Where Our Food Comes From by Gary Paul Nabhan

Author:Gary Paul Nabhan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Island Press

CHAPTER EIGHT

Apples and Boomtown Growth: Kazakhstan

The fragrance of the Kazakh forest was unlike any I have ever known, for the pervasive smell of ripening and rotting apples and pears filled my nostrils. At my feet, russet reds, blushing pinks, vibrant roses, and creamy yellows mottled the ground, where wildlife had half consumed many of the fruit that make this forest so bountiful. I had arrived in the place that was the ultimate source of the apples and pears I had eaten since childhood, a place I had tried to imagine since I first read about these “wild apple forests” while still a student many years ago. But the sight, taste, and smell of wild fruit was not my only thrill this particular day; I also had the good fortune to meet the Kazakh scientist who, more than any other man alive, deserved to be compared to the legendary Johnny Appleseed, and to Vavilov, as well.

I had always dreamed of meeting someone who had known Nikolay Ivanovich Vavilov—not someone who had merely shaken hands with him at a meeting, but some scientist or farm laborer who had worked with him in the field. That dream came true during a summer 2006 journey to Kazakhstan's most famous city, Almaty, formerly known as Alma-Ata. There, I found Dr. Aimak Dzangaliev, one of the last students whom Vavilov had taken into his fold, in excellent health and still working in the wild apple forests of the Tian Shan,or Heavenly Mountains, just west of China, where he had first met Vavilov in 1929.

The story Dr. Dzangaliev offered not only gave me insight into Vavilov the person, but also made me fully aware that “the Vavilov legacy” includes the field work and vision of many other fine scientists, such as Dzangaliev. Professor Dzangaliev's work on the origins of apples has deservedly brought him world renown and praise from the likes of N. A. Nazarbaev, president of Kazakhstan; cider maker Frank Browning, author of Apples: The Story of the Fruit of Temptation; writer Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire; and Joan Morgan, coauthor of The Book of Apples, who has tasted nearly every apple variety in the world. Dzangaliev had also played a pivotal role in protecting these wild apples from the urban expansion of Almaty, the biggest oil boomtown in all of Central Asia.

While my own travel to Almaty was virtually without incident, few travelers during Vavilov's time could make that claim. In July of 1929, Vavilov and his traveling companion at the time, botanist M. G. Popov, set out for the agricultural oases in China's Taklimakan desert, which lay in the rain shadow of the towering Tian Shan range, in Xinjiang Province. Those oases could only be reached overland from Alma-Ata by a caravan of horses, mules, and Bactrian camels, for Xinjiang Province—then called Chinese Turkmenistan—was at that time as remote as any place on the Eurasian continent. At one point, Vavilov and Popov split up, and Popov suffered an accident that landed

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