Category: History

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A Japanese banana in northern Italy

An advert in a local gardening magazine for something called Freddi Banana, supposedly a cold-tolerant banana “developed” in the northern Italian region of Alto Adige, led me down some interesting online byways. In one place it is a cross between a Japanese and a Nepalese variety, in another its origin is given as Ryukyu Islands, Japan. That’s the chain stretching from Taiwan to Japan. I found the whole thing hard to believe, but a little research revealed that there is indeed a Musa species in the Ryukyu Islands. This is Musa basjoo, and it is the most cold-hardy of bananas. Various cultivars are available commercially.

Musa basjoo is commonly referred to as the Japanese Fibre Banana and it’s native place is given as the Ryukyu (Liu Kiu) Islands. However, Musa basjoo is not the Japanese Fibre Banana. Musa basjoo is not from the Liu Kiu Islands and not from Japan, it is a Chinese species.

So what is the Japanese Fibre Banana, I hear you ask?

The true identity of the Japanese Fibre Banana became known only in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat in WWII when the Ryukyu Islands came under the control of the United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands (USCAR). USCAR brought to Okinawa Egbert H. Walker, a staff member of the Department of Botany, Smithsonian Institution who was in charge of the Serviceman’s Collecting Program (SCP) in which US forces members were encouraged to collect and submit botanical and other specimens. But Walker was no desk-bound administrator of the SCP. He was an accomplished field botanist and developed a thorough knowledge of the Ryukyu flora. His work, during which he personally collected over 7,000 plant specimens on Okinawa and neighbouring islands, culminated in his Flora of Okinawa (Walker 1976). Walker made no mention of M. basjoo in this work but did include the ito-basho, Musa liukiuensis, after the treatment of which he commented:

“Seeds from plants [of Musa liukiuensis] in Oku [village in northern Okinawa] were grown in Kingston, Jamaica by the Banana Breeding Scheme of the Banana Board. The seed, seedlings and flowers were reported in 1973 to be identical with those of Musa balbisiana Colla.”

Called ito basho, or “thread banana,” the Japanese Fibre Banana is very important in Ryukyu tradition, much like abacá, a different fibre-producing Musa species, is in the Philippines.

In the old days, bolts of plain-colored, striped and kasuri (ikat) basho-fu were woven in numerous locations across the Ryukyu islands and were used as tribute payments to the Okinawan royalty. In those days, basho-fu was worn by everyone from kings to commoners. Nowadays, however, basho-fu is a luxury cloth that is made only in the village of Kijoka, on the island of Okinawa.

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“I find that no Plants were as yet collected for His Majestys Garden at Kew”

Smithsonian Magazine has a long, wonderful piece this month about the breadfruit — and Captain Bligh — in Jamaica. It’s by Caroline Alexander, who wrote a book on the famous mutiny, The Bounty. People forget that after the Bounty debacle in 1789, Bligh eventually, doggedly went back to the Pacific and completed his original mission of taking breadfruit to the Caribbean. In 1793, the Providence finally delivered its Tahitian cargo to Jamaica. Its descendants are still there. There’s a companion piece on cooking with breadfruit which includes Diana Ragone’s (of the Breadfruit Institute) recipe for her tasty breadfruit nachos. You can become a fan of the Breadfruit Institute on Facebook, which is how I got to the Smithsonian piece.

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Agrobiodiversity timelines roundup

While looking for something else, I came across an interesting food timeline. Perhaps a bit selective, but definitely worth exploring. Then by coincidence I stumbled on another timeline, this time of gardening around the world. Again, not a bad way to waste some time, although way too many links seem to be broken. Anyway, I naturally tried to go for the trifecta, but I could not find an even half-decent timeline of agricultural history. Maybe you can?

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Selling touselle

In 1482, in the month of December, King Louis XI was taken ill at Tours, and had Touzelle [wheat] brought from the diocese of Nismes, so that bread could be made for him. The prince, extremely weak in mind and body, and struck with the fear of death beyond all expression, believed that of all the corners of his kingdom, the diocese of Nismes produced the wheat most likely to bring him to health.

That’s Léon Ménard in his Histoire de Nîmes of 1755. The passage is quoted in a short post in what alas seems now to be a dormant blog about artisanal breadmaking. I got there because I was intrigued by this statement in a box in a GRAIN article by Hélène Zaharia (of Réseau Semences Paysannes) called Bread of life. ((This is a companion piece to breadmaker Andrew Whitley’s The bread we eat, published in 2007.))

