MARVIN HARDISTY
Supplementing the Hardisty story in volume 6 of Recipes for Living

I was born September 29, 1949, in Red Oak, Iowa, and raised in the small town of Carl in southwest Iowa. Carl was one of what used to be many small coal mining towns in that area. Carl had a school, a country store, a Methodist Church, a repair shop, and 15 people. Five of the 15, who lived in Carl were the Hardisty family — my parents, Paul and Evelyn Hardisty, my brother, sister, and me.

Early on, Carl was a very large town. I remember as a child we had a roller skating rink. I particularly remember being stung by a bee at the front door of that rink. Those are the kind of things that stick in your mind forever. When I grew up, they turned the rink into a family center. Carl was not incorporated so we didn't have our own zip code. Once a year there was a watermelon festival. The farmers would take three trucks, go down to Texas and get watemelons to bring up, and for that one day there would be 3,000 people in Carl. They would bring in a big-name artist to perform in the little town square. I can remember being in the parade. That was a big deal and farmers around Carl would come in to help out.

My father was a share-cropper. He owned no land. I can remember about how little money we had. Dad quit smoking the day he had 25¢ and the choice was getting a loaf of bread or a pack of cigarettes. He quit smoking that day. We never had many new vehicles or new farm equipment. I remember after all the children were gone, my folks suddenly began getting a lot of new vehicles so I don't know if he was just storing the cash or us children were expensive.

We raised most of our own food. We'd go into the town of Corning, about 11 miles away, once a week to get supplies. That was often enough because we had milk cows, a large garden, and a cave, where Mom stored the food she canned. We had our own milk and later on butter. My father went into the service when was 18 because that way he would get more to eat. His family didn't have meat when he was growing up, so meat became very important to him. That had an effect because he always said, as we were growing up, we would always have meat on the table and we children would have a college education, which we did.

My mother graduated from high school. My father had seven years of grade school and graduated because he had taken two years in one, so he was credited with graduating from eighth grade. He wasn't the best schooled but he was one of the best farmers around. He cared about the soil but most of all he cared about animals. I remember he was one of the better cattle breeders in Adams County. A lot of farmers came to him to purchase their stock.

Another part I remember about growing up, we had our own milk cows. I was the one who got up early in the morning before school and milked 10 cows by hand, and I came home in the evening and milked all 10 by hand. I was so short that I sat on a low milk stool. We had restraints we called "kickers," which we hooked around the back legs of the cow when we milked them, so they couldn't move around as much. A clamp went around each leg with a chain between them. If we had it too tight and the cow tried to move, she fell over. One time I had a cow's kickers so tight she fell over and her bag dragged over the top of my head. That was how short I was. I can remember the day we actually got electric milking machines. That was a big deal. It put me out of my business of hand milking, which was just fine with me.

The other thing I remember about growing up is when we finally got an indoor bathroom. I believe I was in about the 6th grade. We had some running water before then but we never had an indoor bathroom. Especially in the winter, it was a highlight to have an indoor restroom.

I went to a one-room school house until I was in eighth grade. I think it was Carl School house #7. I was the only one in my class until I was in sixth grade. I don't remember a lot about how the one-room school houses operated. I know there were all eight grades at the same time, and one teacher. I remember getting up in front of the class and reading. We did a lot of reading, but I don't remember how it all happened — whether the teacher used the older students to help teach us or what. As I've thought about it, I've been impressed that one teacher would do all the different grades and all the different subjects.

We had no running water at the school house, which was across from our house, so we had outdoor facilities for the restroom. We always brought in the water from the outside but we didn't use a lot of water at school. The schoolhouse still sits. I have its bell. I don't have it up yet but I purchased it thinking it would help me remember that part of growing up.

My brother, sister, and I all three had college educations. My brother, Jerry Hardisty, went to Iowa State. He is a veterinarian located in North Carolina. It is depressing when I google on the internet for Mary Hardisty, and then my brother, who does a lot of traveling, who has a lot of pages on google. So I don't do that very often. My sister married a pharmacist and they are located in Corning, Iowa, the county seat of Adams County. I now live in Osceola.

I enrolled at Iowa State in 1968. I started in mathematics and computer science. Computers then were just starting to be available so Iowa State didn't actually have a lot of them at the time, and I focused on math.

