Normal (A) and mutant seedless sugar apples (B and C), courtesy of PNAS

If fruit trees grow from seeds, how do you grow seedless fruit? It’s not unusual for plants to produce mutant fruit that lacks seeds, but these fruits are usually the end of their line. Naturally occurring hybrids can also make sterile fruit. The varieties that we eat are specifically hybridized to be seedless, like seedless watermelon or bananas, or grafted onto host root stocks, like seedless oranges.

Navel oranges (named for the belly-button shaped indentation in the peel; did everyone else already know this?) were first planted in California in 1872; the New York Times looked back on the fruit’s origins in an article from 1902 (pdf).

The fine original seedless orange trees came from Bahia, Brazil, and were imported through the sense of a woman. Mr. Nellie Desmond of Syracuse, N.Y., was visiting her brother in a rubber camp along the Amazon. The natives brought her several seedless oranges, which were a curiosity to her. She inquired whence they came, and found they grew upon a clump of freak orange trees in the neighborhood.

The woman with sense brought some fruit back to the United States, and word got to the Commissioner of Agriculture, who instructed the consulate at Brazil to ship him some trees. A few years later, Mrs. Luther C. Tibbets, who was well-connected, procured three trees from an experimental USDA garden for land her husband was homesteading in what is now downtown Riverside, California. One of the trees was eaten by a cow, but after five years the others bore fruit. “On Jan. 22, 1878, two of the new oranges were cut open and critically tasted by a little company of orange growers at Riverside. A new star of the first magnitude rose that day in the horticultural firmament.”

Another star of the first magnitude might well arise from a recent report in PNAS. A mutant seedless sugar apple (Annona squamosa) from Thailand was found to have a genetic disruption that blocks ovule development. Fortuitously, similar mutations have been intensively studied in Arabidopsis, a mustard plant that is the lab rat of botany. Understanding this genetic pathway could lead to seedless sugar apples or soursops. Fruits in this genus “have a meat with a sherbet-like texture and a flavor that has been compared with a mixture of banana and pineapple,” the authors write, but huge seeds make these fruits a bit of a chore to eat or process. They also point out that Mark Twain described Annona as “the most delicious fruits known to men.”

Has anyone tried these fruits? I’m intrigued—and wouldn’t mind fighting through the seeds while the seedless varieties are in development.

Cookie dough, so tasty but so dangerous. Courtesy of Flickr user sarah sosiak.

The people who work on food safety are pretty excited these days, or I should say they’re excited in the cautious, constantly vigilant manner of people who have spent their careers worried about deadly microbial pathogens. At an event last night sponsored by the D.C. Science Writers Association, experts from academia, government and advocacy groups met to discuss the implications of the recently signed Food Safety Modernization Act and other projects expected to improve food safety.

“Passage of the bill was a huge victory,” said Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The “modernization” part of the name is apt; as Smith DeWaal and others pointed out, the current laws guiding food safety are based largely on legislation passed in 1906. The push for new legislation was inspired in part by high-profile outbreaks of foodborne illnesses: E. coli was found in ground beef and cookie dough; Salmonella in spinach, eggs and peanut butter; Listeria in chicken. The CSPI has a disturbing but strangely fascinating “Outbreak Alert!” database that tracks these things, and they’ve ranked the ten most dangerous foods. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated last month that one in six people in the United States contracts a foodborne illness each year.

The new law requires companies to assess and minimize hazards, increases and prioritizes Food and Drug Administration inspections of food producers, and authorizes the FDA to recall food and shut down producers. The law is just the first step, though. Big scientific and data-management questions remain, such as how to define a high-risk food; how best to reach the public; and how to standardize the methodologies for tracking food, catching outbreaks early, and identifying their sources. Currently, fewer than half of foodborne disease outbreaks are fully solved, with both the contaminated food and the pathogen identified.

