Free The Triumph of Seeds by Thor Hanson

everywhere from Guatemala to Ghana, Togo, Malaysia, and Fiji, and global chocolate sales exceed $100 billion annually. The average German consumes more than twenty pounds of the stuff every year, and in Britain people spend more money on candy than they do on bread and tea. Ecologically, the extravagance of a large, rich bean makes perfect sense. Like almendro or avocado, cacao seeds evolved to sprout and grow in a dark forest, where young seedlings need large energy reserves to survive. But nothing I saw in cacao plantations, botany textbooks, or candy bars explained why that energy had to come in the form of fat instead of starch.
    I turned to the next ingredient on the Almond Joy list, coconut, from a seed that ranks among the world’s largest. Though familiar to anyone who has dreamed of palm trees and tropical beaches, the coconut is actually something of a mystery. Botanists call it cosmopolitan , a word that only came into common use in the nineteenth century, when global empires and fast sailing ships made it suddenly possible for an individual to become familiar with all parts of the world. For a plant, there can hardly be a greater compliment: so widespread and successful that no one is even sure where you came from.The coconut palm achieved this feat with fruits that function as massive, floating seeds. Each buoyant husk surrounds a single fist-sized kernel that is hollow except for a nutritious liquid known to health-food enthusiasts as “coconut water.” Whatever branding specialist coined that term cannot be blamed for shying away from the more accurate, technical description: acellular endosperm . But while “endosperm” might not sound catchy in an ad campaign, its market potential should not be underestimated. As a coconut seed matures, much of its liquid hardens into a solid endosperm called copra , the familiar white flesh that graces not only candy bars and cream pies but also Filipino stews, Jamaican breads, and South Indian chutneys. Squeezewater through that flesh, and you get coconut milk, an essential ingredient in curries and sauces throughout the coastal tropics. And with minimal processing, copra yields over half its volume in coconut oil, one of the top five vegetable fats in the world and a common additive in everything from margarine to sunscreen.

    F IGURE 3.1.  Coconut ( Cocos nucifera ). The seeds of the coconut palm, among the world’s largest, provide everything from thirst-quenching beverages to cooking oil, skin creams, and mosquito repellant. Dispersed throughout the coastal tropics by ocean currents and people, the origin of the species remains mysterious. I LLUSTRATION © 2014 BY S UZANNE O LIVE .
    To a Hollywood set designer, coconuts provide a reliable fallback prop for any tropical situation. They’ve been featured as drinking cups in productions ranging from The Brady Bunch to Lord of the Flies , and as bra cups in King Kong , South Pacific , and the Elvis blockbuster Blue Hawaii . The Professor, a character in the 1960s sitcom Gilligan’s Island , famously used coconuts to build useful items like battery chargers and a lie detector. His inventions hardly seem exaggerated in light of the actual products made from coconuts, which include buttons, soap, charcoal, potting soil, rope, fabric, fishing line, floor mats, musical instruments, and mosquito repellant. This versatility led Malaysian islanders to name the coconut palm “tree of a thousand uses,” and in parts of the Philippines it’s simply “the tree of life.” But, for sheer ingenuity, nothing matches the bizarre ecology of the seed itself.
    When a mature coconut drops from its mother tree, it usually hits sand. Tolerance to salt, heat, and shifting soil helps wild coconut palms thrive on the upper fringe of tropical beaches, from where high tides and storms regularly carry their seeds out to sea. Once afloat, a coconut can remain viable for at least three months, riding winds and currents for journeys of