The Triumph of Seeds (8 page)

The Snake River dams, and the placid lakes behind them, may take the thrill out of river travel. But they also say something important about the political power of grain. Because while the dams on the Columbia supply massive irrigation schemes and produce half the region’s electricity, water and hydropower were afterthoughts on the Snake. The four dams downstream of Lewiston were built to move cargo, and the cargo moving from Lewiston was grain. In 1945, awash in war debt, the United States Congress still deemed the transportation of Palouse wheat and barley a top government priority. It approved construction of “such dams as are necessary” to open up the lower Snake River to navigation, a massive infrastructure project that would last three decades and cost more than
$4 billion in today’s currency. At a ribbon-cutting ceremony in 1975, Idaho governor Cecil Andrus stood on the docks at Lewiston and predicted that his state’s new seaport would “enrich our daily lives through international trade.” The export boom that followed proved him right, and also proved that wheat and barley can do more than get dams built: they can also protect them in a changing political climate.

Within a few weeks of the governor’s speech, rare fishes like Tennessee’s infamous snail darter gained protection from the recently passed Endangered Species Act, and began complicating dam construction across the country. This trend reached Idaho in the 1990s, when four varieties of Snake River salmon and steelhead, decimated by the dams and slackwater, were added to the endangered species
list. The resulting “Salmon Wars” illustrate how grain continues to hold sway in national politics. Breaching the Snake River dams became a rallying cry for fishing and environmental groups, and for a time seemed a likely outcome in efforts to save wild salmon. But though the idea of dam removal was bolstered by favorable court decisions and support from the likes of Vice President Al Gore, it slowly faded from the discussion. Instead, the government spent additional billions of dollars building fish ladders and hatcheries and even physically moving fish around the dams. Sometimes the little salmon go by tanker truck, but more often they travel the same way that grain does: by barge.

A few “SAVE OUR DAMS” signs can still be seen in Lewiston and nearby communities, but the lettering is faded and they seem redundant. Hardly anyone on either side now considers dam removal likely. When I asked Sam about the controversy, he said simply, “Dams are still an important part of how we move product.” Sam struck me as a modest man, but that might have been his biggest understatement of the day: since Governor Andrus cut that ribbon in 1975, the Snake/Columbia system has become the third-busiest grain corridor in the world.

While multibillion-dollar dam schemes may sound extreme, they’re far from the only way that politicians support growing, shipping, and marketing the grass seeds we all depend on. The same economic and cultural forces that led the Romans to invent Annona, the “free wheat” goddess, still keep governments around the world in the grain business. State-supported enterprises from Russia and Ukraine to Australia and Argentina continue investing heavily in transportation, export terminals, and subsidized production. In China, the practice dates back to at least the fifth century
BC
, when work began on the Grand Canal, a 1,104-mile-long (1,777-kilometer) waterway designed to keep wheat and rice supplies flowing to the capital. It’s a timeless imperative. As agricultural lobbyists love to point out, skimping on a highway bill means a few more potholes; cutting the farm bill means that people don’t eat.

Toward the end of our day on the Palouse, Sam and I passed a row of grain elevators on the edge of Genesee and came to a metal-sided building that hummed with activity. “Do you want to see some garbs?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” I answered, hoping that I’d correctly understood “garbs” as an insider’s slang for garbanzo beans.

Sure enough, I soon found myself on a noisy factory floor, dodging forklifts loaded high with legumes. We watched the garbs rattle down conveyor belts, pass through cleaners and sorters, and drop finally through an electronic eye that spotted any blemish and removed the offending bean with a blast of compressed air. Packed into hundred-pound sacks emblazoned with a “Clipper Brand” sailing ship, the final product was loaded into waiting trucks. Then it would either head west, to Seattle and the Asian ports beyond, or east, to a hummus factory in Virginia.

“Legumes are an important part of the rotation,” Sam explained, after we’d left the clamor of the packing plant behind. “Most growers will do a fall wheat and a spring wheat, and then work in a crop of lentils, garbs, or split peas.” Alternating crops helps keep the pest load down, but, just as importantly, the peas and beans fix nitrogen in the soil, naturally fertilizing the next grain crop. This pairing of grasses and legumes is as old as agriculture itself, a method repeated virtually everywhere that plant domestication has taken place. Garbanzos (or chickpeas), lentils, and split peas all developed alongside wheat and barley in the Fertile Crescent. In China, early rice farmers soon added soybeans, adzukis, and mung beans to the mix. Central America had its corn and pinto beans, while African millet and sorghum went hand in hand with cowpeas and groundnuts. More than just a good cropping method, this synergy extends all the way to the dining-room table, where starchy grains and protein-rich legumes complement one another perfectly,
both in flavor and nutrition. The “complete proteins” found in combinations like rice and beans, or a lentil and barley salad, are common knowledge to anyone who has read the first page of a vegetarian cookbook. Essential
nutrients that might be lacking in a particular grain can generally be found in the accompanying legume, and vice versa. But these stark differences in the contents of grains and legumes also raise very basic questions about the biology of seeds.

With grasses so successful in nature and so useful to people, it’s obvious that packing one’s seeds with a starchy lunch is a good evolutionary idea. So why don’t all plants do it? Why do beans and nuts store energy in proteins and oils? Why does a palm kernel contain over 50 percent saturated fat? Why are jojoba seeds practically dripping with liquid wax? Grass starch may be the staff of life, but plants obviously have a lot of other ways to fuel their seeds and, by extension, us. Happily, one of the best ways to explore the range of sustenance packed into seeds involves a trip to the nearest candy aisle.

