A Thanksgiving Message: Adventures with Persimmons

Here is something to be thankful for this Thanksgiving Day: agriculture. Maybe we shouldn’t be thankful for every aspect of agriculture; industrial agriculture is ruining the Earth. But I, at least, am thankful for thousands of years of ancestors who domesticated the crops and livestock that we enjoy today.

The origin of agriculture was a gradual process. Take, for example, wild grains. Wild grains have small seeds, which fall off of the stem, and which will not grow when you plant them (physiological dormancy). Had any gatherers tried to “invent” agriculture using wild grasses, the experiment would have failed. But after thousands of years of gathering, our ancestors unconsciously selected the grains that were biggest, that held onto the stems (since they were not interested in scrounging on the ground for grains), and which grew most readily. Then, when someone tried the agricultural experiment, it worked. Since that time, artificial selection for useful crop plants has continued unabated. A similar process happened with wild animals becoming livestock. Horses, it turns out, were first domesticated for their milk somewhere in what is now Kazakhstan. And the North American natives domesticated turkeys.

The difference between wild and domesticated foods became clear to me when I decided to eat some wild persimmons. I found a female tree (Diospyros virginiana has separate male and female trees) near Lake Texoma and gathered about 50 fruits last weekend. (Message to Karl: Don’t worry, I left some for you.) The fruits were so smooshy that I often left the calyx cap behind on the stem. Most of the fruits had ripened simultaneously. But a couple were still just a little hard. Including not-quite-ripe fruits in your foraging pile is a bad idea: even slightly unripe persimmons are legendary for their astringency. Wild fruits often do not ripen simultaneously, while domesticated fruits have been bred to do so. That’s the first thing to be thankful about.

Then I had to remove the seeds from the pulp. Were I just eating the fruits, I might have skipped this step. It is possible to pop a persimmon in your mouth, mash it around gently, and suck away the pulp from the seeds, then spit out the seeds. The wild animals that eat persimmons usually just swallow the whole fruit. This is because they are at the edge of starvation and don’t have time to pick out the fruits, especially if (like coyotes) they could not, or even if (like raccoon) they could. By swallowing the seeds, the animals disperse them to new and perhaps distant locations, and drop them out with little starter cultures of fertilizer.

But I decided to isolate the pulp from the seeds. This was a long process. Each fruit has about ten seeds, constituting about half of the fruit volume. A tenacious layer of pulp clings to these seeds, even when you squeeze as much pulp as possible from them. This usually meant squeezing each seed individually (do the math: 500 seeds). The pulp, meanwhile, clings to your hands like paste. It is orange-brown and scratchy (from sclerids). So you end up with the fruits separated into two fractions: the pulpy seeds, and the pulp on your hands. You have to scrape the pulp off of your hands into a container on a regular basis. For about fifty fruits, this took me about the length of one performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony plus a couple of baroque shorts. But I got a little over two cups of pulp. I then sucked the remaining pulp from the seeds before depositing them in my back yard where they might, someday, grow, after several years when the seed coat softens to the same extent that it would from spending just a few hours in a raccoon gut. With domesticated fruits, you can more easily separate pulp from seeds (including domesticated Japanese persimmons, Diospyros kaki). The pulp can be squeezed through a colander, for example. This will not work for many wild fruits, especially persimmons. Was it worth an hour and a half of dedicated work to get a couple of cups of wild persimmon pulp? Yes, if that was all that was available. But I found myself questioning the wisdom of my use of this time. That’s a lot of work and a lot of Mahler. Be thankful for domesticated fruits in which you can easily remove the seeds. That’s the second thing to be thankful about.

The next day, I felt a little nauseated. It was probably just end-of-semester stress. But perhaps, I thought, after all that work, the raw persimmon pulp was contaminated? Just a little. So here’s the third thing to be thankful about: we modern humans can cook our food. This is just one of the many benefits of cooking cited by Richard Wrangham in Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. I hope 350 degrees will inactivate any bacteria that may be present. I decided to bake the persimmon pulp into bars. They are in the oven right now as I write. Get ready to copy and paste for a Thanksgiving dessert recipe:

Take about a half cup of smooshed persimmon pulp and mix it with 5 tablespoons of soft or melted butter, an egg, and a third of a cup of plain yogurt. Then blend in about a cup of flour, a half cup of sugar, and some baking powder, a little salt, and your choice of spices (something like cinnamon or nutmeg). Some pecans would have been nice, only I forgot them. Grease a small baking tin, put in the mixture, and bake it at 350 F until you think it’s done (the usual test is to insert a toothpick and see if it comes out clean). Notice, for the benefit of my lactose-intolerant wife and daughter: this recipe contains no untreated milk.

It’s almost done. Boy, this had better be good, after all that messy squishing.

The moment of truth! I will tell you how it tastes. If it makes me sick, watch for a dispatch tomorrow from St. Francis Hospital.

Verdict: Not bad. It does not have a strong persimmon flavor, which can at any rate be a little annoying. It is a little mooshy inside, but once again, not bad. It is definitely gritty with sclerids as only a wild fruit (or a pear) can be. I kept eating it.

I think I will use the rest of the batch of pulp in this manner for the Saturday family meal for the remaining descendants of Edd and Stella Hicks, sharecroppers in early twentieth century northeastern Oklahoma. I wonder if Stella gathered persimmons and cooked with them. There is no remaining family history to this effect, but it seems reasonable to suppose that she did. Persimmons, an aggressive early-successional clonally-spreading tree, would have been re-invading my grandfather Edd’s cleared farmland. This means that, after seventy years, persimmons have returned to our family.

