India's 'Cashew Capital' Loses Ground in Global Race [video] | Hacker News Reader

India's 'Cashew Capital' Loses Ground in Global Race [video]

wsj.com

30 pointsbruceb8 comments

One thing that few people seem to know about cashews: the "nut" is actually the seed of a fruit, the cashew apple, and it's delicious. Unfortunately it's extremely perishable and can only be found near places where cashews grow.

I grew up in northern Brazil and would get them from straight from the trees when the season came.

Here's what it looks like: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/64/Ca...

I sometimes wonder how much it'd cost to get a couple of fresh cashew fruits shipped by plane to San Francisco. It'd be willing to pay up to $100 for this treat - anyone knows if this is something easily done? Or would it be too complicated to get fresh and extremely perishable produce past customs?

You could get it sent frozen like fish?

In first grade I'd sneak out of school in Rio de Janeiro to buy a hot dog and "suco de cajú" (watered-down and sweetened cashew-fruit juice), my favorite drink. This lasted a few weeks till the nuns busted me, and I'd had no concept of the rule "you can't leave campus" ... they had to explain it to me, to my loss.

I've never seen cashew fruit here in the U.S., I'd love to have some. I just need to wait till the U.S. health-nutrition-fitness industry gets hold of it. We've already seen peak-quinoa, peak-coconut, peak-avocado-toast. I'm sure cashew fruit will see its day in the U.S.

Goa, a state in India has a popular liquor called Feni which is made from the cashew apple https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feni_(liquor). This is a good way to make use of an otherwise perishable fruit.

All nuts are seeds of fruit. Just not fruit you would want to eat. Check out a walnut, almond or pistachio tree sometime when the fruit is growing. It is pretty cool. A few millimeters of fruit growing around a big nut.

I live in Vietnam and run a craft brewery that makes a cream ale with cashew nuts added. (Lac Brewing Company - Cashew Cream Ale).

India imports a huge quantity of unprocessed cashew from west Africa, whereas Vietnam grows the majority of theirs domestically (or that was the case years ago when I was in the game). The video lays the blame (if briefly) on politics but there are plenty of other factors that could be causing this.

Not sure if you are from Kerala, but we can’t deny there is a an equal not major blame in politics that slows down or completely stop industries from adopting automation. Living in Kerala for 22 years of my life it is easier to see that politicians find it easy to create a spectacle by scapegoating industries. Kerala fared well in terms of development, but we are highly dependent on foreign remittance which is heavily concentrated from Middle East. To curb the high unemployment rate (7.4 percent) there needs a new wave of industrialisation in the state.

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