One intriguing tool for either identifying outbreaks or alerting customers to recalls is grocery store customer loyalty cards. David Goldman of the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service said that comparisons of retailer databases with USDA databases have been “huge contributors to successful investigations.” (The FSIS is responsible for monitoring food safety before the product gets to market; it monitors slaughterhouses, for instance, and provides the USDA stamp of approval. The FDA is responsible for food once it comes to market. Sometimes the division doesn’t work and foods fall through the cracks, like eggs. Better coordination among the various federal and state agencies in charge of public health is another improvement in public health that is supported by the Food Safety and Modernization Act.)

One important factor in food safety is consumer education, and Goldman pointed out that the USDA has a help line with 24-hour automated responses and frequent live help chats about food safety. (I got a kick out of the name, “Ask Karen,” which is what I do when I have a cooking question because my mom’s name is Karen.)

So things are looking up, but in the meantime, wash those vegetables, cook your meat thoroughly, check dates, and beware of stuffed stuffing.

Heirloom tomato salad, courtesy of Flickr user mnapoleon

Our final installment of this month’s Inviting Writing challenge, “First Tastes,” comes from Kim Kelly of Carlsbad, California, who writes the Liv Life blog.

Stay tuned for the next round of Inviting Writing, which we’ll announce on Tuesday, January 18.

A Slice of Heaven

By Kim Kelly

Tomatoes are a new thing for me. While I have always loved salsa, tomato sauce, and even an occasional dab of ketchup, I spent the first 42 years of my life diligently picking anything remotely resembling a tomato out of any salad, sandwich, In-N-Out Burger or taco. Something about the texture and what I remembered (from my one try as a child) as a somewhat “metallic” taste always had me saying, “no, thank you.”

In the past few years, though, articles praising the health benefits of tomatoes flashed across my computer screen and I began letting those tiny diced pieces on my taco slide by. I even kind of got used to those little fragments and almost missed them when they weren’t there. Then I bravely ate a slice from a salad. Unfortunately it was a winter tomato, white inside, mushy, a bit mealy and absolutely tasteless. To me it was just, well… for lack of a better word, yucky. The experience set me back a few years.

Two years ago a vendor at my local Carlsbad Farmers Market offered me a slice of heirloom tomato which had only hours earlier been picked fresh from his fields. I have to say his display was quite beautiful. Abundant with dazzling yellow, green, orange, red and even zebra striped tomatoes, I really wanted to like them but was sure I wouldn’t. A bright red globe had been sliced and simply dressed with a splash of balsamic vinegar and a light dusting of salt and pepper. Without an easy way to say no and to not offend him, I searched out the smallest slice and wondered how I was going to swallow the expected mushy texture and funky “tin-like” taste. Bracing myself, I popped the piece into my mouth and waited for my expectations to be met. Oh, how wrong I was! The flavor bursting in my mouth was anything but tin-like, and the texture not even remotely mealy. This small slice of heaven brought instead a fleshy yet firm and juicy bite combined with a savory sweetness. With the fresh delicate flavors dancing on my tongue, I found myself groaning in pleasure and actually reaching for a second slice. I purchased my first three tomatoes.

Since that eye-opening day, I have come to realize that there are good tomatoes and bad tomatoes. To me, “bad” (insert: soft, mushy, mealy) tomatoes are not worth eating. Good tomatoes, though, are a treat worth waiting for. That year, I spent my summer craving those luscious, flavor-filled heirlooms, even eating unadorned and plain slices out of hand. Recipes from magazines and internet sources filled my files and I spent leisurely afternoons at the market sharing tips on serving tomatoes with the vendors.

Mid-summer 2010 brought the much anticipated heirloom tomato arrival to our market and I purchased no less than 10 of the brightly colored, heart-shaped orbs the first day they appeared. Adding them to sandwiches, sauces and an extraordinarily tasty Heirloom Tomato Salad topped with Blue Cheese had my husband smirking and laughing at me. As I sat down and fully enjoyed this salad made almost wholly from tomatoes, I realized I had grown. Next summer I think I’ll grow again and give those mysterious yet alluring eggplants a try. Well… maybe.

