Broadly speaking,
the system of international trade we live under is a kind of technology. It’s certain that without modern
engineered means of transportation and communications, international markets
would be much less significant than they are today. And while the particular story I’m going to relate pertains
to the oldest technology in human history, namely farming, the lesson behind it
applies to many fields of engineering.
The pecan tree is
the state tree of Texas. (In case
you’ve never heard a Texan say it, it’s pronounced “puh-cawn”). Pecan trees
can grow to a height of 100 feet (30 meters) or more, live up to 1000 years,
and for most of those years can produce an abundant annual crop of tasty,
highly edible nuts. When my late
grandfather moved to Fort Worth, Texas in 1930, he planted a pecan tree in his
back yard. The last time I visited
his house (currently occupied by other relatives), that tree was still going
strong, providing shade for most of the back yard and a good bit of the house
too. Pecan trees are native to
Texas and grace thousands of acres of river banks and bottom lands, besides
furnishing an important food crop to pecan growers who grow hundreds of
different varieties. Pecans are
sold both for direct consumption, either in the shell or hulled, and also as
ingredients for processed food that benefit from the addition of chopped or
blended pecans. But until about a
decade ago, the pecan market was almost entirely domestic, with a good number
being sold mainly in Texas.
Then someone in
China caught on to the fact that the huge market there for snack nuts, sold
often in vending machines in locations such as gas stations and convenience
stores, might benefit from imported pecans. Up until then, most of the snack nuts sold were Chinese
walnuts, but the cheaper pecan tastes just as good (in my opinion, anyway), and
some clever Chinese importers introduced the new nut to Chinese consumers
around 2001.
They liked
it—liked it so much that since 2007, shipments of pecans to China from the U.
S. (which includes exports from relatively new pecan-growing states such as
Georgia and New Mexico as well as Texas) averaged almost 60 million pounds
annually. But there is a fly in
this profitable ointment, which is the fact that the Chinese market wants a
particular kind of “improved” pecan, not the rich variety of our native pecans.
According to an
article in Texas Monthly by James
McWilliams, the hybrid improved pecans have a uniform size, uniformly thin
shells, and uniform quality. These
improved varieties will work in the Chinese vending machines, which can’t
handle the variation in shapes and sizes of native varieties. Texas pecan growers have known about
the Chinese market for years, but so far they have exhibited a marked
reluctance to chop down their existing groves, many of which are native
varieties, to plant the improved type that produces machine-vendable
pecans. In so doing, they
are losing year by year a potential market that could allow Texas to surpass
the newer pecan-growing states and once more lead the nation in pecan exports.
That takes care of
pecans and profits; now for the piety.
I have been reading a book called Food
& Faith, a work of theological musings about the connections between
eating and Christianity. The
author, Norman Wirzba, relies on the works of agrarians such as Wendell Berry
as well as more explicitly theological writers. But I was struck by the following passage from the book as
expressing exactly what is going on between the Chinese pecan market and Texas
pecan growers: “Food that may have
begun in the ground [or on a tree] must lose all traces of soil, sunlight, and
fragile plant and animal life so that it can be redesigned, engineered [!],
improved, packaged, stored, and delivered in whatever ways the food producer
sees fit.” Wirzba’s book, among
many other things, is an impassioned plea to stop thinking about food and
eating merely in material and economic terms.
Viewed one way, it
only makes sense for Texas pecan farmers to replant their groves with
machine-friendly pecan trees, for the more efficient production of pecans that
will contribute to the efficient international trade that efficiently fills
vending machines with pecans that Chinese consumers can eat to fuel the
machines called their bodies.
But viewed another
way, there is incalculable value in tending native pecan trees which are so
deeply connected at multiple levels to a part of the world that Texans, at
least, view as God’s country. Not
that His title to the rest of the world is defective in any serious way. But as a recent arrival here from
California said to me the other day, “Texans seem to have a loyalty to their
state that I haven’t noticed anywhere else.” And native pecan trees are part of what makes Texas the
place it is. I find reassuring the
fact that just down the road from where I live, in Seguin, you can visit Pape’s
Pecan Nutcracker Museum, and view both stationary and portable World’s Largest
Pecans. One is a concrete model on
a pedestal on the town square, and the other, welded out of steel, is mounted
on a trailer for convenient towing in parades. And I would like to think that at least part of the reason
that Texas pecan growers haven’t done the economically sensible and efficient
thing of whacking down all their old-fashioned native trees to plant new ones
for the Chinese market, is that, well, there’s more important things than
money.
It takes ten years
for a new pecan sapling to mature enough to start producing. That induces a natural tendency in
pecan farmers to take the long view.
Ten years from now, the Chinese may have dropped pecans for Brazil nuts,
for all I know. But the rich
biological and cultural heritage represented by the native pecan trees of Texas
will live on, I hope, for many generations to come.
Sources: I learned
about the Chinese pecan market from James McWilliams’ article “Shell Game” in
the Sept. 2013 edition of Texas Monthly. It is an excerpt from his book The Pecan: A History of America’s Native Nut to be published in
October 2013. I also referred to
an online article about the pecan market posted by Nature’s Finest Foods Ltd.
(a brokerage firm) at http://www.nffonline.com/industry-news/2013/06/19/pecan-exports-china-falter
and an item by the Whitney Consulting Group posted on Google Docs (account
required) at https://docs.google.com/file/d/1l9XwHsObwgS8O9OERlQwUqaF_IEoBXSVhQLpcnLvwnLpB_fwr-kY1pSeeVdl/edit. Norman Wirzba’s Food & Faith: A
Theology of Eating was published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press.