I married my wife Joyce Swartz just before my junior year and about that same time I also started working part time on campus at the computer center. One of the lessons my father taught me was, "Work hard and you will get where you should be." I worked two years while I was going to school. I graduated from Iowa State in 1972. It took me 5 years because the last two years I worked full time as a computer operator while I was going to school full time. Toward the end, they came to me and said, "If you finish your degree quickly, we have a full time programming job for you." So I took a job at Iowa State.

The building I worked in beginning in 1972, still stands. At that time it was called the Computation Center Building and it is now called the Atanasoff Hall for the person credited with building one of the first digital computers. I don't know the heritage of his name. I never met the individual. He was not on campus while I was there. Toward the end of my degree program, there was a lot more emphasis on computer science because computers were then becoming more common, but when I started at Iowa State the computer science department was just being put together. I was really more into math than computer, and Iowa State was well known as a mathematics school at the time.

When I started to college, I didn't know exactly where I was headed and sometimes in that case, I like many others tend to wander. The result was I didn't have a very high grade point because I was more focused on having fun than on school. Then my wife Joyce came along, so after we were married, my grade point jumped a full grade point, because she brought some very much needed focus to my life. We eventually purchased a house in Nevada, Iowa.

I worked very hard at Iowa State, during which time I did some part time work with Norm Farrington, who had a small computer company called "Compass" in Ames. At the end of 1979, Norm came to me and said there was a company in Des Moines that was going to buy his company and he wanted me to come work for him full time. Pioneer Hi-Bred purchased the small computer company and in March, 1981, I became an employee of Pioneer. That was a major shift.

I tended not to move around on jobs. That wasn't the way I was raised. I practiced what I'd been taught — I worked at one job and I worked very hard. So I progressed quickly through Iowa State, and was a manager when I left. When Norm came and asked me to come to Pioneer, again I worked hard. One of the interesting points of my life and career, I have never gotten a position which I formally interviewed for. I have applied for jobs. I have interviewed for jobs. But obviously my work shows better for me than my interview skills.

I had an office in Ames for 1 1/2 years with Pioneer. I had left what was called permanent employment at Iowa State. Shortly after I joined Pioneer, they decided to close the Ames office and change what they were doing. That worried me because my role was changing at Pioneer but I decided to stay with them. That taught me to be careful not to burn the bridges in the job I was coming from because I might have to go back to it. That was a very important lesson, because I thought a lot about how I had left Iowa State. It was a big growing point for me.

At Pioneer I worked very hard. I became a technical manager in the computer area and by 1983, I had moved into the Research Computing Area of Pioneer. That is primarily where I have been ever since. When I joined Pioneer there were 43 people in the computer department. There are now 540, so in the 28 years I have been at Pioneer, there has been a lot of growth in Pioneer on the computer side. When I started with Pioneer, they were not an international company. In 1983, two years after I joined, they opened the first international location, which was in Canada, and shortly afterward they started to grow internationally both on the research and the sales side of the company. By the end of 1985 and into 1986, we really started doing a lot of computing outside the United States. This was an important shift as it started a lot of international work for me.

The first real international locations where we put computers were in Guadalajara, Mexico and in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. We did what we call off-season growing in those countries and we did a different kind of research in Puerto Vallarta. About every three months I would go down to Guadalajara, and work on their computer. In the process, I became very familiar with Mexico and it ended up being my favorite country.

I also helped put the first Pioneer computer in Canada in 1983. I remember this time I came back to the Pioneer offices in Johnston and sent them an e-mail message back to Canada asking how things were going. For some reason I stopped and thought about what I had done. At that point in time, about 24 years ago, people weren't using e-mail. Even though I am a computer person, it was amazing to me that I could send a message to someone in another country and they would almost immediately receive it.

I also witnessed another change since I worked at Iowa State. When I began with Pioneer, the internet was in its infancy. It was used more for research and not for commercial purposes or public use. Only about 15 years ago people didn't turn to the internet for normal use. Because we were a research company Pioneer was able to get on the internet through Iowa State. This was important because our web site is www.pioneer.com. We often are asked about buying big screen TVs and other Pioneer Electronics equipment, which isn't what we do. We sell seed corn. Pioneer Electronics has tried to get the www.pioneer.com website from us a couple times but we had it first.