What toppings make your pizza unusual? Courtesy of Flickr user Sarvagya Kochak

This month’s Inviting Writing series is about “first tastes,” revelatory experiences of foods you’d never tried before. My first memory of a first taste is of pizza. I was six years old, and the pizza was pepperoni with extra cheese at a pizza parlor that had just opened in my neighborhood. I remember playing with the stringy cheese and being giddy with delight at the delicious taste, all the while experiencing a vague sense of regret that I had lived my whole life unaware of this magical food.

My taste in pizza toppings grew a bit more sophisticated as I grew up: mushrooms, green peppers, maybe some olives. In Europe I tried pizza with an egg cracked on top, which was both tasty and absurd. When I moved to California for graduate school in the 1990s, I discovered that those kooky Californians would top a pizza with anything: walnuts, potatoes, corn, artichokes, herbs I’d never tasted before. It was all delicious, and so freeing. Pizza, like life, can be anything you want to make it.

I’ve been experimenting with weird pizza toppings ever since—broccoli, squash, black beans, crab, arugula—and enjoying the pizazz that others bring to their pizza pies. Amanda tried Swiss chard and squash blossoms. California-style, no-rules pizza has caught on across the country. Serious Eats has a Slice blog dedicated to pizza news, baking tips and odd recipes. Pizza blogs, like Thai restaurants or hair salons, tend to have clever names, perhaps demonstrating the creative potential unlocked by a good pizza: Pizza Goon, Pizza Therapy.

While trying to figure out how best to use the two Meyer lemons that grew on my potted tree this year (my pathetic attempt to grow a California specialty in Maryland), I found a recipe for lemon pizza. Not lemon-flavored pizza with a dash of zest in the crust or a spritz of juice to make the sauce tangy, but pizza with lemons on top, rind and all. I modified the recipe a bit, but the main twist is to thin-slice a lemon, saute the slices in olive oil with garlic and peppers until the rind softens, and then top the pizza with that mix plus some cheese. Yet again, a pizza led me to reevaluate everything I thought I knew about food.

What are your most surprising and surprisingly delicious pizza toppings? And can you remember the first time you tasted a slice?

Guava paste on cheese, courtesy of Flickr user World to Table / Veronica

Our theme for this month’s Inviting Writing series is “first tastes”: foods that were a revelation the first time you tried them. This week’s entry comes from Elizabeth Bastos, who shared a scary food story about artichokes last year. She blogs about “humor, food, home, parenting and cheese” at Goody Bastos.

A Rebound Relationship with Guava Paste

By Elizabeth Bastos

Years ago, when I was in a complicated relationship with a Venezuelan, I went to his home country and had a cheese arepa for the first time—and that was supposed to be the big deal. When I got home, broken-up-with and sad, my friends said: That’s too bad about Jose. How were the arepas? And I said they were okay.

The big deal for me was the guava paste. Not to get all magical realism, One Hundred Years Of Solitude about it, but the first time I tasted guava paste, it was the muted dead red of heartbreak, a sun just before it sets under the horizon, a thin slab that was sad/happy, sweet/tart and just slightly crystalline. Tears, maybe? I had a bit on top of a piece of cheese called queso tropical after one of my last arguments with Jose about the meaning of love and betrayal, and whether Americans can ever really be sensual.

Queso tropical distinguishes itself in no other way than that it is the perfect foil for guava paste. It is salty, coarse in texture, even squeaky. It’s the work-a-day piano man to guava’s torch singer. I said to Jose, through my tears: You are too passionate, like an artist, of course you are, but what is this cheese? What is this jelly on top? Is it jelly? A preserve of some kind? It’s definitely not strawberry. Or peach. More important, can I have some more? So I brought two bricks of guava paste home with me on the plane, plus some terra cotta knick-knacks, but they all broke.

