100 Million Years of Food (7 page)

The chickens also poop in the soil and aerate the earth through their digging and scratching. Once in a while, Clea harvests the hens' eggs. We approach the cow stall where Clea keeps a few cows and their calves. Like the chickens, these cows have it pretty good; they will be neither milked nor butchered.

“I just want them for their piss and shit,” she says, in her characteristic blunt manner.

Cattle urine and manure make excellent fertilizer. In true permaculture spirit, she also captures the waste from her own toilet to grow her vegetables. She discovered through experimentation a method of treating urine and feces from a regular flush toilet; the toilet output could be used to grow vegetables, with no adverse health effects noted.

We descend into the fruit terrace, which resembles a modern-day Garden of Eden: trees bearing juicy sweet lime-green star fruit, crunchy rose-pink heart-shaped love apples, and a profusion of cashew apples, odd yellow-red triangular fruit with hooked appendages harboring the cashew seed. While I'm stuffing my face on star fruit and love apples, we reach an old concrete dam and the waterfall that runs beneath it. Clea is trying to design her guesthouse bathroom so that slabs of cool smooth gray stone in the shower re-create the ambience of bathing in the waterfall. We ascend a short ridge, just as the last of the light fades from the warm Goan night sky. Clea points out a distant phalanx of trees demarcating the valley. In the middle of her property stands an old crooked tree with menacing spindly limbs raised against the sky, bristling like a gargoyle. “The Devil's tree,” she says, laughingly.

According to the previous farmer and local folklore, the property was cursed by this tree and crop yields were consequently low. The farm was abandoned, and Clea was able to buy the property, one step closer to realizing her dream. Clea notes that the true value of her long scientific education was that it equipped her with a skeptical mind and a love of experimentation. The farmer's principal error, to her way of thinking, was that he used crude rice monoculture practices, stripping the land of its natural cover and exposing the nutrients to leaching and erosion. It was this practice, rather than the Devil's tree, that doomed his crops. Clea takes me to a patch of earth on the farm that is caked, dry, and barren, as if it were the boot-print of a giant. Clea says that when she bought the property, all the earth looked like this. Over a span of four years, with the help of her students and hired workers, Clea has slowly brought the land back to life by analyzing the soil chemistry and water runoff patterns, using plants with matted roots and weeds to hold the soil, and employing a variety of other ingenious techniques. Foyt's Farm is an example of a self-sustaining ecosystem, whose general strategies can be used in other places to return to a more locally efficient method of farming.

In the remaining eerie dusk light, we gather fallen cashew fruit in our hands, the smell of the soft, broken fruit lustful and cloying. Clea planted trees on her property that give off strong perfumes, to confuse insect pests as they try to home in on the scent of their preferred host plants. This lessens the need for chemical pesticides and provides a natural fragrance.

The strenuous beating of drums can be heard in the distance.

“It's India. There're always festivals going on,” she tells me.

I follow the thin swath lit by Clea's torch as we head back to her dwelling. Clea harvests arugula and lettuce from the greenhouse (ratlike bandicoots have been breaking in and wreaking havoc) next to her open-air kitchen. She pulls out a package of homegrown cashews from a freezer and pulverizes them into a cream with a countertop blender. One of her workers fetches a strand of black and green pepper from a vine growing around a tree near the house. A squirt of homegrown lemon into the cashew cream, a sprinkle of fresh peppercorns. We tuck into the meal. The heat of the peppercorns and arugula and sour lemon sets off the cashew cream perfectly. I ask for another helping. And another.

“Have some more dressing,” Clea says. “Every day I eat this and every day I get excited!”

“You're living in paradise,” I respond, overwhelmed by the feast.

“I think so, but no one else does. They think I'm crazy.”

We happily eat, slurp, and grunt. Clea sighs, indicating her ample waist. “I eat far too much, though, way more than I should. I have a lot of healthy meals, but when the bananas are ripe, I eat six or seven a day. I eat cashews, all fattening!” Clea notes my empty bowl. “Shall I get you another star fruit? This is a meal!”

