Monday, July 9, 2012

Where Oh Where is Sweet Little Pawpaw?


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.

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...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.

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