When I eat guava paste even now, years later, I can’t help thinking: Wow. How can it be that for some people this fragrant, pomegranate-colored, ear-lobe-textured gem of a food is mundane? For me, it’s An Experience, perhaps The Experience. They don’t realize how lucky they are.

Midwife/Middle School Science Teacher | San Antonio, TX | 3-Person Household (including dog) | First week after deciding to eat locally grown vegetables. | 2008 (Mark Menjivar)

“May I photograph the interior of your fridge?” That’s a question photographer Mark Menjivar asked people as he traveled around the United States for three years working on a project about hunger. He describes the project, called “You are What You Eat” on his website:

a refrigerator is both a private and a shared space. one person likened the question, “may i photograph the interior of your fridge?” to asking someone to pose nude for the camera. each fridge is photographed “as is.” nothing added, nothing taken away.

these are portraits of the rich and the poor. vegetarians, republicans, members of the nra, those left out, the under appreciated, former soldiers in hitler’s ss, dreamers, and so much more. we never know the full story of one’s life.

The photos, which you can see in this gallery, come with brief biographical sketches of the fridge owners. A carpenter in San Antonio has a freezer full of plastic baggies of meat from a 12-point buck. A bartender who “goes to sleep at 8 a.m. and wakes up at 4 p.m. daily” has a fridge crammed with Styrofoam take-out boxes. Documentary filmmakers, their fridge stocked with what looks like high-end beer and wine, “have helped send millions of dollars to children in Uganda.” Really, you’ve got to see these photos.

I asked Menjivar a few questions about the project:

What’s in your fridge right now?

Apple sauce, asparagus, eggs, salsa, yogurt, spinach, Real Ale beer, etc.

What was the most surprising thing you saw in someone’s fridge?

Definitely the snake. [Caption: Short Order Cook | Marathon,TX | 2-Person Household | She can bench press over 300lbs. | 2007 ] Was not expecting to see that when I pulled open the door. Also, in one refrigerator there was a small bunch of herbs in a glass of water that looked so beautiful it changed my whole perspective that day.

In addition to what you mentioned in your Statement, are there particular lessons or insights from your three-year project you’d be willing to share?

As part of my exploration of food issues and as a self portrait, I wrote down everything that I ate for 365 days. This exercise made me realize the realities of my food habits and has helped change the way my family eats. I thought that I only ate fast food a couple times a month, but found out it was sadly more often that that!

At the heart of this project is the fact that too often families struggle to fill the fridge with nutritious and dignified foods. I was constantly amazed at the ingenuity of people in the kitchen when they only have a few food items. I have also had the opportunity to see the incredible safety nets that food banks and other organizations provide for so many. So much is being done, while we still have a long way to go.

At this point, a few different organizations have hosted the exhibit in their communities and these times have been very rich to experience. There have been lectures, sermons, pot luck groups, book discussions, gardening workshops, action groups formed, etc. My hope is that I will be able to partner with like-minded organizations in the future to continue this kind of dialog about our food choices and the impact they have on self and the world around us.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year—the day after Easter, when all the strangely shaped candy is on super sale. Quick! Get to a grocery or drug store today to buy the last Peeps, malted milk robin eggs and hollow chocolate bunnies of the season.

Even if you don’t eat the stuff (and it is pretty low-grade; what tastes so good is the nostalgia), you may want to stock up for the sake of your inner artist. The Washington Post holds a delightful art contest every year for the best Peep-based diorama (bet you thought you’d never need that particular elementary school skill set again).

Mike Chirlin (a friend of one of Smithsonian.com’s web editors) and Veronica Ettle are semi-finalists for their Peep*E post (and video, above). They confirm that making these dioramas is a lot of work. Veronica explains:

Michael and I came up with the idea for our diorama about 2 or 3 months ahead of the due date, which was mid-March, so we started gathering supplies like old bike parts then. I had to go to a few different bike shops to find the specific parts we needed that they were planning on throwing away.

