Where the wild things are
Hunting for wild walnuts in a hotspot of biodiversity
In the 1920s, the Soviet botanist Nikolai Vavilov set off on a series of trips around the world to collect seeds that could form the basis for stronger, drought-resistant crops back home. In the process, he traced the roots of agricultural crops to their original wild ancestors, and developed a theory that profoundly shaped the thinking of modern scientists, agronomists and conservationists.
Vavilov proposed that today’s crops developed not randomly around the world, but in a few “centers of origin” — regions of high biodiversity where men and women first domesticated the wild ancestors of wheat, beans, fruits, and other crops. Vavilov’s centers of origin were often found in mountainous areas, where varied microclimates and geographic isolation encouraged plants and animals to form unique populations. They were reservoirs of genetic diversity. In these areas, one didn’t find a single type of apple, for example, but dozens of apple varieties growing right next to each other or even on the same tree.
I’d read about Vavilov in the book, “Where Our Food Comes From,” by the agricultural researcher and writer Gary Paul Nabhan. He retraced Vavilov’s original travels and went to the Pamirs, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Kazakhstan, the American Southwest, searching for those original ancestors of today’s foods.
I became intrigued by the idea of sourcing food from their centers of origin. So many of the foods that I’d grown up eating from the supermarkets of NY are grown from a few, highly bred varieties that are often susceptible to disease. (The banana is the most commonly cited example.)
Not only that, these crops that are bred because they have a lot of sugar, or because they grow uniformly for the harvesting machines, often don’t have the health benefits of their less domesticated and disobedient wild cousins. How much better or different would food taste if they were closer to their original forebears?
So, I decided to start a business around the idea of sourcing nuts from their centers of origin. I would bring varieties of nuts that were ancient, had been harvested and eaten by people for millennia in the communities where they originated, but relatively unknown and rare in Europe.
This is what brought me to Kyrgyzstan a few weeks ago. The Kyrgyz Republic, a country of 6 million people that emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union, is smack in the middle of Vavilov’s Central Asia center of origin. Here, a few hours from the capital Bishkek, Vavilov traced the apple to its original wild ancestor, where it was spread by horses, birds, and traders along the Silk Road to the rest of the world.
In the fertile Fergana Valley, where Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan’s borders intertwine, you can find wild varieties of fruits and nuts that probably look and taste similar to their early ancestors: pistachio and almond trees growing in the hills, fragrant apricots and cherries. And walnuts. Hundreds of thousands of walnut trees.
Arslanbob, where the Fergana Valley meets the Kyrgyz mountains, is home to the largest wild walnut forest in the world. It covers about 45,000 hectares of land, bigger than Arches National Park, with walnut trees mixed with apples, plums, and apricots growing wild from 1,000 to 2,400 meters above sea level. At each elevation, the walnuts are slightly different colors, shapes, sizes, and tastes depending on the microclimate.
There’s a Russian story that says after World War II, US President Harry Truman asked Soviet leader Joseph Stalin for the Arslanbob walnut forest as a partial repayment for the USSR’s debt. Stalin refused, saying the forests were a national treasure.
I traveled to Arslanbob to learn more about these famous walnuts, and see whether the taste is as good as the story. I’m months too late to catch the height of the walnut harvest in September, when entire villages empty out to camp in the walnut forests collecting the nuts.
In mid-April, it’s amazingly peaceful in the forest. Birds chirp to each other from the towering, centuries-old trees, and a small herd of horses graze lazily under the lush canopy of leaves. A young man rides by on a donkey, dragging a makeshift plow behind him as if placed there by Instagram.
In the markets, I can see the diversity of walnuts that were harvested last year. They range from grey-brown to dark yellow, some as small as golf balls, others oblong and the size of a small egg. I spoke to the general manager of a walnut processor, who said that the wild walnuts have shells of different thicknesses in addition to their varied shapes, making them impossible to crack with machines. For Kyrgyz women especially, cracking walnuts at home is often an important source of income during the harvest season and winter months.
So how do these wild walnuts taste, compared to the cultivated varieties? As a baseline, I’d brought some Chilean walnuts with me from a high-end nut shop in Copenhagen. The Chilean nuts were beautiful: large, light yellow, unbroken, and perfectly homogenous. But pop one in your mouth, and it’s clear that the growers chose visual appeal over flavor; the walnuts are bland and light, more texture than flavor, as if tasting a photocopy of a walnut or buying a tomato out of season from the supermarket.
In contrast, the Kyrgyz walnuts look like misfits, a motley assortment of colors and sizes that are smaller, darker, and denser than their cultivated cousins. They were much more intense, fatty, and rich, with a curious malty flavor that lingered in your mouth, and each tasted slightly different from the last.
Is this what walnuts tasted like when Alexander the Great’s army supposedly came through and convalesced in the foothills?
I had gone to Arslanbob with Aibek Abdurakhamonov, the regional representative of a Kyrgyz agriculture development organization called Agrolead. We drove through a small village, and Aibek pointed to houses that looked newly built. “Almost every family here has someone who works in Russia and sends money back,” he said, matter-of-factly. “They wouldn’t be able to afford a house like that otherwise.”
According to the World Bank, Kyrgyzstan had a GDP per capita of about $1,220 in 2017, putting it somewhere between Haiti ($770) and Cote d’Ivoire ($1,540). Nearly $2.7 billion dollars flowed into the country last year from migrant workers abroad who send money back to their families (remittances, as they’re called in development speak). It makes up an astonishing one-third of Kyrgyzstan’s GDP, and is one of the highest rates of remittances in the world. It means that villages like this have emptied out their young men and women who are abroad seeking to make money.
It will be difficult to work in Kyrgyzstan. The government, with limited resources to provide even basic services, doesn’t have the resources to support its farmers the way that the US and EU governments can. It’s a landlocked country. The vast network of railroads built during the Soviet times have fallen to disrepair or been dismantled, making transport expensive. Additionally, sourcing wild nuts, harvested by families rather than planted by one large producer, means buying in small quantities from many different people, requiring careful quality control.
I have my work cut out for me. But I’m convinced that the best foods will come from places like Kyrgyzstan, hotspots of biodiversity where large agribusinesses haven’t yet displaced the natural, distinct varieties that have been growing for centuries. I’m convinced that doing business in a country like Kyrgyzstan might help provide incentives for young people to stay.
Once I start the business, maybe I’ll even send some Kyrgyz walnuts to Harry Truman’s descendants.