New video

I posted a new video on the StanEvolve channel: Barbecue with Wranglin’ Rich. It presents Richard Wrangham's cooking hypothesis of human evolution. And it has the approval of Wranglin' Rich himself. His email from Harvard noted, "Dear Stanley: I love it! Thank you for sending the link, and for promoting the cooking hypothesis. I will proudly share with my family. Actually I have a question. You cited an article from Life Magazine from the 1960s, but I don't think I know it. Can you give me a citation? It sounds like something that Carleton Coon might have said. I looked at some of your other productions. Great stuff! Appreciatively, Richard." I told him what I could of the article. Hope y'all enjoy the new video.

A Convergence of Readings on Human Evolution

Purely by chance, I happened to read from four different sources last night about human nature and human evolution. They illustrate that we have been confused about human nature for centuries, but that we are making progress in understanding it.

First, I read an article by Ann Gibbons from the August 2 issue of Science: “How a fickle climate made us human.” She reviewed the history of scientific thought about the relationship between climate and human nature. As far back as Raymond Dart, many scientists have noted that hominin evolution began when Africa experienced droughts, starting about five million years ago (at which time the Mediterranean dried up into a salt flat). More recently, this viewpoint is expressed in Steven Stanley’s Children of the Ice Age. Human ancestors had to come down from the trees and start running around on the savanna, perhaps carrying food and babies with them in their hands, rather than having to use their hands as front paws. Even a dog can walk on two legs, but try to get it to carry something in its front paws while doing so. Sounds like a great theory to me. I put the carrying-babies theory into my encyclopedia; I called it the “Let go of my hair! Okay, I’ll carry you” theory. I especially liked it because it gave women an important role in human evolution.

The problem is that the stages of human evolution do not neatly line up with African drought. In 2009, researchers published evidence that Ardipithecus ramidus (“Ardi”) lived in trees and ate fruits and nuts from forests about four million years ago—they walked upright (sort of; they still grasped branches with their big toes) but did not live in the savanna. Also, just because Earth’s tropical and subtropical climate was becoming drier, in general, does not mean that it was doing so in East Africa. Recently, scientists have begun drilling cores in ancient African lake beds to determine what the climate was like in the past near the actual localities where human fossils were discovered. (They can tell that a lake had water if the sediments contained diatom shells, for example.)

What scientists such as Richard Potts found was that rapid evolution in hominins occurred not during long droughts, or during long wet periods, but during periods in which the climate changed back and forth every thousand years or so. That is, when the climate was, as Gibbons put it, fickle. Biological evolution could not keep up with such rapid changes; cultural evolution was necessary, and this put a premium on the capacity for intelligence.

Second, I continued reading E. O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth. An expert on ant societies and an informed writer about human societies, Wilson wondered what ants and humans had in common that promoted the evolution of advanced societies in each. The answer: very little, other than forming a defensible home site (ant nest, tribal campground). Aside from this, ants and humans became social for different reasons. In the case of humans, the increase in intelligence was made possible by adding meat to a herbivorous diet, and later cooking the meat (an idea recently promoted by Richard Wrangham). For a gracile animal to go hunting, intense social cooperation was necessary. Therefore hunting made us an intensely social species, according to Wilson. He takes it further: this is why we have always been and will always be warlike, a view disputed in a recent book by John Horgan.

Third, I read a Jack London short story, “In a distant country.” In this story, two would-be gold miners during the Yukon gold rush gave up the pursuit halfway, and had to spend the winter in an abandoned cabin with two graves outside of it. During the long winter, they became first uncooperative with and then intensely suspicious of one another. Eventually, they would become two more graves outside of the cabin.

London’s story begins, “When a man journeys into a far country, he must be prepared to forget many of the things he has learned, and to acquire such customs as are inherent with existence in the new land; he must abandon the old ideals and the old gods…” London was not thinking about human evolution, I suspect, but he could have been talking about the hominins watching their way of life dry up or get flooded in Africa during periods of “fickle” climate. And to London, human nature was based on conflict.

Fourth, I tried reading a little bit of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, written in 1516. It is slow going. More invented the word utopia, from the Greek topos (place) and a prefix; More deliberately confused the prefixes eu- (good) and ou- (no), implying that this good place can really be found in no place. In this book, More speculates about what a utopia might be like. He criticizes the practice, common in England at the time, in which landowners would drive poor families into desperate poverty, which practically forced them to become thieves, and then the government would arrest the thieves and hang them. European governments were creating their own problems. What should be done instead is for government and economy to work in a way such that everyone helps everyone else—not that all are entirely equal, as communists would think, but everyone can make a decent living and contribute their resources to the good of society. More presented this as a story, told to him by the fictitious Raphael Hythloday, about a utopian society somewhere in the recently-discovered Americas, so that he could if necessary tell King Henry VIII that it was just a story. Actually, Native American societies were closer to this ideal than European societies, and maybe More had heard this. More’s view contrasts greatly with not only other philosophers of his time but also differs greatly from those of Wilson and London that I had just read.

Lastly, I read a little bit of George Carlin, the late cynical humorist. Sometimes I wonder if he understood human nature better than either More or London.