Miles-tall thunderheads build above the
length of coastline. For now, the air is heavy and thick and scented
by floral productions and botanical decay. In a forest clearing, a
party of the region's inhabitants, wearing little clothing, are
roasting meat outside of an open shelter. Across the clearing, their
view of the forest greenery is dulled by the hazy air. A stream flows
out from those dark woods. The people could follow that stream to
find a stand of small trees growing on the steep bank. Having
already shed their alien flowers, the trees are harnessing tropical
energies, encapsulating them in thin green skins. When the fruits
ripen, the people could return to find them - four inches oblong,
singly or in clusters- among the tree's large, drooped leaves. Eating
the sweet, custard flesh, and discarding the large lacquered seeds would complete the life cycle of this tree. And the satisfied
people would be glad to have found the fruit.
- - - - - - - - - -
“...although credited...as edible
and wholesome, one must be either very young or very hungry really to
enjoy its flavor”.
That was how Clevelander Harriet Keeler
described the food-worthiness of the fruit of Asimina triloba
in her popular guide Our Native
Trees, And How to Identify Them. A native New Yorker, Ms.
Keeler settled in Cleveland following her graduation from Oberlin
College in 1870. An educator in the area's school districts, she also
published a number of popular field guides. Our Native Trees
was published in 1900; I bought a facsimile reproduction in 2011.
Asimina triloba is colloquially
known by several names, most often used is the name “pawpaw” or
“papaw” - the latter is Ms. Keeler preferred spelling – and, of
the hundreds of species covered, this was the first entry I turned to
in the guide. I found her description of its fruit surprising and a
little disconcerting. I very much enjoy the fruit as a middle aged
man, even on a full stomach. And since returning to the area and
buying 7 acres in Geauga county, I have been establishing an orchard
of grafted, named varieties hoping one day to peddle them at some
area farmer's market.
But pawpaws are not really known by any
name at all. They are a “forgotten fruit.” Once widely eaten in
the eastern U.S., it has been nearly deleted from the American
psyche.
I had nevertheless assumed that a
sizable clientele of pawpaw eaters would spring into existence once
people had sampled my offerings. Was I mistaken? Could it be that the
reason pawpaws are forgotten is because they're unpalatable to most
everyone but me?
In its described distribution, Ms.
Keeler highlights pawpaw's abundance in her neck of the woods,“...
on the southern shore of Lake Erie.” True enough, the tree is
fairly common throughout much of the deciduous forests of the eastern
United States. Grab a U.S. map and the compass you used in high
school geometry. Stick the compass point in the middle of Kentucky
and stretch the pencil to Ann Arbor. The circle you draw includes
most of pawpaw's range, with some spill over to the east and
west-southwest. Within that circle pawpaw's distribution is
predictable yet spotty, mostly occurring along rivers and streams as
stands of clones, the result of a trees tendency to sprout new stems
from its spreading root system.
Despite its present obscurity in the
U.S., pawpaw enthusiasts – mainly foragers, rare fruit growers and
breeders, nursery managers and botanists – like to point out the
quintessential “Americanness” of the fruit. Along with its nearly
exclusive United States range (a few stands occur in southern
Ontario), pawpaw appreciation has been recorded by Native Americans,
New World explorers, early settlers, Founding Fathers and several
presidents.
Although I've never read testimony of
it, Johnny Appleseed would surely have encountered pawpaw as he
pushed into America's 19th century frontier – at that
time Ohio was the wild west. His role in settling America was the
establishment of apple orchards; Planted orchards supported claims of
land ownership, and apples were a most important source of
inebriating drink.
I have an allegorical image of Johnny
Appleseed, somewhere in southeastern Ohio, stepping out of the direct
sun of a young apple orchard to take a break from the hard work and
the heat of an early Indian summer near a little stream. There he
finds a stand of pawpaw trees with pounds of ripe fruit, so he picks
and enjoys the sweet creamy flesh, as cool as the forest shade under
which he rests. Rejuvenated, he returns to his work: planting rows of
fruit trees native to Kazakhstan, his efforts helping to supplant the
importance of the very fruit sustaining his work.
Today not much is as American as apple
pie. To a people largely of old world origins,
so is their most American of fruits.
But can pawpaw's obscurity be
attributed to domestic cultivation of exotic fruits like the apple or
peach, pear or apricot? Seems unlikely, as nothing else grown in the
country's temperate regions can take the gastronomic place of pawpaw.
Asimina triloba is one of the
very few members of the botanical family Annonaceae that can tolerate
freezing temperatures. Tropical people enjoy fruits produced from
many other members of the so-called “custard apple” family, but
pawpaw is decidedly temperate - the seeds require a cold period in
order to germinate. Where it occurs, pawpaw is often locally referred
to as the state “banana”, as in “Ohio banana.” This tendency
reflects the tropical characteristics of the fruit. The flesh is the
color and consistency of pureed banana and is aptly eaten with a
spoon, like an avocado.
