Tales Of Our Times
By JOHN BARTLIT
New Mexico Citizens
For Clean Air & Water
Macadamias Have Proved To Be Hard Nuts To Crack
History has reasons of its own, which steered the fortunes of macadamia nuts. Macadamia nut trees evolved in nature far from the world’s crossroads where trade began. Trade took new wings in the “Age of Exploration”, lasting from the 1400s through the 1600s, some say the 1700s. Europe’s seafarers sailed afar and went ashore on many a land, where they came upon new foodstuffs and spices. Ships returned with these prizes to the port cities that were expanding back home. Thus was world trade born.
Centuries earlier, tasty and nutritious macadamia nuts were growing and used in a land even more remote—among certain indigenous tribes in the coastal rainforests of eastern Australia. Yet, the voyagers to the area eyed a swifter rush of profits from smaller islands in the Pacific. So, the prized nuts missed the boat, so to speak, in the centuries of the Age of Exploration, also called the Age of Discovery.
But before we count up the losses and gains from trading, we have to read more pages of history.
The English East India Company was founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. Its stated purpose was to trade in commodities from around the Indian Ocean and further east to the East Indies. At its peak, the company was the largest corporation in the world, complete with its own armed forces of about 260,000 soldiers, twice the size of the British army at certain times. The company accounted for half the world’s trade during the mid-1700s and early 1800s.
A second tough competitor was the Dutch East India Company that was founded in 1602 and went bankrupt in 1799. The Dutch followed England’s lead. Early on, open employment of war and control of local governments seemed like good ideas to practice in “world trade”.
At a slower pace, the science of agronomy matured and its uses spread. People began to see that suitable regions for growing each food or spice exist in many places in the world. This promise was bad news for monopolies and their schemery, but good news for consumers and their selections.
(Food resources are continually bred, sown, and grown in far-flung locales, which thoroughly benefits the food supply. If only we could do the same for the Earth’s mineral resources.)
We and the Aborigines now know the immense good luck that let them escape the onslaught of world trade by living in the farthest reaches of the New World. For centuries more, macadamia nuts remained confined to small areas of Australia. So the macadamia story proceeded at its own pace.
By the mid-1800s, macadamia nuts still had a long way to go to become big-time. Both the natives and visitors Down Under would play parts in this history.
More recent checkpoints provide a snapshot of the expanding spheres of commerce:
- 1860s – King Jacky, an aboriginal elder of the Logan River clan in Queensland, Australia, regularly collected and traded macadamias with settlers
- Early 1880s – The first commercial orchard of macadamias was planted at Rous Mill in New South Wales, Australia, by Charles Staff
- 1922 – Ernest van Tassel formed the Hawaiian Macadamia Nut Co. in Hawaii
- 1997 – Australia surpassed the United States as the major producer of macadamias
- 2012-2015 – South Africa surpassed Australia as the largest producer of macadamias
Macadamias are the world’s hardest edible nut to crack. And the kernel is softer than many others. For commercial scale deshelling, rotating steel rollers are used. In South Africa, the average crack-out rate, meaning the ratio of usable nut to discarded shell, is 27.6% nut to 72.4% waste.
The data suggest a fortune awaits the inventor of more efficient technology that cracks ultra hard nuts and handles the scrap. The industry needs a shred less damage to kernels and a lot more uses for the heavy-duty shells. Trade drives, and thrives on, innovation.