Posts Tagged ‘fruit’
“The bigger, the better”*…
Thea Applebaum Licht with a reminder that, when it comes to size, Texas has got nothing on California…
Between about 1905 and 1915, the United States entered a golden age of postcards. Cheaper and faster mail service, the advent of “divided back” cards (freeing the entire front for images), and improved commercial printing all drove a new mass market for collectible communication. It was at this same moment that a craze for “tall-tale” or “exaggeration” postcards reached its peak. By cutting, collaging, and re-photographing images, artists created out-of-proportion illusions. One of the most popular genres was agricultural goods of fantastic dimensions.
Nowhere were such postcards more popular than in the western states. There, in the heart of the tough business of agriculture, illustrations of folkloric American abundance were understandable favorites. Pride and place were tied up with the prodigious crops. Supersized fruits and vegetables were often accompanied by brief captions: “How We Do Things at Attica, Wis.”, “The Kind We Raise in Our State”, or “The Kind We Grow in Texas”. Photographers like William “Dad” H. Martin and Alfred Stanley Johnson Jr. captured farmers harvesting furniture-sized onions and stacking corn cobs like timber, fisherman reeling in leviathans, and children sharing canoe-like slices of watermelon.
In the series of exaggeration postcards [produced in the run-up to the postcard boom, then published during it] collected [here], it is California that takes center stage. Produced by the prolific San Francisco–based publisher Edward H. Mitchell, each card features a single rail car rolling through lush farmland. Aboard are gargantuan, luminous fruits and vegetables: dimpled navel oranges, a dusky bunch of grapes, and mottled walnuts. Placed end-to-end, the cards would make a colorful train crossing California’s fertile valleys. Unlike other, more action-packed “tall-tale” cards — filled with farmers, fisherman, and children for scale — Mitchell’s series is restrained. Sharply illuminated, the colossal cargo lean toward artwork rather than gag. “A Carload of Mammoth Apples”[here], green-yellow and gleaming, could have been plucked from Rene Magritte’s The Son of Man [here].
Fabulous fruit and vegetables: “Calicornication: Postcards of Giant Produce (1909),” from @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.
In other art-related news: (very) long-term readers might recall that, back in 2008, (R)D reported that London’s Daily Mail believed that it had tracked him down, and that he is Robin Gunningham. Now as Boing Boing reports:
Anyone reading Banksy’s Wikipedia article at any point since a famous Mail on Sunday exposé in 2008 would likely get the impression the secretive stenciler is probably Robin Gunningham or Robert Del Naja, artists who came from the Bristol Underground. Reuters, having conducted extensive research into their movements, finds both men present at critical moments, but only one at all of them: an arrest report from New York City puts Gunningham firmly in the frame, and recent public records from Ukraine put it beyond doubt.
We later unearthed previously undisclosed U.S. court records and police reports. These included a hand-written confession by the artist to a long-ago misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct – a document that revealed, beyond dispute, Banksy’s true identity. … Reuters presented that man with its findings about his identity and detailed questions about his work and career. He didn’t reply. Banksy’s company, Pest Control, said the artist “has decided to say nothing.”
His long-time lawyer, Mark Stephens, wrote to Reuters that Banksy “does not accept that many of the details contained within your enquiry are correct.” He didn’t elaborate. Without confirming or denying Banksy’s identity, Stephens urged us not to publish this report, saying doing so would violate the artist’s privacy, interfere with his art and put him in danger.
Del Naja (better known for other work) evidently participates in painting the murals and is perhaps the stencil draftsman (Banksy: “he can actually draw”). Banksy’s former manager, Steve Lazarides, organized a legal name change for Gunningham after the Mail on Sunday item, which successfully ended records for Banksy’s movements under his birth name and stymied researchers—until Reuters figured out the new one by poring through Ukrainian public records on days Del Naja was there. Gunningham used the name David Jones, among the most common in the U.K. If it rings a bell, you might be thinking of another famous British artist was who obliged by his record company to find something more unique.
* common idiom
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As we live large, we might spare a thought for Isaac Newton; he died on this date (O.S.) in 1727. A polymath who was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed, Newton was a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, author, and inventor. He contributed to and refined the scientific method, and his work is considered the most influential in bringing forth modern science. His book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), first published in 1687, achieved the first great unification in physics and established classical mechanics. He also made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for formulating infinitesimal calculus. (Newton developed calculus a couple of years before Leibniz, but published a couple of years after.) Newton spent the last three decades of his life in London, serving as Warden (1696–1699) and Master (1699–1727) of the Royal Mint, a role in which he increased the trustworthiness/accuracy and security of British coinage in a way crucial to the rise of Great Britain as a commercial and colonial power.
