Nick Wray, curator of the University of Bristol Botanic Garden, unearths the fascinating stories behind five key food plants grown in this very special corner of the city – and explores the future of farming on a planet with a booming population.
Photos taken by Nick Wray
We are surrounded by food; it has never been so diverse and readily available and in our recent history it has never been so cheap. However, our relationship with food is complex. In the past, we ate what we could afford and what was seasonally available. Food historians will tell you that as a society, the UK population were at our fittest during the second world war; German U-boats sank so many Allied ships that cheap, imported food disappeared. Food was rationed, but what you grew yourself was yours to eat.
Garden and allotment numbers grew as fast as the veg they cultivated, and appeared everywhere, including the moat at the Tower of London. In the 1940s, people ate twice as much home-grown food compared to food they’d purchased. Fruits became seasonal, strawberries in summer along with the currant fruits, plums in August and depending on the cultivar, apples and pears picked from September to January.
Wartime communication from the government instructed people to ‘eat your carrots as they make you see in the dark’, and that Spitfire pilots ate them; a sure ruse to get children to eat more of this nutritious vegetable. Between 1939-1941 our carrot harvest flourished resulting in a glut. Spitfire pilots alone would not consume the many sacks of carrots, but hungry children could.
Sweet enough already
Sugar is everywhere in its natural state. No matter how worthy and humble your morning cereal may be, if you add cow’s milk you sweeten your breakfast with natural lactose. Our sugar comes from two main sources; sugar cane, a type of fast-growing tropical grass and sugar beet a type swollen root crop only grown in Britain on the most fertile soils in the east of England. Both require lots of time to grow and a lot of processing and energy to obtain saleable sugar.
Despite the abundance of natural sugars in our foods, many manufacturers continue adding extra to some foodstuffs like cereals, to improve the taste, and some spray on liquid sugar to create a ‘frosting’ effect. Here the sugar content is high and over consumption is not part of a balanced diet. The resulting sugar rush is often followed by a sugar slump, perhaps that’s why we don’t see Tony the Tiger on our TV channels anymore…
Cocoa hit
Some foods are addictive; they contain chemicals that create a release of endorphins. Cocoa is one such food, it contains theobromine, an alkaloid of the methylxanthine class which also contains caffeine.
The chemical is named after the plants scientific name; Theobroma cacao meaning ‘food of the Gods’. Theobromine contributes to the bitter taste of dark chocolate and has several effects on the body including mild stimulation and increased urine production. Dark chocolate with 70-85% cocoa can contain up to 810 milligrams of theobromine per 100 grams of chocolate, while on average milk chocolate contains around 60-70 milligrams of theobromine per 100 grams of chocolate. White chocolate is made of cocoa butter and milk solids so does not contain any cocoa solids. The higher the cocoa content in the chocolate the greater the effect. Many chocolate products contain sugar to remove the natural bitterness of cocoa, as well as fat so the product can be moulded into shapes. These combinations make for easily consumed food as a treat for everyday consumption.
It was the Mayans who used both domesticated and wild Cocoa trees that grew in the Central and South American tropics. They were able to hybridise individual plants creating many unique cultivars, each with their own characteristics. They learned how to grow and process cocoa from their predecessors the Olmecs, who began cultivating cocoa as early as 1600BC, and eventually from the 14th Century the expanding Aztecs culture adopted their idea that it was a god-given fruit.
The midge you can thank
In the natural home of the cocoa tree midges are valued and encouraged. This insect is responsible for pollinating the small-white flowers of the cocoa trees; without its efforts there would be no cocoa fruit and nothing to make chocolate with.
These flowers are unusual for trees in temperate regions as they appear on the trunk of the tree, an adaptation called cauliflory, that has evolved on tropical trees growing under thick jungle canopy ensuring that the small pollinating midge can easily see the flowers. After pollination pods on female trees grow quickly. There are 30-40 large pale lavender to brown seeds in each pod covered in a mucilaginous pulp which can be made into juice.
The pods themselves are thrown away, while the seeds are placed on the ground and covered with banana leaves to enable them to ferment. This liquifies any remaining pulp and dries their skin enabling it to break off in the cleaning process. Its these dried beans that are now such a valuable commodity with demand rising.
My favourite flavour
From ice cream to cakes, vanilla is the most common addition to confectionary after chocolate. It has a wonderful flavour, but its production is a tale that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.