It's remarkable to think of what Clea has achieved on the strength of her determination, ingenuity, and passion for sustainable farming. By comparison, Clea's sister is the model of Indian respectability: educated at Berkeley in economics, then Harvard Business School, and now employed at one of the biggest management consultancies in the world. Clea's sister is married, has two kids and a big house in Belgium, and employs a maid. Clea expresses not the slightest iota of envy for her sister's life. Clea recalls that she never played with dolls; she once asked her parents for an elephant and horses but was given instead a dog, ducks, rabbits, tortoises—anything her parents thought she could handle.

I bring out the rosé wine. It is terrible—never trust these liquor store owners—but as we sit there in the utter darkness, Clea becomes expansive. Her parents wanted her to get married, but Clea's relationship is on the rocks.

“Who wants to live with a crazy woman in the jungle?” she says.

We listen for the sounds of a panther that roams the perimeters of the farm, stalking the chickens. Clea seems unperturbed. “You can sense its presence, the way a twig snaps … not like a wild boar blundering in the bush.”

It's unnerving to think that a large predator is roaming beyond the circle of feeble light emitted from the house; I think I might have to pee soon. A tiger had been spotted before in a nearby village, and a twelve-foot cobra was caught on the property once. Clea says this is when she is happiest, alone at night, sharing the jungle with wild animals, soothed by the entrancing perfume emanating from her trees, living on a farm that had been abandoned but has now begun to heal, yielding the sweetest, most satisfying fruits that a human could possibly ask for.

 

THE TEMPTATION OF MEAT

I shot a large roan antelope which was divided among twenty-two adults and forty-seven children in a community where there had not been much meat available recently.… [An] old lady cried light-heartedly, hitting her stomach, “I have been turned into a young girl, my heart is so light.”

—
A
UDREY
I
SABEL
R
ICHARDS,
Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia: An Economic Study of the Bemba Tribe

Fruits have their devotees; in modern times, some people have subsisted largely or even entirely on fruit. However, in the long history of food, our affection for fruit pales in comparison to our worship of meat. It's true that some people abstain from meat, many of them repulsed by meat's taste and associations, but instances like this represent triumphs of mind over body. Human babies are not so complicated. A few days ago I watched my nine-month-old nephew in action during lunch. Arrayed on his plastic tray were diced bits of carrots, green beans, and stewed pork. His pudgy little hand reached out and vigorously swept aside the green beans, seizing instead the morsels of pork, every last one. In the years to come, he might ponder his relationship with meat and spurn it for a spell, as many of my friends and family have done, along with myself; for now, his genes have programmed him to target meat over veggies. In the turbulent religion of food, infants dwell peacefully, having no inkling of sin. The puzzle over meat goes beyond morality, though; even from a biological or archaeological viewpoint, many researchers grapple with why and how humans developed a taste for meat, the hallmark of the Paleo or caveman diet.

*   *   *

Dominic looks me up and down. A former rugby player twice my girth, he could quash my toothpick frame at a moment's notice. An overhead fan spins sluggishly, not enough to churn and dissipate the thick heat coiling around us and the other waiting passengers. “You're a student?” he asks. “You can visit my village, if you wish. I live in the rainforest. It won't be what you're used to.” He steps out into the sun to buy me a Coke from a vending machine, sealing our agreement in a stream of ice-cold fizzy brown soda.

I'm in Papua New Guinea to scout a future site for my dissertation research. Before writing their dissertations, anthropology graduate students are required to undertake fieldwork. Papua New Guinea has long been a magnet for anthropologists, because the region's steep mountain ranges and thick jungle terrain led to the evolution of a profusion of cultures and more than eight hundred distinct languages.
1
I selected the province of West New Britain for my fieldwork site because from satellite and atlas maps, only a single spindly road could be seen worming into the interior, which meant that I would have a better chance of observing more intact cultural traditions. However, the lack of infrastructure in West New Britain also meant that it was impossible for me to arrange contacts in advance. To my great fortune, after I caught a lift to an airport on the northern side of West New Britain in the back of a pickup, my driver happened to see his friend Dominic in the waiting room and introduced us, giving me a precious contact in the interior.