The flavor is often described as some cross of banana, pineapple,
papaya and mango.
Given the tropical ancestry of the
pawpaw, it makes sense that those attempting to describe the fruit
would naturally turn to the produce of the tropics for comparative
reference. But that tendency is
only reasonable because these once exotic fruits are now so widely
available. It's a testament to the global food market: people
living a few miles from a productive wild stand have never heard of a
pawpaw and wouldn't know what to do with one in hand. On the
contrary, these same people can deftly remove the thick yellow peel
of a tropical Asian fruit while driving to work. They can prepare a
hot, stimulating beverage by grinding and steeping the roasted seed
of an Ethiopian shrub. They can determine the ripeness of a
football-sized fruit from Brazil by tugging on its green crown and
smelling its scaly skin.
Fruits cultivated in and shipped from
the tropics are routine, while a local native fruit with tropical
ancestry is a mystery.
The shift toward globalized food
choices accompanied increased alienation of people from local food
sources. Of course this includes the dissolution of the once
ubiquitous family farm. In considering pawpaw's anonymity, more
important is the abandonment of foraged food. For most people today,
foraged fruit might be an occasional opportunistic snack but not a
legitimate, even important, source of nutrition.
Consider the folk song Way Down
Yonder in the Pawpaw Patch – a musical piece of Americana
dating back to at least the early 20th century:
Where is sweet little (or dear
little) Nelly (or name of other child singing song)?
Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch
Come on kids, let's go find her
Pickin' up pawpaws, put 'em in your
pockets.
Assuming folk song lyrics make sense in
the realities in which they were written and originally sung, the
pawpaw was once a local commodity gathered from stands that everyone
knew the location of. The fruit was brought home, often in the hands
(or pockets!) of children, exercising a real and active role in their
family's food economy – they worked on the family farm and they
also gathered wild foods. Extra foraged foods were shared or traded
with neighbors and sold at farm stands or local market-places along
side produce grown on the farm.
We know this not from a song; Along
with pawpaw, many other once-foraged foods now gather in the basket
of rural America's recorded history. Chestnuts, mayhaws,
elderberries, persimmons, hickory nuts, wild plums – the list is an
ethnobotanist's dissertation. Some of America's wild-gathered plant
foods went global – wild rice and blueberries come readily to mind
- but many others did not.
In thinking about why some foraged
foods, like pawpaw, are no longer eaten I am tempted by a background
in ecology, at least for metaphors. One irresistible concept from
this branch of biology is “optimal foraging,” which tries to
explain the behavior of consumers. Simply put, evolution should favor
consumers whose food choices give them the most energy gain for the
least energy cost. Arguably, it's the reason we throw unopened
pistachios back into the bag – the small nut isn't really worth
struggling to open when I can just grab another whose shell is
already parted. The concept operates in similar form in the other
branch of inquiry beginning with the prefix “eco” (from the Greek
oikos for “home”), economics, which is perhaps more apt
here since human consumers are concerned with saving money as well as
gaining energy. Keep in mind the adage from business: Time is money.
For the forager, time is energy – energy spent rooting around for
food. For those of us with a choice to forage for free food or go
shop for it, the logical conclusion that money and energy
are interchangeable is relevant.
Can I convincingly use these ideas to
argue an hypothesis that pawpaws are forgotten for a reason other
than a disagreeable taste? Let's see. I need scape goats. I blame
demographic changes of the U.S. population beginning at the close of
the 19th century. And I blame the banana.
If I had to pick one fruit, available
in the United States, that satisfies the same gustatory cravings as
the pawpaw it would be the banana. According to Dan Koeppel, author
of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit
That Changed the World, bananas only became widely
available in the United States around 1890, when sea captain Lorenzo
Dow Baker made a bundle of cash selling 160 bunches he purchased on a
dock in Jamaica, just before returning to New Jersey. Imagine paying
$2.00 for a single banana today - that's equivalent to the 10 cents
paid by the first American consumers of the fruit. The willingness to
pay such extravagant prices compelled Baker to keep them coming.
Production in Latin America was expanded and preservation and
transportation techniques, by boat and rail, improved. Availability
increased. Prices decreased. By 1910 the banana was the most popular
fruit in the country.
These developments coincided with
demographic changes that favored banana consumption and pawpaw
forgetting. The U.S. population was becoming urban. The 1920 census
was the first to record a majority of Americans living in towns and
cities. This was most pronounced east of the Mississippi River in
pawpaw country. People living in urban areas along transportation
routes would have had easier access to bananas, and the demographic
shift represented a widening geographic and mental divide between
people and pawpaw patches. This divide widened further with the
expansion of suburbs and large-scale agriculture in the following
decades. By the middle of the 20th century our parents or
grandparents were forgetting the pawpaw.