Newton, of course, had a famous relationship with fruit:
Newton often told the story that he was inspired to formulate his theory of gravitation by watching the fall of an apple from a tree. The story is believed to have passed into popular knowledge after being related by Catherine Barton, Newton’s niece, to Voltaire. Voltaire then wrote in his Essay on Epic Poetry (1727), “Sir Isaac Newton walking in his gardens, had the first thought of his system of gravitation, upon seeing an apple falling from a tree.” – source
Newton’s apple is thought to have been the green skinned ‘Flower of Kent’ variety.
“Uniformity is not nature’s way; diversity is nature’s way”*…
The U.S. boasts an impressively vast array of agricultural and botanical species. In an attempt to document that fact, The United States Department of Agriculture collected over 7,500 botanical watercolour paintings of evolving fruit and nut varieties in its Pomological Watercolor Collection, assembled between 1886 and 1942…
Independent publishing house Atelier Éditions is now revisiting this documentation of American pomology with the release of its latest book: An Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits & Nuts. “I came across the collection a few years back while researching botanical artworks,” says Pascale Georgiev, editorial director of Atelier. “There was such potential for a book with this collection, and it fits with our way of building archival or collection-based volumes.” The book is a biophilic wonder, with beautiful images of fruits popping with gentle colours and careful watercolour work. Accompanying them are often texts by well-versed experts, giving a fascinating insight into the agriculture behind the produce.
“We only produce and consume a handful of varieties today, mainly hybrids that cater to our desire for a certain sweetness, juiciness, smoothness, even specific shapes and lack of seeds,” says Pascale on the importance of the book’s current publication. “In some respects, the collection is a time capsule, and a reminder about the importance of diversity and conservation,” she adds…
Joey Levenson in discussion with Pascal: “We talk to Atelier Éditions about its new Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits & Nuts,” in @itsnicethat. More at Atelier Éditions.
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As we fancy favorite fruits, we might carefully compose a birthday greeting to Pierre Athanase Larousse, the French grammarian and lexicographer, born in Toucy on this date in 1817. In 1856 Larousse and his partner Augustin Boyer published the New Dictionary of the French Language, the forerunner of the Petit Larousse. On December 27, 1863 the first volume of Larousse’s masterwork, the great encyclopedic dictionary, the Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (Great Universal 19th-Century Dictionary), appeared.
Then, in 1938, the Larousse publishing house published an encyclopedia of gastronomy, Larousse Gastronomique edited by Prosper Montagne.
And Happy Mole Day (or to be more precise, October 23 at 6:02 pm, in honor of Avogadro’s number: 6.02 x 1023 items are in a mole — it’s the chemist’s version of a dozen)
“The avocado is a food without rival among the fruits, the veritable fruit of paradise”*…
The story of a fabulous fruit and of the Californian who made it widely available…
The most nutritious known fruit, the avocado — a mostly evergreen member of the laurel family — is a ghost of evolution that should have grown extinct when the animals that fed on it and disseminated its enormous seeds did. Mercifully, it did not. Ample in Europe and North American during the Ice Age, it somehow managed to survive in Mexico and spread from there. But even more impressively, it managed to survive its own self-defeating sexual relations — the botanical equivalent of the human wire-crossing Eric Berne described in his revelatory 1964 classic Games People Play.
Bald of petals though the tree’s small greenish blossoms may be, they are an example of “perfect flowers” — the botanical term for bisexual blooming plants, which can typically self-pollinate. The avocado, however, is far from reproductively self-sufficient due to an astonishing internal clock, which comes in two mirror-image varieties.
In some cultivars — like the Hass, Pinkerton, and Reed avocados — the blossoms open up into reproductive receptivity in their female guise each morning, then close by that afternoon; the following afternoon, they open in their male guise. Other cultivars — the Fuerte, Zutano, and Bacon avocado among them — bloom on the opposite schedule: female in the afternoon, male by morning.
This presents a Pyramus and Thisbe problem across the wall of time — while both partners inhabit the space of a single tree, they can’t reach each other across the day-parts and need to be pollinated by trees on the opposite schedule…
Ever since humans have cultivated Earth’s most nutritious fruit, they have tried to help the helpless romancer with various intervention strategies — grafting, planting trees with opposite blooming schedules near each other, even manually pollinating blossoms of the same tree.
The world’s most beloved avocado — the Hass — is the consequence of human interference consecrated by happenstance in the hands of a California mailman in the 1920s.
[There follows the remarkable tale of Rudolph Hass, whose avocados bring in more than a billion dollars a year for growers, accounting for four fifths of the American avocado industry.]