CHAPTER THREE

Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut

God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.

—German Proverb

I
n the late 1970s, the Peter Paul Manufacturing Company raised its suggested retail price for Almond Joy candy bars to twenty-five cents. But though this figure equaled my entire weekly allowance, I never regretted investing those wages in a confection the ad jingle summarized as “rich milk chocolate, coconut, and munchy nuts too!” At the time, it never occurred to me that my future career would reach this enviable moment: the opportunity to buy my favorite candy bars as a business expense. But a fact that escaped me then is extremely relevant now: from the first crunch of the roasted almond to the chewy sweetness of the chocolate and coconut finish, savoring an Almond Joy bar is an entirely seed-based experience. And while it’s tempting to chalk up Almond Joys to the same logic that Benjamin Franklin used for beer—“proof that God loves us”—there’s far more to their story. The seeds involved don’t just taste good; they demonstrate beautifully the incredible range of ways that a plant can pack lunch for its offspring.

An Almond Joy now costs eighty-five cents at our local drugstore, and I’ve paid more than a dollar for them at vending machines. But you still feel like you’re getting your money’s worth because each package actually contains
two
small bars. This gives buyers the opportunity to share with a friend or save a piece for later, though it’s unclear if anyone has ever done so. In my case, having two bars allowed me to eat one immediately and still have something left over to dissect. Cutting the bar in cross-section revealed its center of shredded coconut (from a pan-tropical palm), topped with almond (from an Asian tree in the rose family), and surrounded by a thin layer of chocolate (from a small New World rainforest tree). I took scrapes from each layer and prepared a microscope slide, but glancing at the package told me that none of these was the most dominant seed product in the bar. That honor rested with corn syrup, a sweetener derived from the seeds of a grass, maize, that is often used as a
replacement for cane sugar (which, incidentally, also comes from a grass). But we already know from the last chapter that grasses are ubiquitous, and that their starch-filled seeds are easily transformed into sugars. The rest of the bar’s contents tell us why seeds have developed so many other ways to store energy, and why we should all be thankful that they have.

The milk chocolate coating contained cocoa butter as well as a dark, bitter slurry that candy makers refer to as cocoa liquor, cocoa mass, or simply chocolate. These products both come directly from the large cotyledons found in a mature cacao bean. Squeeze the bean in a hot press and more than half its mass drips out as cocoa butter, a fat with the important quality of being solid at room temperature but liquid above approximately 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius). Since the average body temperature clocks in at 98.6°F, chocolate, quite literally, melts in your mouth. Roasting and milling the beans produces cocoa liquor, which can be mixed with varying amounts of cocoa butter, milk, and accompanying sweeteners to give us the wide range of chocolate flavors available in any well-stocked candy aisle. Farther down on the ingredients list, I
spotted cocoa powder, another familiar cacao product, which comes from grinding the cake of dry “nibs” left over after
pressing the beans for butter.

In the wild, cacao beans reside inside the fleshy pods of a small, shade-loving tree native to forests of southern Mexico, Central America, and the Amazon. I often stumbled upon old cacao orchards in Costa Rica while searching for
almendro
seeds. I would glance up from a transect to find myself suddenly surrounded by their pods—bizarre, gourd-like fruits that sprouted directly from trunks and branches in varying shades of orange, purple, chartreuse, and hot pink. It’s no wonder that cacao caught the attention of the Mayans, Aztecs, and other early Americans, who developed a stimulating energy drink from the beans, and whose reverence for the species lives on in its genus name,
Theobroma
, “food of the gods.” It took Europeans and the rest of the world a few centuries to really acquire the taste, but cacao trees now grow everywhere from Guatemala to Ghana, Togo, Malaysia, and Fiji, and global chocolate sales exceed $100 billion annually. The average German consumes more than twenty pounds of the stuff every year, and in Britain people spend more money on candy than they do on bread and tea. Ecologically, the extravagance of a large, rich bean makes perfect sense. Like
almendro
or avocado, cacao seeds evolved to sprout and grow in a dark forest, where young seedlings need large energy reserves to survive. But nothing I saw in cacao plantations, botany textbooks, or candy bars explained why that energy had to come in the form of fat instead of starch.

I turned to the next ingredient on the Almond Joy list, coconut, from a seed that ranks among the world’s largest. Though familiar to anyone who has dreamed of palm trees and tropical beaches, the coconut is actually something of a mystery. Botanists call it
cosmopolitan
, a word that only came into common use in the nineteenth century, when global empires and fast sailing ships made it suddenly possible for an individual to become familiar with all parts of the world. For a plant, there can hardly be a greater compliment: so widespread and successful that no one is even sure where you came from.
The coconut palm achieved this feat with fruits that function as massive, floating seeds. Each buoyant husk surrounds a single fist-sized kernel that is hollow except for a nutritious liquid known to health-food enthusiasts as “coconut water.” Whatever branding specialist coined that term cannot be blamed for shying away from the more accurate, technical description:
acellular endosperm
. But while “endosperm” might not sound catchy in an ad campaign, its market potential should not be underestimated. As a coconut seed matures, much of its liquid hardens into a solid endosperm called
copra
, the familiar white flesh that graces not only candy bars and cream pies but also Filipino stews, Jamaican breads, and South Indian chutneys. Squeeze
water through that flesh, and you get coconut milk, an essential ingredient in curries and sauces throughout the coastal tropics. And with minimal processing, copra yields over half its volume in coconut oil, one of the top five vegetable fats in the world and a common additive in everything from margarine to sunscreen.