Fairchild: Testing New Foods 



25 



when asked by a friend, who had given 

 him some Russian tea, how he Hked it, 

 repHed, "Well, you know we found it a 

 trifle tough." He had tried to eat the 

 leaves ! A friend of mine recently took 

 an avocado (alligator pear) up from 

 Florida to New England as a present 

 to his people. "Of course, they knew 

 how tO' serve it!" In the middle of the 

 dinner, as the salad course was ap- 

 proaching he was called into the 

 kitchen to show how the avocado should 

 be served, and he found that the cook, 

 in trying to peel it, had let it slip out of 

 her hands on to the floor, and, in trying 

 to cut it in half, struck the stone and 

 was trying -to cut that with a hatchet. 

 Yet this is the staple food of millions of 

 Guatemalans who can no more imagine 

 intelligent people having difficulty in 

 eating an avocado than we have in im- 

 agining how one should eat an apple. 



I think there is no doubt but that the 

 difficulties of preparing good corn bread 

 have stood in the way of the use of this 

 excellent food by the peoples of 

 Europe, just as our ignorance of how to 

 cook rice properly has prevented our 

 consumption of that cereal from ex- 

 ceeding 7 pounds per capita. 



We have underestimated the size of 

 the task. To plant a tree of a new fruit 

 in a botanical collection and expect the 

 public to take it up is a good deal like 

 making a new tooth powder in a test 

 tube and waiting for a demand for it to 

 spring into existence. In the Pinchin 

 Garden in Rome stands an avocado tree 

 over one hundred years old, and the 

 only people who gather the fruits are 

 the members of the Mexican Legation. 



THE CHAYOTE 



Take the chayote as an example. A 

 few French descendants near New 

 Orleans, Charleston and Savannah have 

 for many years grown with varying 

 yearly success a small patch of what 

 they there call the Mirliton, or mango 

 squash. They have generally sold what 

 they grew, but the demand has not in- 

 creased. Only a very small circle of the 

 fashionable people knew it, and those 

 who 'were not fashionable hesitated to 

 try it. We have taken up its cultiva- 



tion on a larger scale, and we find that 

 instead of a few plants we need at least 

 an acre of trellises and hundreds of 

 vines, and we are planning for the pro- 

 duction of a thousand bushels of the 

 fruits which, with the most carefully 

 thought-out literature to accompany it, 

 will be sent out to the commission 

 houses and the public generally. Hun- 

 dreds of bushels have been so dis- 

 tributed this year and last, with two 

 results — a growing demand by the trade 

 on the one hand and, on the other, a 

 local interest in them by people who 

 could grow them in their own yards for 

 their own use. The propaganda lifts 

 the vegetable from the rank of a curios- 

 ity which "neighbor Jones is growing" 

 and puts it where it belongs, as a per- 

 fectly good vegetable with certain char- 

 acteristics, distinguishing it from all 

 others and making it a valuable addi- 

 tion to the table. 



Much fun is poked at the Florida 

 "Cracker," but, after all, it must be ad- 

 mitted that we owe the grapefruit to 

 his open-minded attitude towards new 

 foods ; whether born of the necessity 

 of isolation or not, is another question. 

 If canned fruits had been cheaper and 

 easier to get in the early days in 

 Florida, perhaps we would not have the 

 grapefruit at all. 



But, after all is said, perhaps the 

 greatest obstacle to a satisfactory test- 

 ing of new foods lies in two curious 

 facts. It seem to be human nature to 

 ridicule a food which one does not like 

 oneself, and to attribute health-giving 

 or disease-producing qualities to the 

 food one eats. This is not only an in- 

 dividual trait, but a universal one. 



Upon the walls of a quaint little hotel 

 in Doylestown, Pa., I found in my bed- 

 room last year an interesting old wood- 

 cut depicting the departure of the 

 French soldiers for England, and under 

 it were these lines : 



"With lantern jaws and croaking gut 

 See how the half-starved Frenchmen 



strut, 

 But soon we'll teach those bragging foes 

 That beef and beer give heavier blows 

 Than lamb and roasted frogs." 