Henri is an organic farmer in the south of France. In 1997 he was carrying out research into farming practice in the Gare ((Is this a misprint? I think it should read “Gard.”)) region when he discovered Touselle wheat. It is an early wheat, without whiskers, with a soft grain, very suitable for bread-making. It was once cultivated quite widely in Languedoc and Provence and was appreciated for its good yields, even when it was grown on poor soil in a difficult, dry environment. But by the time Henri became interested in it, it had been widely abandoned in favour of modern varieties.

Henri decided to try it out for himself and obtained a few seeds of four of the 13 varieties of Touselle held in the Department of Genetic Resources at INRA in Clermont-Ferrand.

It turns out that “Henri” (for some reason, no surname is provided in the GRAIN article) is Henri Ferté, and what intrigued me particularly about this passage is that he is a farmer who obtained germplasm directly from a genebank, in this case the Conservatoire de Ressources Génétiques, INRA Clermont-Ferrand. ((“[L]’une des premières collections européennes.”)) This doesn’t happen as much as it could, or should. Or at least I don’t know of that many examples. Henri knew about the genebank because he has “un diplôme d’agro en poche,” as Zaharia says in another, more recent, article (which I cannot find online, but is entitled “Gard: La relance des blés méditerranéens.”). How do less academically qualified farmers find out about what’s in genebanks? It would be great to do a review of such direct use of national genebanks, and why there isn’t more of it. Maybe there is one out there already? Not all users are breeders — we sometimes forget that.

Anyway, Henri seems to have been fairly successful in bringing back touselle, King Louis XI’s miraculous wheat. This was apparently still around — in a number of distinct forms — at the end of the 19th century, but later largely disappeared: “…by 2004 Touselle was being grown experimentally on a fairly large number of peasant farms in the south of France.” A Union for the Promotion of Touselle was established in 2005. It doesn’t look to me like their website has been very active in the intervening years, but that’s no doubt because niche wheat farmers in the south of France have better things to do than mess around on the internet.

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Pulses and the Renaissance

I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of an intriguing, vaguely familiar assertion about legumes made by Tom Jaine in his recent Guardian review of a clutch of food books:

the 12th-century renaissance that gave us Heloise and Abelard was due mainly to better agriculture and more protein-rich legumes rather than heightened sensibility or appreciation of the classics — for Abelard, not so much cherchez la femme as cherchez le pain.

Intriguing, but ambiguous. Legumes which were more protein-rich? Or more legumes? More yield of legumes, or more species of legumes? I remembered having read similar things in the past — medieval agricultural innovation and all that — but I had never looked into the subject in any detail.

I suppose the easiest way to find out more would have been to read the source of the statement, Tom Standage’s An Edible History of Humanity. This is about how foods have influenced history, which sounds pretty interesting. And hopefully one day I will get to it. But until then, there is the internet. ((Edible History is not yet on Google Books.))

The most accessible elucidation I’ve been able to find online of the assertion that pulses drove the 12th century mini-Renaissance is an article by Umberto Eco. He points out that the population of Europe began to increase again at the turn of the second millennium after a long period of stagnation, perhaps tripling in the next 500 years. Why? Eco suggests that agricultural innovation was behind this explosion of population, and of physical and intellectual energy. There was a new(ish) three-field rotation, iron horseshoes, a new collar and ploughing methods. But there were also beans, peas, vetch and lentils.

All these fruits of the earth are rich in vegetable proteins, as anyone who goes on a low-meat diet knows, for the nutritionist will be sure to insist that a nice dish of lentils or split peas has the nutritional value of a thick, juicy steak. Now the poor, in those remote Middle Ages, did not eat meat, unless they managed to raise a few chickens or engaged in poaching (the game of the forest was the property of the lords). …[T]his poor diet begat a population that was ill nourished, thin, sickly, short and incapable of tending the fields.

So when, in the 10th century, the cultivation of legumes began to spread, it had a profound effect on Europe. Working people were able to eat more protein; as a result, they became more robust, lived longer, created more children and repopulated a continent.

I tried to find out a bit more online about the dynamics of the spread of these crops through Europe, presumably from their Mediterranean heartland, but was not all that successful. There’s a little something in a book on medieval population growth.

And also a bit in a book on medieval agriculture. But nothing on exactly how pulses were adopted across the continent. Best I can figure is that they were already known to some extent, and perhaps cultivated on a small scale in gardens, and were gradually incorporated into the field system, replacing bare fallows, as suitable agricultural land ran out and intensification became necessary. ((I wonder if modern examples of crops moving from homegardens to commercial fields and orchards might offer a suitable parallel for this process.)) Anyway, surely the process is fairly well understood by historians and I’m just showing my ignorance here. Who will instruct me?