Stone Tools and Stone Fruits: Evolution in the Acquisition of Food

    In The Creative Spark, I am drawn by how Agustin Fuentes describes the evolution of our early Homo sapiens ancestors, most particularly how he describes their first uses of creativity. Life for our early ancestors centered around food, and the more advanced they became in the collection of food, the more successful they became as a species. So, they diversified their food collection, becoming better able to adapt and survive. This supreme ability to collect food made it so that the brains and bodies of the generations to come would continue to grow bigger, stronger, and better able to advance the lives of the Homo sapien species.

Fuentes notes how early humans learned to make tools and harness fire to better collect and prepare food, and they ate a wide range of plants, fruits, nuts, flowers, and animals from land and water. Yet, at some point, we strayed from this diversity. This doesn’t seem obvious because you can go into a grocery store and find cashews from Brazil, bananas from Southeast Asia, and coffee from Africa, but the diversity we lost was within these plant species. You’ve likely only ever seen a yellow banana, but there are over 1,000 banana varietals, with some being red or even blue. 

This monoculturing of produce has occurred in almost every fruit and vegetable you know. One artist, Sam Van Akin, hopes to conserve some of these lost fruits on his “Tree of 40 Fruit.”

Sam Van Akin is popular for his works that combine biology, botany, and conservation. He is most known for creating The Open Orchard, a native fruit varietal orchard that replanted varieties not grown in decades on New York’s Governors Island, and his many plant grafting projects – most notably the Tree of 40 Fruit. Grafting is a technique to join two plants together. This is most often done with flowering bushes to grow different colored blooms on the same plant. Van Akin took this one step further, debuting his grafted stone fruit Frankenstein in 2014 with rare varietals of peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, cherries, and almonds.

This project is a creative form of conservation and an homage to Van Akin’s childhood. The project began when he heard about a 200-year-old orchard in New York closing due to a lack of funding. Having grown up on a farm, he decided to buy the orchard and made it his mission to preserve the ancient and heirloom stone fruit varieties grown there. Inspired by his background in sculpture and installation art, he began his journey of grafting and creating beautiful, multicolored trees. Van Aken also tracked the blooming seasons of all these varietals to help further the conservation efforts of these fruits. Now, his trees are installed around the U.S., acting not only as stunning, living works of art but also as representations of the creativity we need to preserve the wonderful biodiversity of our planet.

Sam Van Akin saw the increasing monoculturization of stone fruits as a problem and came up with a creative way to both challenge this norm and ensure the conservation of some of America’s natural flora. We may be a long way from the stone tools and sharpened sticks of the early Homo sapiens, but we are always in need of innovative ways to support our food system and ensure the preservation of our species.

Learn more about Sam and his trees!

https://www.samvanaken.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9EuJ9QlikY

https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/03/living/tree-40-fruit-sam-van-aken-feat