An Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits & Nuts
An Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits & Nuts

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2021-04-13

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9781733622042

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The United States Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection encompasses 7,497 botanical watercolor paintings of evolving fruit and nut varieties; alongside specimens introduced by USDA plant explorers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Assembled between 1886 and 1942, these remarkable, botanically accurate, watercolors were executed by some 21 professional artists (including nine women). Authored largely before the widespread application of photography, the watercolors were intended to aid accurate identification and examination of fruit varietals , for the nation's fruit growers. Documenting the transformation of American pomology, the science of fruit breeding and production, and the horticultural innovations accountable for contemporary fruit cultivation and consumption, the USDA's collection offers fascinating anthropological and horticultural insights on the fruits we ecstatically devour, and why. Encompassing fruit-suffused anecdotes and observations drawn from the fields of archaeology and anthropology, horticulture and literature, ancient representation and contemporary visual art, Atelier Éditions' kaleidoscopic examination of the USDA's pomological collection, offers readers an engaging, biophillic meditation upon the sweetest of all earth's produce.

Fruits of Eden
Fruits of Eden

Author: Amanda Harris

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2015-04-28

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0813059348

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At the turn of the nineteenth century—when most food in America was bland and brown and few people appreciated the economic potential of then-exotic foods—David Fairchild convinced the U.S. Department of Agriculture to finance overseas explorations to find and bring back foreign cultivars. Fairchild traveled to remote corners of the globe, searching for fruits, vegetables, and grains that could find a new home in American fields and in the American diet. In Fruits of Eden, Amanda Harris vividly recounts the exploits of Fairchild and his small band of adventurers and botanists as they traversed distant lands—Algeria, Baghdad, Cape Town, Hong Kong, Java, and Zanzibar—to return with new and exciting flavors. Their expeditions led to a renaissance not only at the dinner table but also in horticulture, providing diversity of crops for farmers across the country. Not everyone was supportive, however. The scientific community was concerned with invasive species, and World War I fanned the flames of xenophobia in Washington. Adversaries who believed Fairchild’s discoveries would contaminate the purity of native crops eventually shut down his program, but his legacy lives on in today’s modern kitchen, where navel oranges, Meyer lemons, honeydew melons, soybeans, and durum wheat are now standard.

Heirloom Fruits of America
Heirloom Fruits of America

Author:

Publisher: Heyday Books

Published: 2020-07-14

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781597145060

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Heirloom Fruits of America features 100 full-color illustrations selected from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection, an archive of 7,584 paintings, lithographs, and line drawings created from 1886 to 1942 by about sixty-five commissioned artists. These images served as de facto trademarks in the highly competitive and fraud-plagued American fruit industry in a time before patent protection extended to living organisms. They are also meticulously and beautifully rendered, uncovering a cache of botanical diversity in turn-of-the-century American agriculture. Yale historian Daniel J. Kevles's introduction deepens viewers' appreciation of these plates by placing these images in their historical context.

Fruits and Plains
Fruits and Plains

Author: Philip J. Pauly

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9780674026636

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The engineering of plants has a long history on this continent. Fields, forests, orchards, and prairies are the result of repeated campaigns by amateurs, tradesmen, and scientists to introduce desirable plants, both American and foreign, while preventing growth of alien riff-raff. These horticulturists coaxed plants along in new environments and, through grafting and hybridizing, created new varieties. Over the last 250 years, their activities transformed the American landscape. "Horticulture" may bring to mind white-glove garden clubs and genteel lectures about growing better roses. But Philip J. Pauly wants us to think of horticulturalists as pioneer "biotechnologists," hacking their plants to create a landscape that reflects their ambitions and ideals. Those standards have shaped the look of suburban neighborhoods, city parks, and the "native" produce available in our supermarkets. In telling the histories of Concord grapes and Japanese cherry trees, the problem of the prairie and the war on the Medfly, Pauly hopes to provide a new understanding of not only how horticulture shaped the vegetation around us, but how it influenced our experiences of the native, the naturalized, and the alien--and how better to manage the landscapes around us.