It took a few weeks for Michael to build the shelves since it was sort of a trial and error process. I mainly worked on the background objects with sculpey and painting the background. It’s harder to sculpt a miniature boot than you would think.

We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback, a lot of friends and family members saying “I never even knew a contest like that existed”, and a few saying that they will be our competition next year.

You can view the winner and 39 finalists here. What are your favorites? I highly recommend #5 (RelativiPeep), #8 (Mrs. Peepcock, in the Conservatory, with the Revolver) and #40 (Sweet Revenge).

Lentils for New Year

After elaborate Christmas or Hannukah meals (see the comments from our previous post for some great descriptions of absurdly time-consuming puddings, potica, buche de Noel and almond macaroons), and after plenty of champagne toasts on New Year’s Eve, it’s no wonder traditional New Year’s Day meals tend to be humble.

Humble in the hope of wealth, that is. In the South, people eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s, the logic being that if you eat poor at the beginning of the year, you’ll eat rich during the rest of it. Collared greens, another tradition, are supposed to represent money.

The hope for a prosperous year pops up all over the world. In the Philippines, round fruit are supposed to represent money. Lentils serve the same purpose in Hungary and Italy. And in Spain people eat 12 grapes at the strike of midnight, a tradition that supposedly turns 100 years old today.

Happy New Year! And enjoy whatever food or drink are part of your celebration.

Image courtesy of Piano Castelluccio/Wikimedia Commons

Lefse, courtesy of Flickr user paige_eliz

Does your family have a traditional holiday dish that you eat at only one time of year—and for good reason? It’s not that the dish tastes bad. Maybe it requires obscure ingredients or specialized equipment, or maybe it takes an absurd amount of time or upper body strength to prepare. Is there some recipe you make that, in its disdain for modern conveniences, makes you feel sort of Amish for the day?

In my family it’s lefse, a Scandinavian potato tortilla (basically). You peel potatoes (get all the eyes or they’ll come back to haunt you), boil them, mash them, rice them, mix them with flour and cream and butter and sugar, press the mix into loaf pans, chill overnight (yes, it takes two days), cut into slices, roll VERY thin, use a lefse stick to drape one piece onto a lefse griddle, bake, flip, and fold. Then slather it with butter and sugar, roll it up, and eat. (Or follow the directions in poem form.)

Several people around Smithsonian.com HQ have similar stories. Sarah from Surprising Science says her mom makes Polish cookies: “Cruschiki are little knots of crispy fried dough covered in powdered sugar. The recipe has several steps, and the dough is hard to roll out.”

An associate editor’s parents make baccala, a fish soup. The hardest part is finding the main ingredient—salted, dried cod—and then you have to soak the cod until it’s plump and some of the salt has dissolved away.

Beth, from Around the Mall, brought in caramels the other day made according to her grandma’s recipe. Beth says that if the preparation goes really wrong, the burned caramel sticks to the pot and you have to throw the pot away.

A Venezuelan friend of Diane makes hallacas. You roll a complicated mixture of meats and spices up in a cornmeal dough, then wrap with plantain leaves and steam. A lot of work, but a great excuse for friends or family to sit around a table together getting their hands dirty.

Anika‘s mom makes Jalebi, “a fried funnel cake covered in sugary syrup. It requires saffron, cardamom, and a kadhai (the Indian version of a wok).”

Andrea, who used to live in Greece, says cookies called melomakarona appear there this time of year. They are made of honey, lemon juice, walnuts and semolina. She points out that the ingredients would have been available in ancient Greece, possibly traded by the Phoenicians, and an alternate name for the cookies is “Phoenikia.”