Today, every single Hass avocado in every neighborhood market that ever was and ever will be can be traced to a single mother tree grown by a destitute California mailman in 1926 — tender evidence that every tree is in some sense immortal, and a living testament to how chance and choice converge to shape our lives…
“Chance, Choice, and the Avocado: The Strange Evolutionary and Creative History of Earth’s Most Nutritious Fruit,” from @brainpicker in @brainpickings.
See also: “Here too it’s masquerade.”
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As we peel and pit, we might recall that it was on this date in 1837 that John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins, a pair of successful Worcester chemists, began manufacturing Worcestershire sauce, a savory flavoring that capitalizes on umami. Their condiment, which was broadly available to the public the following year, faced down scores of imitators to become the dominant brand, which it remains.
“The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams”*…
And moving those bees…
About 75% of crops and one-third of the global food supply rely on pollinators such as honeybees, according to Our World in Data. But farmers have to rely on commercially managed honeybees trucked in from other states to help pollinate certain crops, such as almonds, because there aren’t enough wild bees to do the job. And trucking bees hundreds or thousands of miles is not simple…
Honeybees are disappearing due to shrinking habitats and the growing use of pesticides. When there aren’t enough bees to pollinate fields of crops, companies pay beekeepers to transport their colonies of bees for pollination season.
“The great pollination migration” happens every year in February when the almonds bloom in California.
Pollinating the seemingly endless fields of almond trees in California requires 85% to 90% of all honeybees available to pollinate in the U.S… Bees are trucked into California from across the country…
Earl and Merle Warren are brothers, truck drivers and co-owners of Star’s Ferry Transport, based in Burley, Idaho. They started hauling bees for a local beekeeper in 1990 and moved about 50 loads of approximately 22 million bees each last year for companies such as Browning’s Honey Co.
“This is not like a load of steel or lumber. These are live creatures. This is those beekeepers’ livelihoods, so we do everything possible to keep them alive,” Earl Warren said.
Some beekeepers estimate that every time you move a truck of bees, up to 5% of the queens die… Minimizing stress for bees is critical, so beekeepers rely on experienced truck drivers to navigate difficult situations such as warm weather, few opportunities to stop during the day and inspections…
A fascinating link in the modern food chain: “A day in the life of a honeybee trucker,” from Alyssa Sporrer (@SporrerAlyssa).
* Henry David Thoreau
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As we ponder pollination, we might spare a thought for a scientist whose very field of study was (and is) made possible by bees, Anders (Andreas) Dahl; he died on this date in 1789. A botanist and student of Carl Linnaeus, he is the inspiration for, the namesake of, the dahlia flower.
“Remember kids: brush your greens, eat your teeth, stay in milk, drink your school, don’t do sleep, and get your eight hours of drugs!”*…
On the preservation of a Southern staple…
In the American South, many people have fond memories of a pot of collard greens simmering on the stove for hours, seasoned with a ham hock and stirred by a parent or grandparent. Cousins to cauliflower and broccoli, collards are a hearty green known for their robust, slightly bitter taste and the rich, nutritious “pot liquor” they produce when cooked. These greens and their liquor have been lauded for generations, but few in the South know that there’s more than one kind of collard green. Even fewer know that there are dozens of different varieties, and that many are now on the verge of disappearing forever.
That’s where the Heirloom Collard Project comes in. By distributing and growing rare and unique collards, this massive collaboration has created ties between chefs, gardeners, farmers, and seedsmen who hope to preserve the plant’s genetic diversity.
Collards are not native to the United States. Instead, they’re Eurasian in origin, and ancient Romans and Greeks feasted on them thousands of years ago. As for how they became prevalent in the American South, scholars have a number of theories. Collard seeds may have been brought over from Portugal in the 18th century, or from the British Isles to the early colonies. However, the most prevalent theory is that enslaved Africans introduced them to the region, since collard greens were a staple crop in many parts of Africa. Historian John Egerton, in his 1987 book Southern Food, declared that “from Africa with the people in bondage came new foods,” such as okra, black-eyed peas, yams, and collard greens…
Seed savers are preserving and celebrating the enormous genetic diversity of collard greens: “The Farmers and Gardeners Saving the South’s Signature Green,” by Debra Freeman (@audiophilegirl) in @atlasobscura.
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As we dig in, we might recall that it was on this date in 1804 that John Wedgwood, son of industrialist potter Josiah Wedgwood (and so uncle of Charles Darwin), chaired the inaugural meeting of the Royal Horticultural Society, a group that he proposed and co-founded.
We might also send hearty, healthy birthday greetings to Luther Burbank; he was born on this date in 1849. A botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science, he developed more than 800 strains and varieties of plants– fruits, flowers, grains, grasses, and vegetables– over his 55-year career.
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