Pawpaw
Pawpaw

Author: Andrew Moore

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

Published: 2015-08-05

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1603585974

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The largest edible fruit native to the United States tastes like a cross between a banana and a mango. It grows wild in twenty-six states, gracing Eastern forests each fall with sweet-smelling, tropical-flavored abundance. Historically, it fed and sustained Native Americans and European explorers, presidents, and enslaved African Americans, inspiring folk songs, poetry, and scores of place names from Georgia to Illinois. Its trees are an organic grower’s dream, requiring no pesticides or herbicides to thrive, and containing compounds that are among the most potent anticancer agents yet discovered. So why have so few people heard of the pawpaw, much less tasted one? In Pawpaw—a 2016 James Beard Foundation Award nominee in the Writing & Literature category—author Andrew Moore explores the past, present, and future of this unique fruit, traveling from the Ozarks to Monticello; canoeing the lower Mississippi in search of wild fruit; drinking pawpaw beer in Durham, North Carolina; tracking down lost cultivars in Appalachian hollers; and helping out during harvest season in a Maryland orchard. Along the way, he gathers pawpaw lore and knowledge not only from the plant breeders and horticulturists working to bring pawpaws into the mainstream (including Neal Peterson, known in pawpaw circles as the fruit’s own “Johnny Pawpawseed”), but also regular folks who remember eating them in the woods as kids, but haven’t had one in over fifty years. As much as Pawpaw is a compendium of pawpaw knowledge, it also plumbs deeper questions about American foodways—how economic, biologic, and cultural forces combine, leading us to eat what we eat, and sometimes to ignore the incredible, delicious food growing all around us. If you haven’t yet eaten a pawpaw, this book won’t let you rest until you do.

The Fruits of Empire
The Fruits of Empire

Author: Shana Klein

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2020-10-13

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 0520296397

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The Fruits of Empire is a history of American expansion through the lens of art and food. In the decades after the Civil War, Americans consumed an unprecedented amount of fruit as it grew more accessible with advancements in refrigeration and transportation technologies. This excitement for fruit manifested in an explosion of fruit imagery within still life paintings, prints, trade cards, and more. Images of fruit labor and consumption by immigrants and people of color also gained visibility, merging alongside the efforts of expansionists to assimilate land and, in some cases, people into the national body. Divided into five chapters on visual images of the grape, orange, watermelon, banana, and pineapple, this book demonstrates how representations of fruit struck the nerve of the nation’s most heated debates over land, race, and citizenship in the age of high imperialism.

Bitter Fruit
Bitter Fruit

Author: Stephen Schlesinger

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-12-01

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 0674260074

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Bitter Fruit is a comprehensive and insightful account of the CIA operation to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954. First published in 1982, this book has become a classic, a textbook case of the relationship between the United States and the Third World. The authors make extensive use of U.S. government documents and interviews with former CIA and other officials. It is a warning of what happens when the United States abuses its power.

American Grown
American Grown

Author: Michelle Obama

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2012-05-29

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0307956032

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The former First Lady, author of Becoming, and producer and star of Waffles + Mochi tells the inspirational story of the White House Kitchen Garden and how gardens can transform our lives and the health of our communities. Early in her tenure as First Lady, despite being a novice gardener, Michelle Obama planted a kitchen garden on the White House’s South Lawn. To her delight, she watched as fresh vegetables, fruit, and herbs sprouted from the ground. Soon the White House Kitchen Garden inspired a new conversation all across the country about the food we feed our families and the impact it has on the nutrition and well-being of our children. In American Grown, Mrs. Obama invites you inside the White House Kitchen Garden, from the first planting to the satisfaction of the seasonal harvest. She reveals her early worries and struggles—would the new plants even grow?—and her joy as lettuce, corn, tomatoes, collards and kale, sweet potatoes and rhubarb flourished in the freshly tilled soil. She shares the stories of other gardens that have moved and inspired her on her journey across the nation. And she offers what she learned about planting your own backyard, school, or community garden. American Grown features: • a behind-the-scenes look at every season of the garden’s growth • unique recipes created by White House chefs • striking original photographs that bring the White House garden to life • a fascinating history of community gardens in the United States From a modern-day vegetable truck that brings fresh produce to underserved communities in Chicago, to Houston office workers who make the sidewalk bloom, to a New York City school that created a scented garden for the visually impaired, to a garden in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, that devotes its entire harvest to those less fortunate, American Grown isn’t just the story of a single garden. It’s a celebration of the bounty of our nation and a reminder of what we can all grow together.