Vanilla belongs to the orchid family, a huge flowering plant family with over 30,000 species growing worldwide. In its native Central America where vanilla pods have been cultivated by traditional cultures for thousands of years, pollination in nature is by wild bees, but less than 1% of flowers are pollinated successfully. When grown in cultivation hand pollination provides a more reliable way to ensure seed set.
When flowering, each day a new flower opens requiring someone with dexterous fingers to lift the rostellum (a flap covering the male anthers) so it can be pressed onto the female stigma. After pollination, the long green pods grow quickly but still take six months to mature.
Once picked green, they dry and shrivel and take on a dark leathery appearance; beans must be dried to reduce water content and prevent rotting and so are placed in boxes for five to six months until the familiar fragrance develops.
Today, commercial vanilla is grown in the Indian Ocean islands with Madagascar leading production. The commercial pollination technique is down to Edmond Albius (1829-80), a 12-year-old enslaved boy from Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean who worked out how to artificially pollinate vanilla flowers on a mass scale allowing the industry to grow. Sadly, due to their nimble fingers, it is often children who attend to this delicate work before attending school, or for some, instead of school. The Fairtrade movement has made progress in educating and encouraging the farmers to eliminate the involvement of children in production and set up schools in the poorest areas. Fairtrade has also set prices so farmers get paid a set amount for quality, so avoiding low quality pods flooding the market, reducing prices which alternates with dramatic price spikes, caused by market shortages of vanilla crop due to damage by cyclones wiping out crops.
Hot potatoes
In the UK we grow around 50% of our food; that’s 15% less than we did in 1980. The decline illustrates how hard it is to make a living growing food on farms. One food that we grow well is the potato, a vegetable originating in Bolivia where it was domesticated 7-10,000 years ago.
While it’s commonly thought Sir Francis Drake introduced the potato to England after his expeditions to South America, but it was the Spanish who introduced the potato to Europe. What an introduction they proved to be; potatoes are a super food, full of vitamin C, fibre, energy, minerals, and have the capacity to be stored during the winter period, which has enabled human societies to develop a food resource that is both dependable and long lasting. There are over 400 cultivars in the UK, with new disease resistant, flavoursome and storable cultivars developed each year. Potatoes are easily grown providing you have enough water; in fact, potatoes are one of the few plant-based crops we are self-sufficient in and export annually.
Poison apples
The potato family (Solanaceae) contains many other important food crops such as sweet pepper, aubergine, chillies, and poisonous plants such as our native nightshades. Another plant, from South America, and as common in our diets as potatoes, is the tomato. Its versatility has made it an important crop across the planet that can be eaten raw, cooked, or preserved. Our relationship with this shiny, red, acid-sweet fruit is linked to social history and the quest for exploration and colonial plunders. Tomatoes were once viewed with suspicion when first introduced to European diets in the 16th Century. They were branded ‘poison apples’ and blamed for illnesses amongst the elite. It’s thought the acidity in tomatoes when used continuously with pewter plates leached some of the lead into the food, making people ill with prolonged exposure. There were no such health issues with the poor masses as they ate off wooden plates. Tomatoes spread throughout the Mediterranean cultures and were adopted quickly as an easily grown food.
The future
The food we eat is steeped in history and stories to tell, from exploration, trade, greed, novelty, fame, and a desperate need to fill peoples’ bellies. As we head towards a global population of nine billion people, the story of our food is far from over; our ability to feed ourselves will depend on science and the adoption of new varieties, farming techniques and attitudes to our food. For example, eating less meat and more plants will help our greenhouse gas emissions.
Agriculture is moving to sustainable farming initiatives where soils are encouraged to become more resilient, no dig and no plough is being adopted to help keep CO2 in the soil rather than releasing it into the air. As time and necessity advance, our relationship with food will continue to evolve to meet the challenges that lie ahead. Around Bristol many of our farms and fields have grown food and reared farm animals for well over a thousand years. Our future care in a changing climate will need to ensure our food is produced sustainably and much of it locally, to ensure its supply for the next thousand years and beyond.
Visitors to the University of Bristol Botanic Garden get to meet and see up close all the food crops discussed here, along with many other wonderful displays, telling the stories of plants. Visit the website botanic-garden.bristol.ac.uk for more information
All photos taken by Nick Wray
