The plant story that is our story

Dinner time, almost two years ago, Charles Mann, an American science writer, sang “Bahay Kubo” to wide-eyed me, across a table in an Ilonggo restaurant. Then, he explained to me that all the crops mentioned in that song are not native to the Philippines. My wide-eyed attention then turned to embarrassment not because I was a science writer who did not know that but because he was talking about “Bahay Kubo,” the song that inhabits every Filipino child’s early repertoire, including mine. But I can always count on my curiosity to defeat my embarrassment and I wanted to hear more so the rest of the night became a most delightful conversation about plants, science and science writing.  Charles was then visiting the Philippines because he was doing research for a book he was writing on the movement of plants around the world since 1493 and the Philippines was one of the important port stops for this botanical journey of thought.

Last Aug 19, his book, “1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), was reviewed in the New York Times by Ian Morris. Morris wrote that “Voltaire would have loved Charles Mann’s outstanding new book.” The book, I think, is an excellent sweep of thought in natural history, like the one before it, “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,” which won the US National Academy of Sciences’ Keck Book Award for best book of the year in 2005.

The premise of Charles’ book is that for the last 500 years, this oft-mentioned phenomenon called “globalization” could only be understood, if we go into the series of events that gave rise to the movement of plants, and everything else that went with them around the world. This included humans finding various schemes to breed them and with plants finding ways in their own biology, to adapt wherever they find themselves in. He called this the “Columbian Exchange” and for this, he went on research missions to reach those junctions where these exchanges started or occurred in crucial ways. He also reminded readers that while history books always put Europeans at the center of this exchange, evidence also compels us to assign importance to the exchanges between Africans and Indians.

I particularly liked the poignant tracing of the connection between his grandfather’s table and the giant worms now destroying the Banaue Rice Terraces. His grandfather headed a school back in 1959 in New York when he requested for a bigger table to accommodate more students with whom he could have breakfast. The more popular choice then was Philippine mahogany or “lauan,” which was not real mahogany but a product of two species from a genus different from the real mahogany. Apparently, the forests where lauan were grown were the original habitat of the giant worms so that when the forests were eventually denuded by the world demand, the worms moved to the terraces nearby.

“1493” made me think of the planet as being constantly made and remade by spores, grafts, vines, seeds, parasites, carried with or without intent by humans in their vessels, through oceans, on caravans or by air across the breadth of time. Suddenly, plants no longer seemed as “rooted” as they are in the humble plots in my tiny garden. The plants we know now to be “local” are much more cosmopolitan in their origins than the most traveled socialite. Indeed, if plants could talk and tell their complete tales, they would put historians out of work.

To locavores (advocates of the patronage of local produce), “1493” offers a complete cornucopia of thought since it gives a history of how those plants got to where they flourish now, a history that goes far beyond their own plotted borders. Also, it will point you to the gains brought on by large-scale exchanges in produce around the world, as they invaded our kitchens, dining tables, gastronomic feasts and therefore lifestyles and cultures. The way we plant could no longer be unbundled from the way the world is now.

I am very proud of Charles and his masterful work and consider myself lucky to have shared some of those rich conversations with him when he was brewing his stories for his book. Thanks to him, I would never have to sing “Bahay Kubo” again in ignorance.

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