[[link removed]]

TOO FEW AMERICANS ARE EATING A REMARKABLE FRUIT  
[[link removed]]


 

Zoë Schlanger
March 28, 2024
The Atlantic
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Breadfruit is a staple in tropical places—and climate change is
pushing its range north. _

Breadfruit, Ashay vb, CC BY-SA 4.0

 

Someplace in the lush backroads of San Sebastián, in western Puerto
Rico, my friend Carina pulled the car over. At a crest in the road
stood a breadfruit tree, full of basketball-size, lime-green fruits,
knobbled and prehistoric, like a dinosaur egg covered in ostrich
leather. One had recently fallen. I jumped out to scoop it up,
thinking about the breadfruit tostones we would make that afternoon.
We’d fry chunks of the white, spongy flesh, then smash them with the
back of a cast-iron pan, then fry them again. In a wooden _pilón_,
Carina would pound garlic and oil with oregano brujo, a pungent weedy
plant in the mint family, and spoon the sauce over the frittered
discs. For me, little in this world is above a breadfruit tostón,
crisp and flaky on the outside, creamy on the inside. My mouth is
watering writing this paragraph.

In Puerto Rico, the word for breadfruit is _panapén_, almost always
shortened to _pana_, which is also the word for your close friend,
your crew, your people. Breadfruit trees feel like kin there: They are
everywhere, their huge lobed leaves splayed over roads and porches
like the hands of a benevolent giant.

Finding a roadside breadfruit tree is like spending a moment in Eden.
Our human effort is irrelevant; these trees, remarkable growers and
givers, will simply provide. A three-year-old tree can reach 20 feet
high. They start making fruit years faster than other tropical fruit
trees, such as mango, and can produce 400 pounds or more in a year
with little to no human intervention. That fruit is more calorie- and
calcium-dense
[[link removed]] than
a potato, to which its starchy flesh is often compared. It can be
steamed, roasted, or fried
[[link removed]], or dehydrated into a
useful flour. If allowed to ripen past its hard stage, a
breadfruit’s flesh softens into a sweet custard that can be a base
for desserts. As a grower in the Florida Keys, Patrick Garvey, put it
to me: “One tree feeds a family of four for a lifetime.” Or at
least 50 years
[[link removed].],
per researchers’ findings. And thanks to climate change, this fruit
may soon be coming to the southern United States in a major way for
the first time.

For as long as humans have been around to watch it, this species has
been confined to the tropical band hugging the middle of the planet.
Breadfruit trees like it hot and can’t stand cold—a couple of days
of 40-degree temperatures would kill one, Garvey said. They also love
the rain, the way it can only rain in the tropics, 60 to 120 inches a
year. But under climate change, its range is set to grow considerably.
There are signs that this is already happening: Up until recently, the
Florida Keys were the one place in the continental United States where
breadfruit readily grew and fruited. Yet according to research from
the Coastal Carolina University geographer Russell Fielding, the
University of Miami's Gifford Arboretum now has a fruiting tree, and
many of the 14 trees at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in
Miami have recently borne fruit, too.

Fielding and his co-author Jorge Julian Zaldivar surveyed
[[link removed]] 43
Florida-based breadfruit growers. Some had as few as one tree. Still,
each was a remarkable living symbol of a changing world. Although
climate change remains overwhelmingly a destructive phenomenon, they
note, the expanding range of the breadfruit is one small silver
lining. “There’s not really a climate that is too hot for
breadfruit,” he says. Normally, with climate trends, whenever you
gain a new range for a species, you also lose it elsewhere. “But
with breadfruit you’re gaining, not losing.”

Maps from a 2020 study show breadfruit dramatically expanding
[[link removed]] its
range through the southern U.S., if climate change is allowed to
proceed more or less unmitigated. Most scientists agree that the world
is no longer on the worst-case trajectory for warming, though, and
Fielding makes a more modest prediction for breadfruit’s immediate
future: a steady northward push through parts of Florida in his
lifetime. Florida does still get an occasional cold snap. “It kills
the oranges, it kills the strawberries, and it would probably kill the
breadfruit. But that puts it in line with other Florida crops,” he
says. Breadfruit might just be another commodity tossed about by freak
bad weather, at least until the cold spells vanish too.