An hour or so later, our bush plane shudders over a forested mountain range. The pilot boomerangs over a cove and drops us swiftly onto a grass landing strip. Dominic leads me through the dusty lanes of the town of Kandrian to stock up on tinned mackerel, rice, batteries, kerosene, and tarp. We lug the boxes to an outboard boat. When enough passengers are gathered, the craft skims out of the cove like a flying fish. We endure numbing sea spray, but after nightfall the waters are lit by glimmering bioluminescent plankton. Eventually we spot flickering torches and huts on stilts. Dominic's name is taken up by a chorus piping in the night. Villagers wade out to the boat and hoist our belongings to shore.

At daybreak, the outboard boat is maneuvered into the maw of a mangrove channel. We pole through shallows, then hike two hours along a slippery trail to the hedges of bougainvillea bordering Dominic's village. Dominic introduces me to his nephews Aloish and Frank, two easygoing New Guineans in their early twenties. Dominic quickly organizes a work party to build a hut for me next to his house. The walls consist of three panels of aluminum siding, with another piece as the roof. Branches are lashed together to make my bed, and two other beds are fashioned for Aloish and Frank. I hang my mosquito net over the bed. Aloish and Frank build up a fire in the middle of the hut. I have a thin blanket to keep me warm and a mosquito net to keep off the bugs, unlike the two young men shivering in the cold.

The Gimi people subsist on cassava, yams, grated coconut, and greens, with occasional windfalls of pork. One evening, my provisions are exhausted and only crumbly yams are doled out. Aloish and Frank request a few bills of Papua New Guinean kina from me to buy flashlight batteries. In the morning, I lift my mosquito net to find a tin pot hanging by the foot of my makeshift bed: a boiled fruit bat, eyelids wrinkled in resignation, rests in a creamy coconut broth, with some strands of bitter greens tossed in. Primal craving drives me to scarf down the bat, grayish oily skin and all, sparing only the bones and brains.

*   *   *

Cooks around the world, past and present, have recognized that great food depends on the glories of fatty meat or some other kind of fat. The Pacific Coast Native Canadians prepared prodigious quantities of oil from salmon and oolichan (candlefish) for their feasts. Coconut and sesame oils impart to South Asian and Korean dishes their comforting tastes. Lard was used throughout much of Eurasia to transform the meat-poor meals of peasants into proper fare, while whale blubber, beaver tail fat, sheep fat, kangaroo fat, whole milk, and olive oil were celebrated elsewhere. The desire to consume fat can humble a grown person. In Melbourne, Australia, a lady on a bus told me that her portly grandmother made stealthy forays into a bucket of forbidden but coveted lard, forging a pact with the grandchildren to keep her indulgence from her daughter's knowledge.

Yet there is nothing intrinsically nutritious about meat, fat, and oil; after all, gorillas, giraffes, and elephants are whopping big beasts that thrive on vegetarian diets. Some of the longest-lived peoples in the world achieved excellent health while consuming sweet potatoes, wheat, corn, or rice and very little meat.
2
Why are we so crazy about meat, fat, and oil? And is eating such fare good for our health?

To answer this question, we need to look at our family tree. As the Earth's temperature cooled down over the past 50 million years and rainforests became scarcer, our ancestors developed different niches. Our orangutan and gibbon ape relations spend their lives in the rainforest canopies of Southeast Asia searching primarily for fruit. Another of our ape relations,
Paranthropus,
lived in Africa 3 million years ago and chomped on tough plant foods, aided by massive jaws and molar teeth that were perfect for grinding.
Paranthropus
skulls look similar to gorilla skulls. If we had evolved from
Paranthropus,
today we would all be content to munch on leaves, grasses, seeds, and roots, and the grounds of a North American college would be a smorgasbord for gorilla-head humans: lawns, leaves, flowers, acorns as a fallback snack. But students, no matter how skimpy their budgets, do not browse on the shrubs outside the dormitory, because humans did not descend from Paranthropine herbivores. Despite the apparent abundance of menu options, seasonal variation in the quality or availability of plants forces herbivores into long marches or airborne flights for lusher pastures.
3
The natural range of
Paranthropus
was likely restricted, as is the range of modern-day gorillas. The geographical options of an omnivore are considerably broader.