Ancient Harvests : THE STORY...

For a kid growing up in a Cold War suburb in the Midwest, food was all about convenience and death. Our freezer was stacked with every kind of frozen vegetable and instant three-course meal that technology had to offer. To this day my mother recoils at the sight of vegetables that still have earth clinging to them.

Food was far removed from its natural state, but that wasn’t all. We lived in the shadow of the mushroom cloud: One of my most vivid food memories is of the eighth-grade home-ec cherries jubilee that was interrupted by the news that President Kennedy was thinking of sending missiles toward Cuba, which meant that the Russkies would send missiles back, and the whole issue of flambe would take on a rather terminal new meaning.

Times have changed. Today’s right-thinking refrigerator is packed with organic produce, and the Cold War has defrosted. What has not changed, really, is our attitude about food. It’s still, to a great extent, about convenience and death, about food as a fossil fuel.

There are people who think a salad is nothing more than a decorative shrub on the landscape of a movie deal. Food is too often an abstraction, which is one of the myriad reasons that Betty Fussell’s “The Story of Corn” is such a delight: The details are lined up like kernels on the cob, with barely room in between for a comma. I defy anyone to finish reading the book without taking a break to cook up a batch (though you must read the “Corn-on-the-Cob” section first, since we have all been doing it wrong forever). Nor will you be able to consume corn, or any corn product, without experiencing a new respect for it--an awareness of its history, an appreciation that even your morning cornflakes link you to the Hopi nation, and its piki wafers. Anyone could decide to write about corn, I suppose, but Fussell, who grew up on a California orange ranch, was looking to find “the center of my family, my country, my culture--founded and sustained on the cultivation of corn.” Her grandparents were Midwestern farmers. Fussell wanted to know what her generation had left behind, which is why she can get away with phrases like “the sexiness of corn” without sounding loopy. The way she writes about it, it is--hypnotic, alluring, sustaining, and not a little bit mysterious. She has written a biography of a lost member of her family, one who just happens to grow on a stalk.

Amal Naj also pursues a single subject. In his case it is peppers, from the sweet bell pepper to the hot peppers he so disliked as a child growing up in India--to the point that the family cook often washed and recooked his portion of a meal to rinse off its burning taste. Naj rediscovered the hot pepper as a college student in Northern Ireland, after one too many bland meals, and now offers an anecdotal history of the fruit to which so many diners worldwide are addicted. He follows botany professor Hardy Eshbaugh, a man as obsessed with the genealogy of peppers as he is indifferent to their taste, on a collecting trip. He documents the Tabasco War between David (B. F. Trappey, makers of Trappey’s Pepper Sauce) and Goliath (McIlhenny Co.), in which an executive from the former has been known to screw the latter’s tops on so tight that restaurant patrons have no choice but to try Trappey’s.

Naj, a Wall Street Journal staff writer, is a food reporter--as opposed to Fussell, the researcher and essayist. His writing lacks the almost spiritual nature of Fussell’s, but he is a wonderful pepper journalist, a man who tells terrific stories that happen to have a foodstuff as a central character.

“Chilies to Chocolate: Food the Americas Gave the World,” edited by Nelson Foster and Linda Cordell, grew out of a 1988 California Academy of Sciences symposium. They have an admirable political agenda, as global in its outlook as Fussell’s and Naj’s are personal. The contributors to this volume intend “retrieving food from abstraction”: They hope to make what Wendell Berry calls “industrial eaters” more mindful of the consequences of their dining habits, and more aware of the world’s food needs. We learn that the tropical forests of southeastern Mexico, once lush with wild vanilla vines, have been destroyed and turned into cattle pastures or citrus groves. Root crops grown in the Andes mountains are virtually unknown outside that region, but could be a valuable addition to the world’s food supply.

If the ecology movement is about saving the planet, then these are food ecologists, committed to saving the planet’s agricultural capacity--even if that means taking grazing land that yields beef for the lucky few and putting it back into use growing nutritious crops that can feed the globe’s hungry population. The writing is often academic, but the message is an essential one: The era of self-interest is over, whether you’re talking about junk bonds or junk food.

This information is oddly reassuring. I remember feeling this way when I saw Paris. Having grown up in the aforementioned apocalyptic suburb, I had little knowledge of the past and so no faith in the future. But here was a city that was hundreds of years old: Suddenly it was possible to imagine that mankind would come to its senses and not blow up the globe. Seeing corn, peppers and vanilla--not on the shelf, but in context--has the same refreshing effect. Faith is renewed. If we acknowledge the past, and learn from it, perhaps we won’t squander the globe, either.