In the process of putting computers around the world, after Mexico, the next location we expanded to was South America and Australia, where we did a lot of work. For some reason Australia was important even though they do not grow that much corn, so my first long trip outside the U.S. was to Australia. It was about a one-day trip there. I worked on the computer for two days at Kingaroy, the site of the research locations and then returned to the U.S. So I spent two days to Australia my first trip there, with about as much time in the air as I spent there on the ground. The two days were about 20 hour days, but I had a lot of time to sleep on the plane coming back. That was also a learning experience. After that when I went to a country I always made sure I had time to see the sights as you never know when you will return. Although I did return to Australia later, I didn't know that in advance.

I don't have a lot of details about when I went to Mexico because I did it quite often. It didn't require a visa at that time. Because of my passport, I have a pretty good record of going to countries that required visas. The first year I went to Australia was 1987. I also made my only trips to Thailand and Japan, and my first trip to Brazil. In Thailand, we flew to Bangkok and went to the research station, which is in northern Thailand. One of the things I have learned as I've traveled around the world is people are all pretty much the same. At the research station, which was out in the middle of nowhere, there was a bus stop and a Buddhist temple across the road. The friend I was traveling with and I walked around. When we came to the bus stop, two children came — a boy and girl about 8 years old. They had a stainless steel bowl of water. We didn't know what the water was for, whether we were to drink it or wash our hands in it, and I'm not sure to this day what it was for. However, by the time we left they knew our names and we knew theirs, because it is possible to get to some level of communication even though you don't know each others' language.

We always had somebody at the station who knew English who could talk with us. One time when we into a small town, we went to a nice restaurant by a river, and people were eating. All of a sudden some of the military came in and the fear on the faces of the Pioneer employees from Thailand was noticeable. It is a different look than we would know. In these other countries the military and government policies are much different than we have in the U.S. The Pioneer employees didn't say much until the military people left.

I tend to eat quite a bit, and at that time I drank alcohol. In foreign countries they often tried to establish their manhood or see how manly we were by how hot or how weird the food we could eat and how much we could drink. I always was quite well respected for that. I can remember the hot food we had at that lunch. They were amazed I could eat the spicy food they were accustomed to eating. We were in Thailand for three days. When we were going to the airport to leave we flew back to Bangkok and stayed overnight in a hotel. I remember making a phone call to Joyce from the hotel. When I went to check out, the phone bill was $90. I was quite worried about turning that in to Pioneer. Again, one of the lessons that taught me was, don't make phone calls from the hotel.

From Thailand we went to Japan. Japan is probably one of the more stressful countries I had been in. When my dad was in WWII, he was in Okinawa. As I drove around I thought of my father having been there in WWII. (His story is in the veterans' book Osceola Area Part III). I always felt they were thinking of that time when they saw me. They had no interest in speaking English. The Pioneer employees would speak English to us but when we went to a restaurant, they spoke mostly Japanese and we couldn't understand any of the Japanese language. An observation I made was they were very much more focused and intense than I we are in the United States. They farmed every inch of land. They had a lot of covered fields like greenhouses. I thought about how in the United States we are more passive and complacent about what we do and the things that are happening now with our economy and everything shows we've just lost focus.

An illustration of losing focus was when our company had to put one of our research employees on half time. As a result, he stayed home. He wouldn't go out because that would be an embarrassment to his family. They are so focused on working hard and working long, that if an employee doesn't work 10 hours a day, he was a bad person. This is what I mean — their work ethics are more focused than ours.

One of the things I remember about Japan was, we stayed at a nice American hotel, but if travelers weren't in an American hotel, they would not have toilets. They would basically have a hole in the floor. This was true even at the station, so I tried to make sure to pace my needs around being at the hotel. Another experience in Japan had to do with food. I had no trouble eating sushi or other raw sea food, but they had just started eating raw horse meat. One of the islands raised horses and made sure the meat was very tender. It was good but it was one of the weird meats.

The Japanese are very considerate, so I learned not to drink beer very fast because they kept filling the glass. Wise customers make sure to keep track of how much they are drinking because the glass is always full.

When we were ready to leave Japan, we missed our flight from one of the islands into the main airport and so, even though we hadn't planned on it, we had to catch the "bullet train". Getting to the bullet train was difficult, when people did not speak English and didn't want to, because when I pointed to a picture of the bullet train, they didn't tell how to get there. We finally reached it, but the bullet train doesn't wait. I remember putting my suitcase between the doors so they wouldn't close. We got on it and we got home, otherwise it would have been a two-day wait for the plane. The bullet train does go fast, but I saw the countryside, the tea plantations going up the side of the mountains, and the intense farming they did.

Japan was an interesting place. I don't care to go back but I do like the food so I go to a Japanese restaurant here in the United States whenever I have a chance.

