AT this time of year, kitchens across North America are filled with the aroma of freshly picked basil, fistfuls of peeled garlic bulbs, hunks of Parmesan, cruets of olive oil and jars of pine nuts. It’s pesto season.
Mixing these ingredients into a delicious sauce for use throughout the winter months is an end-of-summer tradition. The tiny, delectable pine nut is often viewed as essential to a classic pesto “alla Genovese,” but it is the most vexing ingredient — for the high cost of even a small packet or jar of them.
They also come at another kind of price: The pine nut industry may be contributing to the crash of an ecosystem.
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a majority of pine nuts imported into the United States come from the Korean pine tree, a keystone species found primarily in the southern parts of the Russian far east. The temperate rain forest of this wild corner of Russia represents a mere 1 percent of the country’s territory yet contains about a quarter of its endangered vertebrate species.
As a biologist, I’ve spent much of the last 20 years exploring the region’s forests searching for Blakiston’s fish owls, Amur (or Siberian) tigers and other species. In these diverse woodlands, the enormous pines, some over 100 feet tall, are rarely found as pure stands but are mixed with oak, birch, linden and other trees.
The importance of the Korean pine to this rich ecosystem cannot be overstated. Innumerable animals from chipmunks and Asiatic black bears to nutcrackers and crossbills all depend on the nuts produced by this tree to survive the long winter of the southern Russian far east. Wild boars crunch open the calorie-rich cones with their powerful jaws; red deer nibble at the fallen nuts. And shaded by the trees’ broad trunks, tigers stalk their prey.
The pine nut market in North America sources only about 20 percent of its supply from native species, primarily the pinyon pine of the American Southwest. While the pine nuts traditionally preferred for pesto were imported from Europe, harvested from the Italian stone pine, increases in global demand and skyrocketing prices have shifted the American market toward less expensive Asian varieties, of which the Korean pine is the most important.
The Korean pine nuts destined to be ground in the kitchens of North America are harvested, legally, from cones gathered by droves of collectors. Looking to make some cash, these pickers systematically rake the forest floor for every cone they can find.
An ever-expanding road network, driven by selective logging, is exposing more and more of the region to the covetous reach of pine nut harvesters. Once collected, the cones are shucked and the nuts, still in their shells, are sold to Chinese merchants, who haul truckloads across the border to China. From there, they are shipped to overseas markets.
Depending on the market price, local traders will pay about $6 for a sack of Korean pine cones, which can hold on average about 125 cones. Last year, I encountered a group of collectors in the forest that had filled 4,000 sacks — half a million cones — in just six weeks. At the peak of the harvest season, the forests are populated with thousands of collectors in hundreds of makeshift camps.
The global demand is making this harvest unsustainable. The entire Korean pine ecosystem could collapse if it continues. We are already seeing the cracks appearing: The shortage of pine nuts in the forests may have contributed to recent incidents of starving bears roaming the streets — and even attacking residents — in Luchegorsk, a Russian town near the Chinese border.
For those who feel that it’s the combination of roasted nuts and fresh basil that gives pesto its unique flavor and texture, walnuts, cashews, pistachios and even almonds are all palate-pleasing alternatives. Or if you must have pine nuts, then one option is to buy local.
Pinyon pine forests, although drastically reduced in area from what they were a century ago by logging for charcoal and the conversion of land to pasture, still cover nearly 60,000 square miles of the American Southwest. Pinyon pine nuts could account for more of our domestic pine nut consumption.
The other possibility is simply to leave the pine nuts out. Cookbooks and websites are rife with pine-nut-free recipes.