Jesse‘s dad’s side of the family makes fried oysters, which used to be readily available only around Christmas. His mom makes pizzelles—thin, waffle-like cookies that require a special iron, and are “supposed to be the culinary equivalent of catching snowflakes on your tongue.”

Aside from a few odd proteins (or, in Hugh’s case, ethanol), most of these family traditions seem to involve a lot of starch and sugar, nature’s two finest food groups. Everybody feeling nostalgic now? Or maybe just hungry? Let us know about your own quirky traditional dishes.

But years later, when I was living in Chicago, I became aware of another dispute that has engaged some of the greatest minds of our era: “The Latke-Hamantash Debate.”

It began in 1946, at the University of Chicago. According to anthropologist Ruth Fredman Cernea, who has edited a book on the topic, the debate was the product of a chance, street corner meeting in Hyde Park between Hillel Director Rabbi Maurice Pekarsky and two Jewish faculty members. Morale on campus was low. With few occasions for casual student-faculty get-togethers and high pressure for academic achievement, young Jewish students felt uncomfortable and lonely at the university, especially at Christmas time. (Even today, the University of Chicago, with its intimidating gothic buildings, is a bleak place, especially in winter. The students quip that the campus is “where fun comes to die.”) And Jewish professors often felt compelled to submerge their ethnic identity to gain wider acceptance.

The solution? A satirical debate between Jewish faculty members, attended by students, contesting the merits of two holiday foods: the Latke and the Hamantashen (triangular-shaped cookies traditionally eaten during Purim). As Cernea notes, “The event provided a rare opportunity for faculty to reveal their hidden Jewish souls and poke fun at the high seriousness of everyday academic life.”

The debate also owes its origins to the festive Purim tradition of mocking serious rabbinical studies. (See, for instance, the discussion of whether dinosaurs are kosher, mentioned at Smithsonian’s Dinosaur Tracking blog.)

The rest, as they say, is history. The Latke-Hamantash Debate became an annual event at the University of Chicago, and soon spread to other campuses across the country. The participants have represented a “Who’s Who” of academia, including Robert Sibley, dean of the MIT School of Science, who noted that Google returns 380,000 hits on a search for “latke” and only 62,000 for “hamantashen.” (Sibley has also claimed that latkes, not hamantashen, are the dark matter thought to make up over 21 percent of the mass of the universe.). On the other hand, Robert Tafler Shapiro, when he was president of Princeton University, made the case for the hamantashen’s superiority by pointing out the epicurean significance of the “edible triangle” in light of the literary “Oedipal triangle.”

Other contributions to the great debate have included “Latke vs. Hamantash: A Feminist Critique,” by Judith Shapiro, “Jane Austen’s Love and Latkes,” by Stuart Tave, and “Paired Matter, Edible and Inedible,” by Leon Lederman.

So, after more than 60 years of rigorous academic debate, which is the superior holiday food? Nobody knows, and that’s largely the point. “There is no winning, only the symposium going on endlessly, like the study of the Torah,” said Ted Cohen, a professor of philosophy, who moderated the University of Chicago event in 1991. Or, as the famous Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt once said: “I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become more complicated.”

– guest post written by Smithsonian senior editor Mark Strauss

Bryan Noyes of Red Truck Bakery

One of the joys of working here at Smithsonian magazine HQ used to be Brian Noyes’s homework. Brian, the magazine’s art director until the beginning of 2008, took pastry classes at night and often brought his projects into the office the next day—quiches, plum tortes, scones.

Brian decided to devote himself full-time to baking and opened Red Truck Bakery, in Orlean, Virginia.

We’ve always known he’s a fantastic baker, but it was nice to see a shout-out to him in the New York Times’ list of best mail-order gourmet gifts the other day. Some of his specialties, in addition to the holiday-themed dishes mentioned in the review, are sunflower wheat bread, rum cakes and granola. (Only one downside: because of the extra business whipped up by this lavish but entirely deserved praise, he can’t get away from the kitchen long enough to stop by the office holiday party.)