Toward the end of 1987, I made my first trip into South America, the first to Santa Cruz, Brazil, the main location for Pioneer. Santa Cruz has somewhat of a Germanic heritage. The language in Brazil is Portugese but in Santa Cruz and several other locations, Getman is also spoken because following WWII, a lot of Nazi Gentians who wanted to get out of Germany went to Brazil.

Brazil is a large country; there are a lot of agricultural areas. Brazil, like many of the countries I went to reminded me of Iowa. The land is not that much different, and the people aren't that much different, although in most of the countries I went to, the people were poor. I noticed it especially in the children, at times in adults. I must admit that after two or three years I became kind of immune to that. I learned that even though they were poor and the children were poor, they were never sad. They were very family oriented and very caring. I probably felt sorrier for them than they felt sorry for themselves. The children always had smiles on their faces even if they didn't have food in their stomachs.

In Brazil, when we first went there, we flew into their main town, which was Sao Paulo, then to Santa Cruz, and we would also go to the research stations outside of the very large city of Santa Cruz. Our research stations weren't located in the main cities. The other research station I can remember was in Itumbiera. Itumbieria had red soil, which to me was very different. They also had a lot of large ant hills around there — five and six feet tall.

In a lot of these countries like in Thailand and in Brazil, tourists wouldn't want to drink the water, or even get the water into their system. There was always bottled water available to drink and I used it to brush my teeth. I wouldn't even let any of the water from the shower get in my mouth. So I never really got travel sickness like some people have. Itumbiera was not a large city with lots of hotels. At that time the only hotel they had that was worth staying in was a house of ill repute. So I did get a room, but one "without." The towns are small, out in the middle of the country. Our station at Itumbiera is about 30 miles outside the city, a 60 minute drive. One of the things I really enjoyed about that is, a lot of these stations have their own cook. So everybody came in and ate together at a big table. That was what we used to do on the farm when we had people working — making hay or something.

In Brazil we ate a lot of beans with meals. I enjoyed that kind of food. I love rice, and beans and rice cooked together, although hard to find, is something I enjoy eating to this day. Another custom I found interesting — in Brazil most of the local people do not drink coffee without sugar. I don't use sugar so they would bring me a special pot of coffee. I like it very strong, so they thought I was a very macho individual because I would drink the strong coffee without sugar. On that first trip to Brazil I was there for two weeks, traveling to various research stations. That was the first long stay in one place.

In 1988, we started doing a lot of computer work in various locations around the world. There was a lot of travel during that time. Early in the year I went back to Brazil and then also went to Argentina. I remember sitting in the hotel in Brazil looking at a newspaper. Although I couldn't understand the writing because it was in Portuguese, as I looked at it, I noticed it said something about Rio de Janeiro and air puerto and militants. So I called my wife, and as I had suspected, the militants had taken over the airport we were going to fly into the next week. I was a little bit concerned but I was young enough that I didn't worry about it that much. By the time we flew in, the government was back in and had taken over control of the airport. But we don't realize some of the things that happen in other countries.

While I was in Argentina, as is true in a lot of my travels, I remember the food. We went to one barbeque restaurant. Most of what we were having was beef, so I thought we were having the main course. Actually we were having the appetizers, and as we were eating, the cooks kept bringing out other cuts of meat. I asked, "Tell me what portions of the cow we are eating." They would point to their neck and other parts of their body. As it turned out, there wasn't much of the cow we weren't eating. Most of the appetizers were gland meats. So after all the preliminaries, we hadn't really gotten to the parts we would noniially eat. By the time they brought out the actual steaks I was already full but it was a reminder of how much we waste in the U.S. It was all good, although they can have the blood sausage. I always tried different foods in the different countries, but as far as it goes with blood sausage, "I'm not eating any more of that."

Following that trip, in March was the first real long trip. I had 28 different airline tickets. I have made three trips around the world and that was the first. This was going through Africa, Europe and Australia. The first stop was in Egypt. It was very interesting to me because they really didn't have good road conditions and they didn't drive the way people in the U.S. would drive. In some countries, I would drive, but not in Egypt. At night they didn't turn their lights on because they said, "It would not be courteous to the oncoming people." That was kind of exciting. We would be on a road for two cars and all of a sudden our driver would decide, "We'll make it three lane," so he would just kind of move in between the other two cars. They drove a lot of Mercedes and what we would call expensive cars. Most of them had been in some form of accident although I didn't see many accidents myself, which always amazed me. I believe a reason they keep the roads in such bad condition is so they can't drive fast enough for an accident to really kill anybody.

