Florida oranges, Georgia peaches, and motherf****** dancing California raisins.
Even though all these fruits are really popular, none of them are actually native to the United
States.
There’s actually one fruit that’s far more American than any of those, but there’s
a good chance that you’ve never even heard of it before.
It’s called the pawpaw.
This is Maeve Turner.
She’s the herb garden curator at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and we talked pawpaws.
They are native to a large portion of the United States, but they have this really tropical
look.
And they’re part of a plant family, Annonaceae, that is mostly tropical, so they’re one
of the only — they are in fact the only genus in the family that grows this far north.
They naturally grow along what’s called the “pawpaw belt” that includes 26 states,
mostly in the eastern half of the US.
You can find them growing along the banks of rivers and in forests.
And if you look up there, those are pawpaw trees.
And the twigs and bark on the trees contain a natural insecticide, so they’re also really
easy to grow organically.
They’re also the largest edible fruit native to North America, which makes you wonder:
What do these bad boys taste like?
It’s sort of like a nutty fruit.
It tastes tropical.
Oh, it’s not bad.
It’s very mushy.
Oh, I don’t like this.
It’s bitter.
It’s not that good.
I wish I hadn’t eaten it.
They’re kind of a mess to eat, and the flesh sticks to the seeds a lot.
Maybe you’ve heard them called by of one of the many nicknames they’ve had over the
years: Indiana banana, fetid-bush, or bandango.
No?
All right, whatever, dude.
There’s fossil records of pawpaws being in North America as long as 56 million years
ago.
And there’s evidence from Native American tribes showing that they were really prized
in their ... using them for fruit and also using the seeds medicinally, and even the
bark from the trees they would use for rope or string.
In May of 1541, the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto and his North American expedition
reached the Mississippi River and documented Native Americans growing what some believe
to be the first written record of the pawpaw.
He wrote: “There is everywhere in the country a fruit, the produce of a plant like ligoacam,
that is propagated by the Indians, having the appearance of the royal pear, with an
agreeable smell and taste.”
They’re often confused with the papaya, which, while sort of similar-looking, are
actually totally different species.
A papaya is a truly tropical fruit; it doesn’t grow this far north.
They’re also a lot bigger, and they have a much brighter orange inner flesh.
And you know that Australian pawpaw ointment you’ve been using?
It’s actually made using the papaya species.
Sorry, mate.
The pawpaw has a unique place in American history.
The Jamestown settlement was carved out of what was likely a pawpaw patch.
This is Andrew Moore.
He wrote an entire book about the pawpaw fruit.
The Founding Fathers of the US would’ve been familiar with the fruit.
George Washington had them planted at his estate in Mount Vernon.
Thomas Jefferson knew the fruit and had them planted at Monticello.
Jefferson loved them so much that he even sent pawpaw seeds to his friends in France,
which I do every Christmas and have yet to receive a single thank-you card.
John James Audubon even included pawpaws in his painting of a yellow-billed cuckoo in
his book Birds of America.
You’ll find towns named after the pawpaw in Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, West Virginia,
and Indiana.
And there’s even a pawpaw festival every year in Ohio, which can get pretty f******
crazy.
There are entire towns named after the pawpaw, so why are you probably not going to be seeing
them sold in your grocery store anytime soon?
Sheri Crabtree works at the Kentucky State University pawpaw program.
A lot of the wild pawpaws are gone due to development.
They’re native to kind of understory of forests, and so a lot of them don’t exist
anymore because land has been cleared for development, to build houses and cities and
commercial developments.
The United States lost almost 950,000 acres of forested land each year between 1990 and
2010, with the eastern portion of the US where the pawpaws grow being disproportionately
affected.
I think people used to just be much more in tune with nature.
People would go out and grow their own foods and look for foods in the woods, versus now
people want to mostly just go to the grocery store and buy their food.
Which is another part of the problem, because pawpaws don’t fit well within large-scale
industrial agriculture.
The fruit ripens really fast, so once it is ripe enough to either be picked or fall off
the tree, it’s almost too ripe within, like, three to five days.
Which makes it incredibly difficult to sell on a mass scale.
Contrast that with something like apples, which through a process called controlled
atmosphere storage can be kept fresh for months at a time, making them easy to store and ship
anywhere.
In fact, most apples that you buy at the store were probably picked over a year ago.
Pawpaws, on the other hand, are inherently finicky.
They bruise easily, have a short shelf life, and don’t ripen at a predictable or uniform
rate.
So even though they’re delicious, nutritious, and native to the US, you’ll pretty much
only be able to find them at farmers markets.
Pawpaws thrived in a simpler time, when people would go out into the forest and pick their
own fruit.
But as things changed and industrial agriculture took over, the pawpaw didn’t really have
a place in this new mass-produced modern world.
But there’s almost something kind of nice about it in a way.
They very well maybe destined to be a niche or a specialty fruit.
And, again, that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
You know, the pawpaw doesn’t have to rule the market to be something that people enjoy.
There’s a certain satisfaction in the journey that it takes to acquire a pawpaw.
It’s not an easy fix like an apple or a banana, where you can just go on Amazon Fresh
and have them delivered to you in an hour.
You have to almost earn the pawpaw, in a way.
So maybe they’ll never be as popular as other mass-produced fruit.
And maybe that’s okay.
Not everything needs to be an apple, and that can be fine.
The pawpaw doesn’t have to be something it’s not.
It can just be the pawpaw, something that people have enjoyed for centuries and, you
know, hopefully may continue to enjoy.