One barrier to breadfruit becoming a staple crop in more of the U.S.
is how quickly it spoils. Breadfruit is best two to three days after
harvesting, before it begins to soften into its custard phase. But
researchers in Hawaii are testing
[[link removed]] various
varieties for their ability to withstand different environmental
conditions. It’s likely that fewer than 10 breadfruit varieties have
ever been tried in the mainland U.S., Fielding points out, despite
hundreds of them existing in the tropical islands of the Pacific. It
will take some research, but a breadfruit revolution in this country
is possible.

Originally spread east from New Guinea throughout the Pacific islands
by voyaging people, breadfruit has a place in Pacific diets, including
in Hawaii. It is also eaten across the Caribbean, where it was
transported by European colonists in the 1700s to feed enslaved people
working on those islands. Jamaicans eat it, Barbadians eat it, Puerto
Ricans eat it, and Dominicans export it. Experts tell me the Dominican
Republic is likely where the breadfruit that occasionally shows up in
the markets in my Carribean neighborhood in New York City comes from.
Breadfruit also grows in India, where it’s been introduced, and
tropical parts of the African continent.

Despite its popularity, breadfruit is still considered a dramatically
underutilized crop, says Julia Vieira da Cunha Ávila, a
tropical-crop-diversity scientist at the Breadfruit Institute in
Hawaii, which is dedicated to promoting the fruit and maintaining a
living portfolio of its many species. Organizations, including
the Trees that Feed Foundation [[link removed]], have
taken it upon themselves to support smallholder farms trying to make a
way for breadfruit. Still, for all its wonders, too few people are
eating it. Ávila is from Brazil, where the breadfruit also grows but
has yet to catch on with the general public. She likes to blend
overripe breadfruit into her acai bowls to give them a smooth texture.
“Normally you would use a banana,” she says, but a soft,
over-ripened breadfruit is perfect for the task. She also eats chunks
of steamed breadfruit with her breakfast, instead of a slice of bread.

Garvey, the Florida grower, owns and operates Grimal Grove, the first
and largest commercial breadfruit grove in the continental U.S. He
started growing the trees in earnest after Hurricane Irma in 2017 sent
brutalizing winds and three feet of salt water sloshing over his land.
Every fruit tree he’d planted was destroyed—except for his one
breadfruit tree. Its limbs were torn in the wind, but within 18
months, the young tree was sprouting new shoots. That resilience
struck him. This was a hardy tree, unafraid of a little salt water. In
a climate-addled South Florida, that was not just an asset but a
necessity. He now has 33 breadfruit trees in the ground and a couple
hundred more in pots.

I asked him what he thought about the new phenomenon of breadfruits
growing farther north in Florida. “I’d rather be the only
breadfruit grove in the continental United States ever, and not have
climate change,” he said. But he’s a breadfruit evangelist, and
more breadfruit enterprises mean more people who know about the
unusual fruit, which can only be to his benefit too. He sells fresh
breadfruit in the summer, and has partnered with a distillery to make
vodka out of overripe specimens. When breadfruit fall, he harvests
them to make pickled breadfruit spears. “It’s a little like a
pickled artichoke. We have a dill-and-garlic one and a spicy-jalepeño
one. People really love it. And the nice thing is we’re not wasting
it,” he says. He also makes a mean breadfruit-macadamia nut cake,
something he first tried to impress a love interest. “Didn’t get
the girl,” he told me. “But I got a great recipe.” I’m not
sure how it would stack up to those tostones, but I’d be willing to
give it a try.

_Zoë Schlanger
[[link removed]] is a staff writer
at The Atlantic._

_Subscribe to The Atlantic.
[[link removed]] Unlimited Access -- and a
free Tote when you start a Print & Digital or Premium subscription._

* food
[[link removed]]
* Climate Change
[[link removed]]
* tropics
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]