SUMMER 200728GASTRONOMICAAccording to the truism, we are what we eat. These days, most of us delight in eating plenty of guacamole and mango chutney. But where did those avocados and mangos originate? When did they shift from being exotic intruders to part of our daily diets? What were the politics of their transfer? Most of us haven’t a clue.In fact, deliberate plant transfer into the United States dates back to the late nineteenth century, to the period when Darwinism spurred scientific interest in new typolo-gies and in the recording of new species. This seemingly innocent and objective process evolved into a dynamic global strategy of plant exploration and collection that transformed landscapes and yielded new hybrid vegetable and fruit varieties. In the United States, plant transfer had a clear economic base: the us Department of Agriculture (usda) wanted to provide American farmers with seeds and plants for the creation of new markets. As a result of usda policy, farming and the national landscape changed dra-matically, if gradually. New hybrids that were developed in this country became staples in regional and national markets and ultimately engendered a transformation in global agriculture.The pioneers who sought out nonindigenous plants were by and large men of creative vision and imagination. The collection of plants and their transfer initially belonged to a burgeoning botanical science in which new plants were added to growing and impressive typologies. But economic reasoning, no less than scientific curiosity, shaped the plant hunters’ activity. The significant funding involved in orga-nizing their travels and disseminating their work required administration by government agencies that imposed a variety of regulations and controls. Today’s network of food regulations reflects a hierarchy tied not only to health and safety but also to economics and control. In the late nineteenth century, the usda sent agents throughout the world to find new fruit and vegetable variet-ies suitable for hybrid adaptation and eventual export in the world market. These agents, largely unknown to most the global market | robert r. alvarezThe March of EmpireMangos, Avocados, and the Politics of Transferof us today, formed a cadre of remarkable explorers who pushed at the frontiers of botanical science and changed forever what we buy at our markets, plant in our gardens, and cook for our meals.The Plant HuntersDavid Fairchild (1869–1954). David Fairchild, a botanist and bureaucrat, grew up in Kansas in the 1870s as a mem-ber of America’s intellectual elite. He studied at the Kansas State College of Agriculture, where his father was president, and then at Iowa State and at Rutgers, where his uncle, a distinguished biologist, taught. He eventually married one of Alexander Graham Bell’s daughters. Fairchild came to Washington in the early 1890s, where he joined the Department of Agriculture and made several explorative forays abroad. Indeed, while working for the usda, Fairchild himself introduced more than twenty thousand exotic plants into the United States, among them mangos, alfalfa, nectarines, dates, horseradish, bamboos, and after a trip to Japan, the first flowering cherries of Washington, D.C. In 1889 he convinced the us Congress to allocate twenty thousand dollars to create the Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction (ofspi) and subsequently became its first director. Fairchild’s intention, like that of the usda in gen-eral, was to support an applied botanical science to provide American farmers with what they called “economic plants” for market development. To achieve that goal, he sent usda agricultural explorers, known as “plant hunters,” to collect thousands upon thousands of seeds and plants suitable for America’s farms, home gardens, and city landscapes.The term “economic plants” suggests the motivation behind the newly created office. Rather than search for new botanical specimens solely for the sake of science, the agri-cultural explorers went to the exotic, non-Western regions of the world to seek and capture specific plants and seeds that could prove to be commercially viable. They worked on the margins of what they believed to be the “civilized world,” gastronomica: the journal of food and culture, vol.7, no.2, pp.28–33, issn 1529-3262. © 2007 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press’s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2007.7.3.28.SUMMER 200729GASTRONOMICAusing China, Mexico, South America, India, Northern Europe, and Africa as their hunting fields.Through his expeditionary travels, Fairchild met and recruited other botanists and collectors, many of them distinguished as much by their eccentricities as by their passion for exotic plant exploration and their eagerness to penetrate the far corners of the earth. One such collector, Frank Meyer, exemplified the explorers’ wanderlust. As he wrote in a 1907 letter to Fairchild: “Our short life will never be long enough to find out all about this mighty Frans Nicholas Meijer, Meyer worked as the head gardener at the Amsterdam Botanical Gardens. Even as a young man, he preferred solitary wandering, and his passion for botany took him by foot across Europe through Belgium, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. Ever restless, he went to England to work in a commercial nursery but ended up sailing to New York in 1901, where his mentor, the eminent director of the Amsterdam Gardens, helped him secure work in the usda’s Washington greenhouses. Between 1901 and 1905, Meyer visited Mexico, California, and Cuba,paying his way by working in nurseries. David Fairchild had heard countless stories about Meyer and his adventurous travels. Meyer was working at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis when Fairchild broug ht him into the ofspi and asked him to travel to East Asia in search of plants that might have economic value. Between 1905 and 1918, Meyer went on four long expeditions. His first, to Shanghai and Manchuria, lasted from 1905 to 1908. From the Far East, he shipped back specimens of persimmon, lotus, juniper, horse chestnut, and ginkgo biloba, in addition to thousands of seeds from Chinese vegetable crops. He also explored China’s borders with