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.

The Evolution of Delusion (a Thanksgiving Day Message)

Today is Thanksgiving. But it is also the fortieth anniversary of Yukio Mishima’s seppuku.

Yukio Mishima was a Japanese writer who sometimes wrote feel-good novels (e.g. The Sound of the Waves) and very rarely even humor (e.g. the short story Tamago, or Eggs). But he was most famous for writing fiction with angst, much of which was focused on the loss of the spirit of Japan (Yamato damashii). As I understand it, his mind was in the grip of a delusion that Japan had a glorious samurai past, where warriors had total honor and would rather commit ritual suicide than to submit to any loss of face. The ritual suicide was, of course, seppuku, which is the same as harakiri—the former is the fancy, the latter the ordinary, way of saying it in Japanese. He had a small cult of young men who followed him, like a band of samurai, or perhaps like ronin, the wandering samurai who had no home after Japan entered the modern world in the nineteenth century. But this was post-World-War-II Japan, with no room for either samurai or seppuku.

To Mishima, Japan’s defeat in World War II was an intolerable loss of face. And quite possibly he was influenced by his own cowardice during World War II: when he was drafted, he told the doctors at his physical exam that he had tuberculosis, and he was relieved from Army duty. It was not until 1967 that he joined the postwar version of the Japanese army (the Self Defense force; Japan’s constitution, written by the United States, forbade an army capable of international expansion). He considered this army to not be patriotic enough, so he formed the Tatenokai (Shield Society) in 1968, which upheld bushido (the way of the warrior) and swore to uphold the Emperor. However, he did not think that even Emperor Hirohito was patriotic enough, because Hirohito had renounced his own divinity at the end of World War II.

Mishima was one of the last holdouts of the delusions that were widespread in Japan before and during World War II. Such delusions can, as the Hakko Ichiu principle (Japanese world dominion) did, grip an entire nation. But even this was not enough for Mishima and his followers. On November 25, 1970, Mishima and four members of his Tatanokai visited the commandant of the Tokyo headquarters of the Self-Defense Force. Once inside, they barricaded the office and tied the commandant to his hair. Then Mishima stood on a balcony and delivered a prepared speech, about returning Japan to its glory, to the soliders who had gathered below. He asked the soldiers to join him in a coup d’etat, but they just jeered him. He finished his speech, went into the commandant’s office, and committed harakiri. After he had partially disemboweled himself, one of his assistants was supposed to behead him, in the traditional manner; but this assistant was unable to do so, and another assistant had to finish the job for him. It is now generally believed that Mishima had not intended the coup to be successful, but had planned his ritual suicide for years, and he had made sure his legal affairs, including money for the legal defense of the remaining Tatenokai members, were in order before his final battle.

Delusions can completely determine what a person considers to be reality. Every piece of sensory information is interpreted as a reinforcement of the delusion. This might seem to be an imperfection of the brain that evolution would have gotten rid of. But delusions can sometimes provide evolutionary advantages to the people who have them and to the societies in which these people live. If you have two tribes, one of which has delusions of being God’s chosen conquerors of the world and the other of which values reason over emotion, guess which one will win the war. If a delusional tribe wins territory and resources, its individual members, to varying degrees, will have greater evolutionary fitness. The human mind is capable of intense delusion, and this is the product of natural selection.

Well, I have tied this story in with evolution and religion. Let me finally tie it in with Thanksgiving. Americans have a delusion, even if only mildly held, that the Pilgrims were heroic pioneers who came to the New World from England for religious freedom. But after leaving England, they mad moved to the Netherlands, where they had religious freedom—but so did everyone else. The Pilgrims wanted the “freedom” to enforce their religion, so they had to form their own colony, in Massachusetts. When they got there, they nearly starved, but were rescued by the welfare provided to them by a socialistic Native American tribe. Later, they showed their gratitude by carrying out genocide against this tribe. Pilgrim leader William Bradford describes the way the colonists surrounded a Pequot village at sunrise. They set it ablaze and killed anyone who fled. Bradford wrote, “It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they [the colonists] gave praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully.” They were able to ignore the suffering that they inflicted on their fellow humans because their brains were deluded with the idea that they were God’s chosen people upon the face of the Earth and had the right, even the responsibility, to slaughter anyone (at least any Indian) who questioned their delusion.

But let me end with something to be thankful for on this day. Evolution has given our species the ability to create, in our minds, a beautiful world based upon the sensory information that those minds receive—brilliant color, wonderful scents of food, beautiful music. They are illusory creations of our minds, but let us enjoy them anyway. They are more beauty than we, the products of natural selection, have any right to have expected.