Our research station in Egypt was I think the first one we'd seen where everything was done by hand. They sent people out to hand-pick the crop and lay it out on the ground to dry. We would go to the Pioneer research station and the Pioneer Production Plant and here would be a nice U.S. type plant in the middle of nowhere and I always wondered what image the country people had of the United States and of Pioneer. Although the people who worked there were very happy about it.

I saw the pyramids of Egypt and the Sphinx. One story about the pyramids. We arrived there late in the evening, at dusk, and there were a few people from the United States and another person and I from the States. As we were looking at the pyramid, an Egyptian boy came along with a camel and wanted me to ride the camel. So he put some Egyptian garb on me so I was fully covered from head to foot and had me climb on the camel. He wanted to take my picture, so I gave him my camera. As I was sitting on the camel, he kept moving me around so "he could get a better picture," he said. I finally decided I'd had enough and wanted to get down and he told me I had to pay him $100. I eventually paid him $5 but as I stepped off the camel, I realized he was trying to get me over behind the sand dunes away from everybody else. It crossed my mind that he was planning to take all my money. I couldn't see any of the Pioneer people but he hadn't gotten me as far as he wanted to.

I found it very interesting for some reason as I was walking from the car over to the pyramids, a lot of other countries smoked a lot more than we did, here was a empty package of Camel cigarettes laying on the ground and for some reason Camel cigarettes next to the pyramids I found humorous.

Following the pyramids, we went back to Cairo. We saw the Sphinx and what I remember about the Sphinx is, it has deteriorated over the years because of the smog. It made me realize how fragile are a lot of the things that we know about, and how we much we neglect taking care of them. Cairo people were good. Other than the incident at the pyramids, I never really worried about my security. I felt if you treat people right, they will treat you right.

From Egypt we went to Zimbabwe. One of the things I realized in Zimbabwe, as opposed to South Africa, is whenever the British left Zimbabwe; they didn't help establish a formal government. They just picked up and left, so it was a country in chaos. It was under black control when we were there. This was one place where I was afraid. When you see children 15 or 16 carrying machine guns at the airport, you behave yourself. We did go out to the research station. It was small. A lot of what we did in Africa and some of those types of countries weren't really focused that much on growing corn to sell in that country. The research was often around other diseases because the disease in that country might sometime come to the U.S.

The other reason Pioneer was in Zimbabwe was that it was on our way to South Africa, where Pioneer wanted to go. At that time apartheid was in South Africa. We chose not to be in South Africa for that reason, but we needed to make sure we were well established once apartheid was done away with. When we left Zimbabwe, they wouldn't let us take any of their currency out of the country, so we had to leave it all at the airport. They gave travelers a receipt and they could pick up the currency when they came back. I never understood exactly why they wouldn't let their currency out of the country.

From Zimbabwe we went to Cote d'Ivoire, which is sometimes referred to as the Ivory Coast. That would be more on the northwest side of Africa. Cote d'Ivoire was under French control at one time. French was their language of choice. The city we flew into was on the ocean and we drove into the center where our research station was. The city was the capital.

Cote d'Ivoire used to have a lot of oil money so parts of it were very rich and parts of it weren't. As we drove from the airport into the main city — I forget how long the drive was, but it was long drive. At first it was a nice highway with phones along the highway for emergencies, and it was obvious when they ran out of oil money as it went to a two-lane, rough road. It was the difference of day and night. As we drove in, there was one spot where a water truck with bottled water had turned over right in the middle of the road. We were in the main city for one week and when we came back, the truck was still there. They had no way to move it.

In Cote d'Ivoire, the president of the country was building a religious structure that he wanted to be larger than the Vatican. The problem I had with this was the people were so poor they had nothing to eat, but the president was taking money from the country and building something in his own image.

The other thing I learned about Cote d'Ivoire was very sad. Often the parents would break the limbs of their children so they could beg better. That gives an idea of what happens in other countries that doesn't happen in the U.S. It was kind of common practice in Cote d'Ivoire. I don't know that I saw any non-black people there, but they were mostly French speaking. I could usually understand a little bit of what they were saying as I had some French in college.

