbian stirring of the global
food pot amounted to the most significant reordering of the natural environment by mankind since the adoption of agriculture.
New foods from foreign lands slotted into previously underexploited ecological niches, increasing the food supply in many
cases. This was true of potatoes and maize in parts of Eurasia, peanuts in Africa and India, and bananas in the Caribbean,
for example. Sometimes new crops were hardier than local ones: Sweet potatoes from the Americas caught on in Japan because
they could survive the typhoons that occasionally destroyed the rice crop, and cassava, also from the Americas, was adopted
in Africa after being found to be resistant to locusts, since its edible roots remain safely out of reach underground.

Despite the botanists’ nationalist ambitions, attempts to monopolize new plants generally did not last long. Making money
from sugar, for example, depended on having colonial possessions with the right climate, and that depended chiefly on military
rather than botanical might. Even so, one European nation emerged as the winner of this colonial contest, though its victory
took an entirely unexpected form. The exchange and redistribution of food crops remade the world, and in particular those
parts of it around the Atlantic Ocean, in two stages. First, new foods and new trading patterns redefined the demographics
of the Americas, Africa, and Europe. Having done so, they then contributed to Britain’s emergence as the first industrialized
nation. Had he known this in 1675, Charles II would no doubt have been proud, though he might have been disappointed to hear
that the pineapple was not one of the many foods that would play a part in this tale. Instead, the two foods that are central
to the story are sugar, which traveled west across the Atlantic, and the potato, which traveled in the opposite direction.

The Columbian Exchange, as the historian Alfred Crosby has called it, was aptly named because it really did start with Christopher
Columbus himself. Although many other people carried plants, animals, people, diseases, and ideas between the Old and New
worlds in the years to follow, Columbus was directly responsible for two of the earliest and most important exchanges of food
crops with the Americas. On November 2, 1492, having arrived at the island of Cuba, he sent two of his men, Rodrigo de Jerez
and Luis de Torres, into the interior with two local guides. Columbus believed that Cuba was part of the Asian mainland, and
he expected his men to find a large city where they could make contact with the emperor. Torres spoke a little Arabic, which
would, it was assumed, be understood by the emperor’s representatives. After four days the men returned, having failed to
find either city or emperor. But they had, Columbus recorded, seen many fields of “a grain like millet that the Indians call
maize. This grain has a very good taste when cooked, either roasted or ground and made into a gruel.” This was the first time
that Europeans had encountered maize, and Columbus probably took some back to Spain with him when he returned from his first
voyage, in 1493; he certainly took back maize from his second expedition the following year.

Though maize was initially regarded as a botanical curiosity by European scholars, it soon became apparent that it was well
suited to the southern Mediterranean climate and was, in fact, an extremely valuable crop. By the 1520s it had established
itself in several parts of Spain and northern Portugal, and it soon afterward spread around the Mediterranean, into central
Europe, and down the west coast of Africa. So rapid was the spread of maize around the world that its origins became obscured
almost immediately. In Europe, it was variously known as Spanish corn, Indian corn, Guinea corn, and Turkey wheat, reflecting
confusion about its provenance. And the speed with which maize reached China—it probably arrived there in the 1530s, though
the first definite Chinese reference to it was not until 1555—led some people to the erroneous conclusion that maize must
have been present in Europe and Asia before Columbus. Maize spread so quickly because it had such desirable properties. It
grew well in soil that was too wet for wheat and too dry for rice, so it provided extra food from marginal land where existing
Eurasian staples could not be grown. It also had a short growing season and produced a higher yield, per unit of land and
labor, than any other grain. And whereas wheat typically produced four to six times as much grain per measure of seed sown,
the figure for maize was between one hundred and two hundred.

If maize, the crop that Columbus took eastward, was a blessing, then sugarcane, the crop he took westward, was a curse. Having
worked in his youth as a sugar buyer for Genoese merchants, Columbus was familiar with sugar cultivation. He realized that
the new lands he had discovered were well suited to the production of this lucrative product, and he took sugarcane with him
to Hispaniola on his second voyage to the Americas in 1493. If he could not find gold or spices, he could at least make sugar.
Given the labor-intensive nature of its production, he would have to find sufficient manpower, of course. But Columbus had
observed after his first voyage that “the Indians have no weapons and are quite naked . . . they need only to be given orders
to be made to work, to sow, or to do anything useful.” In other words, he could put the locals to work as slaves.