Lizard in a grocery store salad
Embed from Getty Images“I got an idea and I can’t get rid of it. I go to sleep and it comes right back at me. Never had anything give me so much trouble. It’s kind of a big idea. Maybe it’s full of holes.” – Adam Trask in East of Eden.
John Steinbeck (1962): The year he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
So, what was Adam Trask’s big idea in John Steinbeck’s magnum opus “East of Eden”? And, more importantly, how does it relate to anoles? The kernel of an idea that would eventually revolutionize the salad industry—and link anoles to a literary legend—can be found in the fictional dialogue written by Steinbeck in 1952.
“… they’ve dug up a mastodon in Siberia. Been in the ice thousands of years. And the meat’s still good.” said Adam Trask.
“Mastodon?” inquired Will Hamilton.
“Yes, a kind of elephant that hasn’t lived on the earth for a long time.”
“Meat was still fresh?” asked Will.
“Sweet as a porkchop” proclaimed Adam.
Steinbeck was born in the Salinas Valley of Central California, known as “America’s Salad Bowl” for its prodigious production of leafy greens. He spent many summers, while away from college at Stanford, working in the vegetable fields near Salinas. Steinbeck’s fondness for his birthplace and working knowledge of the agriculture industry is a cornerstone to many of his novels, especially “East of Eden.”
“… in the cold parts of the country, don’t you think people get to wanting perishable things in the winter—like peas and lettuce and cauliflower? In a big parts of the country they don’t have those things for months and months. And right here in the Salinas Valley we can raise them all the year around.” declared Adam.
“Right here isn’t right there,” said Will. “What’s your idea?”
“… if you chop ice fine and lay a head of lettuce in it and wrap it in waxed paper, in will keep three weeks and come out fresh and good.” said Adam.
“Go on,” said Will cautiously.
“Well, you know the railroads … they’re pretty good. Do you know we could ship lettuce right to the east coast in the middle of winter?”
The perennial availability of perishable vegetables in the United States is now commonplace, but in the early 1900s, it made literary characters like Will Hamilton exclaim to Adam Trask to “let your damned idea die.” In fact, America’s most popular lettuce variety (iceberg) was originally called crisphead, until Salinas Valley growers began packing it with crushed ice and shipping it nationwide. The genesis of Adam Trask’s business plan was obviously fictional, but the idea of shipping lettuce with ice was successful and revolutionary in the early 1900’s; however, the method never quite kept vegetables fresh for long enough.
“What arrived in New York was six carloads of horrible slop with a sizable charge just to get rid of it.” – East of Eden by John Steinbeck.
In the pursuit of profitable ways to ensure lettuce does not turn into “horrible slop,” the next advance in production came from the humble bag. Lettuce can last for days on ice, but a bagged salad can last for a couple of weeks. It’s always difficult to establish the original (or best) anything in the food industry (vis-à-vis famous rivalries such as Pat’s versus Geno’s for cheesesteaks or Pepe’s versus Sally’s for pizza), but the late 1980s in the Salinas Valley is believed to be when and where the first bagged salads were packaged, distributed from, and then sold nationwide. The bagged salad turned a commodity crop whose predictability was in the capricious hands of nature into a consumer good as constant on the shelves of stores as shampoo or Twinkies.
Over the next decades, prepackaged leafy green vegetables boomed. To keep up with demand, growers invented creative ways to automate aspects of the production process, such as mechanically harvesting leafy greens. They also ramped-up the speed across the entire supply chain, such that lettuce could be bagged in the field within minutes of harvest and then sent overnight to supermarkets nationwide. These overlapping vignettes of industrial prepackaged salads provide the backdrop for a distinctly modern human-wildlife interaction: Small wild animals found by customers in prepackaged produce.
In our recent paper, we attempted to shed light on this poorly understood phenomenon by surveying online news articles for reported incidents. In doing so, we found that this is a much more common occurrence than one might think and that incidents encompassed representatives of several vertebrate groups. Most incidents involved amphibians (treefrogs and toads), and then reptiles (lizards and snakes), mammals (rodents), and birds. Anoles were the most common lizard that we could identify from the pictures and descriptions provided in the reports. The anole incidents included Green Fruit Loop, the aptly named Green Anole that became a class pet at Riverside Elementary in New Jersey. We suggested that the likely source of Green Anoles among the incidents was Florida because not only is the species is common there, but by 2012 the state was the third largest producer of leafy green vegetables in the United States, behind only California and Arizona.
Figure 1 from Hughes et al. (2019): Taxonomic and temporal breakdown for 40 incidents of extemporaneous wild animals found by customers in prepackaged produce items purchased in the United States. A) Vertebrate diversity among incidents; B) Annual distribution of incidents; and C) Monthly distribution of incidents.
An interesting social element emerged from my deep-dive into the trenches of the internet. I found that these incidents were shrouded in uncertainty and thus reporters often relied on anecdotes to discuss and describe them. One common urban myth was that these incidents almost never happen and the second was that if they happen, then it was because the produce was organic. In contrast to these popular views, we found that at least 40 incidents were reported since 2003—so, not exactly rare—and that less than 30% of incidents involved organic produce—most actually came from conventionally grown crops. For greater context and more details, see the Discussion of our paper where we address: 1) why these unfounded views may have persisted; 2) spatial, taxonomic, and seasonal patterns to our findings; 3) our results in the context of competing demands imposed upon the produce industry; and 4) the biosecurity concerns relating to the unintentional translocation of wild amphibians.
Modern agriculture has taken significant steps towards industrialization since the time that John Steinbeck penned Adam Task’s revolutionary idea (see Epilogue). Industrialization of food production will help to address the problems associated with feeding 9 billion people, a figure that is projected for the human population by 2050. Wild vertebrates in prepackaged produce, however, may be one symptom of an overburdened and overstretched produce production system. Any solution to this problem will not likely come from greater controls for wildlife, such as the currently employed “scorched earth” approach, but rather from the decentralization of agriculture. We suggest that the best approach would be to first invest in research aimed at studying a wide segment of biodiversity near agricultural lands, which will help growers assess potential intrusion risks of more species, and second to adopt quality control methods that account for a greater diversity of wildlife to improve screening at more stages in the produce supply chain.
Epilogue:
The birth of Adam Trask’s plan was fictional, but the growth of that idea, as depicted in the novel, is a great example of John Steinbeck’s (often overlooked) scientific mind. While many people my age read “Of Mice and Men” in high school and got to know Steinbeck the literary genius, they may not know Steinbeck the scientist. Ed Ricketts was a marine biologist that became a lifelong friend to Steinbeck when he moved to Monterey in the 1930s. The relationship between the writer and the scientist was one of mutual respect and admiration. At one point, they even undertook a six-week specimen-collecting expedition to the Gulf of California, which resulted in two published books. Not only was Ricketts the basis for Steinbeck’s character “Doc” in several novels (e.g., “Cannery Row”), but the influence he had on Steinbeck is unmistakable in many of his other works, including “East of Eden.” Adam Trask, for example, spawned his idea for preserving lettuce with ice from a scientific expedition that found a frozen mastodon in Siberia, and he read about this finding, refrigeration science, and bacterial growth in articles from “Atlantic Monthly,” “National Geographic,” and “Scientific American.” The mentioning of these specific journal titles in “East of Eden” was by no coincidence as they would have been the same ones that Steinbeck saw, and likely read, in Rickett’s lab, a place that he visited frequently. At the time of Ricketts death in 1948 (which sent Steinbeck into a depression), the two were planning another collecting expedition to British Columbia and another book.