From Cote d'Ivoire we flew through European airports and the Dubai airport down to Australia for my second trip there. That time I spent a week. We were pretty well computerized at that location, and we were adding some new software. Again, we would fly and then go into a smaller city. Kingaroy is the town where the research station was, and I remember it was the peanut capital for Australia. In Australia most of the words in English we would understand but sometimes the word they used had a different meaning from the definition we would use for it.

There was another researcher from the U.S. there with his wife. One of the employees had a new baby. The wife, the U.S. person, wanted to hold it, so they asked her if she wanted to "nurse" the baby which meant hold, as opposed to breast feeding as we would use it. So we had to be careful of the word because it didn't translate exactly the way we would. Another thing was that in Australia they drank quite a bit but the bars had separate rooms. There was a female portion of the bar and a part of the bar only the males could use. Women liberation had not hit Australia by that time.

This time when I was in Australia, I did see many kangaroos. They were like deer in Iowa. On the front of the vehicles they often had something they called a roo-bar. It was meant to protect the front of the vehicle in case they hit a kangaroo on the road.

In May and December of 1988, were the first times I traveled to Europe. Once travelers get to one country, it is easy to get to the other ones. France was our primary country, so the first time I went to France and to Austria. Pioneer was in both those countries. I didn't do a lot of sight-seeing because it was short trip. Toward the end of '88 I went back to France and did some sight-seeing on that trip with another individual. On my first trip, since I didn't do any sight­seeing, I didn't realize there are lots of castles in France. I had forgotten all of the old Robin Hood movies I had seen. It was very interesting to see the castles — huge, nice castles that are being restored, but the first trip there I didn't see any of them. On the first trip we drove straight to the research station, but the second time we went out into the countryside. I never prepared for the sight-seeing part of the trip. That was another thing I learned — to find out more about the country before I went there.

In the first half of 1989, we focused on South America, another trip to Argentina but from Argentina this time I also went to Venezuela. Pioneer has a group that makes animal inoculants. One of the products is called Probios. It is to be given to animals for shipping fever to keep their stomachs calm. We would sometimes take it with us to keep our stomachs calm, too. It wasn't exactly prescribed for humans but it worked very well. It used to be something that looked a lot like tooth paste. We put it on our finger and found it tastes a lot like clay but it did work well for indigestion. When I was going to Venezuela, they had changed how they made the product and it was a white powder that looked a lot like sugar.

We went into Venezuela and drove to the research station. We went back to the main city of Caracas to leave. We had to stay in Caracas for a couple of days until the plane left for the United States. I remember that I had an afternoon open so I went to the zoo, which I always liked to do. I had to pay to get in. I couldn't translate how much money it was going to cost. As I often did, I put a handful of coins on the counter, they took the money they needed, and they were always very honest people. I really don't know to this day how much it was but I know they did not take all of the coins.

Even though it is a Spanish speaking country, I could understand enough — I had Latin when I was in high school and a lot of the words translate. I spent about two hours at the zoo, and being around the people was always fun for me. When I was getting ready to leave Venezuela, my stomach started acting up and I decided to get the Probios out and took some of it. Then I realized how close I was to Columbia and I had this white powder in this little jar and I probably didn't want to take that through the airport. I do not know what drugs look like but I knew they might look like this. I didn't take it back with me, so my Probios may still be sitting at the hotel there.

Toward the end of 1989, I made my first trip to the Philippines. It was an interesting country. I didn't realize there are a lot more islands than we have in Hawaii but it is similar to that. We flew into Manila and stayed there. We had a research station close to Manila. But then we went to another island, General Santos City. There they would not let us go anywhere without an armed guard. The station where we stayed was a house that had barbed wire around it and a guard armed with a shot gun at the front gate. I like to go out and run in the morning. They would not let us out of eyesight because the terrorists would kidnap Americans. I was probably not as worried as I should have been.

One of the most interesting foods I have eaten was in the Philippines. It is called balut. I have seen it on "Fear Factor," and it is that kind of a food. We went into the middle of the city and at the end of a dark street, there were men sitting on five gallon buckets. In the bottom of the five gallon buckets in hot water was a duck egg that had been incubated for 18 days and then hard boiled. They bought six of them. We went back to the house where we were staying to eat the eggs. The manner is to first break the shell of the egg and drink the warm liquid around the inside of the egg. It would have been nice if the lights had been off, because we could see feathers on the duck, since the egg had been incubated for 18 days. The fellow I was with ate his very quickly which meant I had to eat mine. That was the weirdest food I have ever eaten. It is one of those things in your past that you want to forget that you did. But we had to do it to show we fit in with them, because to them it was a delicacy.

