Just before the crash that turned the Roaring ’20s into the Great Depression, a man with a crazy idea for making a fortune was roaming across Persia, examining green aromatic nuts in burlap bags, marketplaces, and orchards. He selected the nuts from the widest variety of trees he could find, brought some 12,000 home, and planted them in California’s Central Valley. Of all the different trees that sprang up, one stood out, thriving in its new home and bearing a heavy load of sweet nuts. Farmers named it the Kerman pistachio, and it quickly entranced America.
Today, when you chew a pistachio, it’s almost guaranteed to be a descendant of that single nut. It’s a classic immigrant success story but also a troublesome genetic bottleneck. Where there was once great diversity, there is now uniformity.
You can find that story repeated with the banana, the coffee bush, and other crops in Simran Sethi’s new book,Bread Wine Chocolate: The Slow Loss of The Food We Love. As you might guess from the title, the book is elegiac — Sethi mourns the decline of delicious diversity in our broken food system.
I suspect Jayson Lusk, the author of another new book about the state of our food system, might tell the story of the Kerman pistachio a bit differently. Lusk’s book, Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World, describes an utterly different world from Sethi’s, one in which deliciousness and diversity is on the rise. Lusk would likely point out that a great diversity of pistachios still grow in what is now Iran. It’s just that the most accessible pistachio for the 99 percent in the United States is the Kerman. What was once a luxury import for the rich is now a common coffee-table treat for regular folks. Those with sufficient money and desire can still find other varieties.
I see these two versions of reality every day while reporting on food. It’s either decline and fall or triumphant ascension. If there’s any hope of building a truly sustainable food system, we’ve got to reconcile these perspectives and see the whole truth.
Neither side is wrong here. People simply look at the same facts and come away with entirely different interpretations of reality. That happens because our political leanings and the values of our tribe determine which facts we emphasize and which we ignore.