Today
around 80% of Americans are urban and they shop at grocery stores. A
foraging expedition to get pawpaws might be a fun excursion. But the
money saved in retrieving free pawpaws is trumped by the time and
energy expended to arrive at a patch. Bananas cost little money and
running to the store costs little time. Foraging for bananas at the
store is optimal.
Of course, I have to account for
pawpaw's absence from the grocer's shelves. The stingy values of the
global market favor some key characteristics of banana over pawpaw.
First, bananas are
freaks of nature, producing fruit with no seeds. Their waste
of energy is our benefit, as it means the entire volume of fruit
within the skin is ours to eat. Pawpaws have numerous large seeds (a
seedless pawpaw is the holy grail), and they only produce this fruit
when their flowers are pollinated by a genetically-different
individual. This can be tricky. Pawpaws flower in early spring,
relying on several species of flies to transfer pollen. These flies
are out foraging for carcasses freed from the melting snow. Pawpaw
flowers are maroon – the color of rotting flesh – and have a
yeasty, mildly-malodorous smell. Nevertheless, their pollinators are
not particularly efficient; Pawpaw growers have been known to
relocated road kill into their orchards to make them
more…um...attractive.
Both bananas and pawpaws reproduce by
cloning and this certainly favors banana growers. As soon as a banana
plant produces a bunch of bananas, the mother stalk dies. Sprouting
from an underground stem, a new plant grows up to take it's place,
producing another bunch of bananas within a year. Pawpaws form clumps
of continuously-spreading clones, hindering out-crossing as
pollinators spend time among the flowers of one clone. In order to
get a harvest, pawpaw orchard-keepers must control sprouting and
plant different varieties near each other to insure exchange of
pollen between dissimilar individuals. And a new pawpaw tree can take
nearly a decade before it starts fruiting.
Finally, bananas, with their thick
skins and our ability to control their ripening, arrive in stores
looking pretty and almost ready to eat. And the relative homogeneity
of tropical climates means year-round banana production is possible.
Thin-skinned pawpaws are produced for about a month. Have you ever
gone 11 months without buying a banana? Banana sellers hope your
answer is “no.”
But the competitive advantages could be
shifting. Banana plants are being decimated by an as-yet
uncontrollable fungal disease in a banana pandemic. Meanwhile, a
small but dedicated group of people are working to bring the pawpaw
out of the patch and into the mainstream.
I found myself wrestling with the
future of pawpaw in Frankfort, Kentucky in September of 2011. I was
one of a couple hundred attendees of the 3rd International
Pawpaw Conference hosted by Kentucky State University and the
director of its world-renowned pawpaw improvement program, Dr. Kirk
Pomper. Attendees included all manner of folks from across the
country and abroad, including the man who rediscovered the pawpaw for
a nation of amnesiacs – Neal Peterson. His is a mythical story
among pawpaw enthusiasts. With his first taste of a pawpaw in 1975,
while a student of genetics in West Virginia, a life-long passion was
born in an instant. His research uncovered James A. Little's pawpaw
breeding program in 1905 and a 1916 contest sponsored by the Journal
of Heredity to find the nation's highest quality pawpaw fruit.
Despite pawpaw's absence from grocery stores, there were named
varieties out there, and Neal traveled to find them and grow them
himself. We were all at this conference thanks to the success of Neal
Peterson.
But the conference was about the future
of pawpaw, and many of the talks illuminated pathways to a planet of
consumers. Naively, I had been thinking of pawpaw as a good addition
to the slow food movement, a new component of diverse agroecosystems
in the eastern U.S., an expanded diet breadth for locavores. But for
some of pawpaw's admirers and growers, the world is their pawpaw
patch.
Despite Ms. Keeler's apparent distaste
for the pawpaws she tried, I'm confident they will be rediscovered
and enjoyed again. For me the question is not if, or even when –
it's how? Will we pull flash-frozen pawpaw pulp-in-a-plastic bag from
our grocer's freezers? Will we drink it as a nutraceutical
ingredient, in a beverage we may not even like, for some alleged
marketed health benefit? Will we pick some up in April as a fresh
fruit, shipped in from an Argentinian grower? Will we enjoy it for
the month or so that our local farmers can supply it?
Just as our forgetting pawpaw
demonstrated our values, so will our rediscovery of it.
Who knows, maybe after reading this you
will spend the time and effort to follow a wooded stream in search of
your own little pawpaw patch? By late September their fruits are out
there for you to find.
A final celebration of our
tropical summer.
