There is a Latin American story about a kid who was asked to write an exam essay about elephants, but he had only studied the material about worms. Without missing a beat, the kid wrote: “The elephant is a big animal with a very small tail that looks like a worm. The worm, blah, blah, blah…”.
This story came to mind while reading Coconut: How the shy fruit shaped our world, by Robin Laurance, which is not so much a book about coconuts as a series of amusing facts and narratives motivated by references to coconuts. The title evokes other books that focus on the unexpectedly important role of a single commodity in world history, like Sidney Mintz’s pathbreaking Sweetness and Power: The place of sugar in modern history or the more modest Cod: A biography of the fish that changed the world, by Mark Kurlansky.
But Coconut is neither an academic book nor a well-researched history monograph. It is much closer to Laurance’s earlier book, Just what I always wanted! Unwrapping the world’s most curious birthday presents, which did not pretend to be more than a collection of brief accounts of interesting birthday presents received by notorious personalities. In spite of the grandiose subtitle, which claims that the (shy?) coconut shaped our world, Laurance’s latest book is really a collection of stories and anecdotes more or less related to coconuts.
Robin Laurence
Coconut: How the shy fruit shaped our world
The History Press, 2019
Even as a lighthearted book about the uses of coconuts, Laurence’s book is of uneven quality. Coconut begins with several lively stories, but the material gets shallower as the book develops. The book is at its best when narrating the origins of industrial applications of coconuts and when recounting naval adventures and misadventures, but it becomes weaker as it attempts to do a thorough review of the impact of coconuts on many other aspects of life, like health, art and religion. While many stories are lively and engaging, others seem forced and rely heavily on sensationalist facts, with only superficial attempts to produce an analysis. Surprisingly, the book does not address the many culinary uses of coconuts beyond the preparation of coconut milk. This will, no doubt, disappoint many readers.
The first chapters of the book move from an account of how the coconut was dispersed around the globe, to a long description of the mutiny on the Royal Navy vessel HMS Bounty, a mutiny supposedly caused by the stealing of coconuts. Another section is devoted to the struggles of coconut farmers in the Philippines. There is also a detailed account of the industrial uses of the coconut, which include lamp oil, soap and margarine. This allows Laurance to tell the early history of companies that grew out of the industrialisation of coconuts, like Lever Brothers and Procter and Gamble.
The discussion of soap companies leads the author to devote several pages to the history of soap operas, which originally were radio shows sponsored by soap companies. At this point readers might wonder how they ended up reading about soap operas when they thought they were reading a book about coconuts. Coconuts are an ingredient in the manufacture of soap, soap companies sponsored soap operas, soap operas blah, blah, blah.
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The chapter called “The coconut goes to war” is more focused. It tells the history of how the fear of chemical attacks by the Germans during the war led to the development of masks that used coconut charcoal to filter poisonous gases. By the end of 1939, the British government had distributed 36 million such masks, although the gas attacks never materialised. This chapter also recounts the history of the creation and deployment of napalm bombs, since napalm is a chemical compound that contains palmitic acid from coconuts.
Robin Laurance.
The darkness of this chapter is at odds with the rest of the book and its easy gliding from one amusing anecdote to the next. But the chapter closes with the more upbeat story of how John F. Kennedy as a young naval lieutenant was able to survive and save his team thanks to coconuts, both as sustenance and as carriers of an SOS. message. The coconut shell on which JFK carved his message was reportedly displayed in the oval office throughout his presidency.
The chapter on health explores many of the ways in which coconuts have been a part of traditional medicine and how today coconut oil is considered a magic cure-all by followers of fads and celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow. Readers also learn that coconut shells have played a role in both the spread and the cure of malaria. Discarded coconut shells accumulate water where the mosquitoes that transmit malaria can breed.
But a Peruvian microbiologist devised an effective way of controlling malaria by filling coconuts with a bacterium that attacks the mosquito larvae, and releasing the coconuts into fishponds as biological bombs that are harmless to humans. As a part of the discussion of the current popularity of coconut as a health elixir, Laurance focuses on the growth of sales of packaged coconut water and delves into the history of the birth and rise of Vita Coco, one of the leading brands of coconut water.
The book starts to run out of steam on a chapter that combines the reporting of an incident in which a coconut was suspected of black magic to influence an election, a review of instances of death by falling coconuts, and a description of the Victorian fair game called coconut shy. The chapter on art is an uninspired attempt to show instances of art devoted to palm trees and coconuts. The author discusses a few cases of coconuts in art, but finds himself more interested in introducing the biography of Frida Kahlo than in her Weeping Coconuts painting. The author’s attention is again diverted towards the most sensational angle of his topic, when a discussion of Indian coconut-based musical instruments leads him to explain how snake charming is a deception.
Not surprisingly, India is often mentioned throughout the book. Readers learn that the oldest coconut fossils were found in Gujarat, that ancient Sanskrit texts explain the Ayurvedic medical uses of coconuts, and that India is the third largest supplier of coconuts after the Philippines and Indonesia.
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In the last chapter, dedicated almost entirely to India, the discussion ranges from the skills and challenges of coconut pickers to India’s failure to modernise the coconut coir industry. However, given Laurance’s penchant for sensational detours, the chapter ends up talking about human sacrifice and cremation. The author presents Hindus in a caricaturesque manner. According to Laurance, Hindus are people whose daily lives are ruled by “ethics, myth and ritual,” and whose rituals are almost always centred on coconuts. After affirming that human and animal sacrifice in India has been substituted by the use of coconuts, the author decides to describe recent instances of human and animal sacrifice in India and Nepal.
From there the author’s focus moves towards Lakshmi devotees who have coconuts cracked on their heads, the use of coconuts in the construction of a substitute corpse for cremation when the actual corpse is not available, and the incipient practice of using coconuts on funeral pyres. For good measure, Laurance follows up his discussion of coconuts in Hindu rituals with their use in Santería (a Yoruba origin Cuban religion that has spread throughout the Caribbean and the United States) and with the role of coconuts in an early twentieth century cult of German nudists in New Guinea.
Laurance’s discussion of coconuts in religion makes Hinduism look somehow bizarre and it dispatches Santería as “offering guidance to impressionable lost souls.” His reluctance or inability to develop a sophisticated analysis is evident in the many different subjects addressed by the book. It reaches a tragicomic point when, after noting that 100,000 people died and a million were left homeless in the napalm bombing of Tokyo in March 1945, Laurence declares: “It was not the coconut’s finest hour.”
If anything, Laurance’s book demonstrates that the history of the industrial application of coconuts, their political economy, and their cultural significance could make good book subjects. However, Coconut does nothing but trivialise these matters. In the end, the book does little more than provide readers with interesting historical tidbits to perhaps start conversations at a dinner party.
Zilkia Janer teaches at Hofstra University in New York, and she has written about the food culture of Latin America and India.