There were some other foods there. There was a fruit called Durian which had a real bad odor. It was a white fruit, very sweet, but we couldn't get by the odor. For some reason, while I was in the Philippines I also wanted to eat some insects. I asked them about it and they said, "Oh, no, that is in the north part. We do not eat insects here." So I wasn't in the right part of the Philippines to eat insects.

At the research station in the Philippines, there was sugar cane so we ate raw sugar cane. We had a plant breeder there who was breeding and growing orchids for sale in the regions of Japan. I asked why we were doing orchid breeding in Pioneer, and they said it was very cheap to hire PhD scientists in the Philippines. This one wanted to breed orchids, and we didn't want to miss the opportunity.

From General Santos City, we flew back into Manila. While at the hotel where we stayed, a typhoon went through. Again I wasn't worried but it did a lot of damage to the hotel where we were. I had never seen that much wind. We stood there and watched trees blown over. One week after I returned to the United States, terrorists were putting bombs on all four corners of the hotel where we had been staying. If I'd been one week later, I'd have been a terrorist attack.

From the Philippines, I made my last trip to Australia. By this time, the research station had moved to a new location, Toowoomba, which was closer to some tropical areas. I took a weekend to go into some of the tropical forests. I saw a lot of parrots and parakeets in the wild. One of the missed opportunities in Australia was on this last trip. One of the research station employees was taking his family for an outing. They were going fishing in the Great Barrier Reef and I'm a fisherman. They asked me if I wanted to go along. I didn't want to impose on their family outing, but as I have thought about it since, I believe they would have appreciated my going. I will never get that opportunity again, so I wish I had gone.

That trip in 1989, was the last major trip I took outside the U.S. for Pioneer until 2005. That year we started using software developers in India. We wanted to establish some development in India so I started traveling to India in 2005. That was my first trip for a long time. I was older and not as interested in taking risks. And I had forgotten what it was like to travel to third world countries. Perhaps India isn't third world, but Americans would be well advised not to drink the water there.

I flew to New Delhi, India with two coworkers from Pioneer. It was always nice to have somebody we knew meet us at the airport. I'm not sure how we would get through the airport any other way. It was just a mass of humanity. In India there were a lot of English speaking people because of their having been under the control of Britain for so long. It was not a problem to find somebody who could speak English, but whether or not they were telling you the truth was always questionable. So it was always nice to have somebody there to help you get through the airport and pick you up. We would normally stay in nice hotels especially in India which has Americanized hotels, although they had trouble with the electricity.

We arrived on Saturday so we could get accustomed to the time change. On Sunday we spent the day sight-seeing. That was when we saw the Taj Mahal. It is as beautiful as everyone says it is. Because of the terrorist activity around the world now, it is difficult to get in. They did let us take our cameras in but not cell phones or anything that could be used as a triggering device. I had no problem with their ruling. The Taj Mahal was beautiful until you think about how it was built. The people they forced to build it, and other people were starving while the people responsible were building it in their own image.

On this trip to India I noticed, when the British left control of India, how much they took out of India. Especially jewels. They still had a lot in the museums, but nothing compared to what had been, although I think they got a lot of that back. One of the things I learned while in meetings was that the individuals who were India based, working with Pioneer, felt they were working with a very unimportant activity. The caste system of India is alive and well, and agriculture is in the lower caste, so they felt they were working with the lower caste of people.

It made me realize it would be very important for me to present what Pioneer does in the science related to agriculture. When they understood we were a research company and very well established, it helped the status of our relationship with the software developers and the people we were working with in India. They are a bunch of very bright young people, well educated and wanting to work very hard to please us. That stayed in my mind; all we had to do was say "Thank you." It was important to me to take Pioneer hats to give to everybody working with us because I wanted them to realize they were working with Pioneer and were part of Pioneer. They would often send back pictures of everybody with their Pioneer hats on.

We tried to visit the location and talk to the people. They were all nice people, but there are so many! I think in three years India is to have more people than China, and India is about one third the size of China. So there are a lot of people. Their infrastructure is not keeping up, the roads are terrible. A lot of people complain about it but I say, "You go to Adventureland and pay money for a thrill ride. In India it's free." Going down the road is much like I mentioned about Egypt. Their roads look like they are made for two vehicles, and sometimes there were two vehicles, but sometimes there are two cars, a bicycle, a camel and a semi all on the same road.

