You've probably never heard of David Fairchild. But if you've savored kale, mango, peaches, dates, grapes, a Meyer lemon, or a glass of craft beer lately, you've tasted the fruits of his globe-trotting travels in search of the world's best crops—and his struggles to get them back home to the United States. This episode, we talk to Daniel Stone, author of The Food Explorer, a new book all about Fairchild's adventures. Listen in now for tales of pirates and biopiracy, eccentric patrons and painful betrayals, as well as the successes and failures that shaped not only the way we eat, but America's place in the world. ENCORE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Last episode, you heard the riveting story of Luther Burbank, plant breeder extraordinaire.
In the episode, we mentioned a guy named David Fairchild.
Burbank was a plant wizard.
Fairchild was a plant explorer.
And unsurprisingly, they were buddies.
Fairchild often sent Burbank little envelopes of seeds from his travels, and both of them have been almost forgotten, despite the fact that they shaped what we eat today.
Were bringing you this encore episode about Fairchild.
Thanks to our friends at American Express, we'll be back with a brand new episode next week.
And for now, here's David Fairchild's story.
Enjoy.
I heard Fairchild's name at National Geographic one day.
Someone described him as an adventurer botanist, and I had never heard anyone have that title before.
And it sounded so illustrious that I dug deeper and deeper and found his journals and his travel memos and his love letters that painted a portrait of his adventures all over the world.
That's Daniel Stone.
And the person he's talking about is David Fairchild, one of the most interesting and important people behind the food on our plates that you've never heard of.
But Dan did hear about him, and he wrote a book about him.
It's called the Food the true adventures of the globetrotting botanist who transformed what America eats.
You're listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.
I'm Cynthia Graber.
And I'm Nicola Twilley.