Some facts about India I found very interesting — they do not have public restrooms, so very often you see people along the streets or along the roads doing what they need to do. People were outside the hotel in the parking lot doing their business because they have no other place. In India people don't waste anything, so they often use water instead of paper to finish their business.

In the countryside we saw a lot of what seemed to be haystacks. We finally realized they were taking the cowpies and stacking them up to dry for fuel. It seemed very weird at first, but in the United States a long time ago, the settlers were doing the same things with buffalo. Again, they would not waste anything. The other thing about India was the cows were sacred. So it was nothing to see Brahma cows wandering around in the middle of the city eating the garbage or whatever. I think another advantage of that was to slow the traffic.

The food there was similar to the food in the United States but spicier. The food in New Delhi, in the north central part, tends to be not quite as hot and spicy as southern India. Although there was generally American food for us, I always tried to eat the local foods. It isn't as much fun traveling with other people because they may not be as risk-taking, especially on the food. One person I was with did not eat much of the India food at all so we ended up eating quite often at Ruby Tuesdays and McDonalds. It just isn't McDonalds, though, since they didn't serve beef.

The other thing we saw in India was a lot of people living in what I call Menard tarp huts. I never saw so many tarps in my life. When there was construction of new highways, they brought in workers from the countryside. A lot of these workers build tarp homes to live in while they work on the road. Once they did that, the person owned the land the tent house was on so they wouldn't leave. We would see the little Menard huts with tarp over them, a TV antenna coming out of them, and a wire running to the nearest electrical post. They were pirating their electricity but it was a very common practice. Up along the posts would be this big ball of wire where everybody was connecting in from wherever they were.

I visited New Delhi again in 2007, then a trip to India in 2008. I traveled by myself on both these trips. In 2008, the trip to India was a direct flight from Chicago, a 15-hour flight to New Delhi, and then a two-hour flight to Hyderabad. In Hyderabad there was an area they call "Tech City." At Tech City we could see how the government has put a lot of money into establishing this location. Around the corner from Tech City with its wide roads and many nice big buildings, there were shanties. The government is trying to put a lot into technology to bring in money from outside countries and to establish work for all employees. As I think about Tech City, it would be a lot like California's Silicon Valley back ten years ago, when the people moved from one company to another to get better pay. Many of the people who work there, and all over India, drove motorcycles as much as cars.

Since I was by myself on this trip I decided I was going to eat Indian food every meal of the day and all I could eat. One of the things I learned is that after eating this way for about four days, it is not wise to change diets that much. I realized that food in southern India where Hyderabad is, was a little spicier — both hot spicy and a lot of different spices. So for the next three days I was about as sick as I have been for a long time.

I also did a lot of sight-seeing this time. They have put a lot of money into the temples and churches. There is one temple that is mostly hand made because they have a lot of people to do manual work. There were huge elephants carved out of single boulders of marble. Cameras were not allowed in this temple. It was just beautiful. South of Madrid, Iowa, there is a Hindu temple. I have been out to it so I knew a lot about the Hindu religion, the symbols, the gods, and what the various gods are for. It helped me as I went through the temples in India and I would better understand what I was looking at.

After Hinduism, Muslim is the second major religion in India. The Hindus and Moslems try to get along at the workplace, but there are differences and sometimes, not often, they have problems. I cannot tell which religion an India person is. They would normally know a person's religion by their names. They can also tell which caste the India person is in. The India caste system determines to which social level a person belongs. There are five different levels of the system: Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra, and Harijans. The Brahmans are the highest caste. Several years before I traveled to India, I had a young Indian work for me at Pioneer in Johnston. He taught me a lot about the India religion and customs. Even in the U.S. working for Pioneer, the individuals of India practiced the caste system. The higher up castes do most of the talking and they very rarely marry across castes.

I've always enjoyed the trips, I've always enjoyed the food but most of all I always enjoyed the people. I've come to know, when we spend a little time with them, people aren't that much different around the world. At times I have noticed differences between other countries and the U.S. but there were lots of resemblances, too. Especially visiting third world countries, there is much to make us proud of what we have in the U.S. Our infrastructure, our roads, our drinking water, our food, and everything we take for granted.. Until we visit other places, associate with other people, and see what they have, we don't realize how much we have.

So that is about all of the life and travels of Marv Hardisty; at least until 2009.

Return to main page for Recipes for Living 2009 by Fern Underwood

Last Revised November 29, 2014