Why is the most American fruit so hard to buy? | Hacker News Reader

Why is the most American fruit so hard to buy?

theatlantic.com

29 pointszeristor18 comments

It's like a banana (custardy) and is probably similar to figs in that they don't store long. Figs are double annoying as they have to be picked when ripe and then are only good for like a day. The ones at a grocery store are picked too early and thus nasty. Like a flavorless peach. Pawpaws also are supposedly carcinogenic and require 2 trees to fruit iirc.

If it's hard to buy, there's a reason such as: 1.) Not good to eat, 2.) Can't be grown economically due to slow growth or expensive inputs, 3.) Can't be stored for long, 4.) Superior substitutes exist (possibly mango or banana), 5.) Illegal nature...etc.

Edit:

After reading, it confirms the inability to store and need to pick on the tree (similar to figs). I have a feeling that the recently coveted nature of the pawpaw is just that people want to try it once and not a sustained need like apples. I didn't see any mentioning of them being carcinogenic though. Maybe I remembered that wrong? I do see that it has annonacin which is also pretty bad if consumed regularly (hard to do with pawpaw) and something that pregnant women should probably avoid.

Yeah, I saw that frequent consumption could lead to atypical Parkinson's and noped right out.

Figs work excellently as dried fruit, and afaik you can dry pretty much any fruit. So is that the simple solution here for pawpaws too?

Good point, but I think it's a no. You can't dry a mango right? I guess a better question is if you can just freeze pawpaw.

An interesting little semi off-topic point, but dried figs somehow taste very differently than fresh figs. This was a shock to me. Fresh figs are close to peaches in a way.

I like munching on dried mangos?

Where do you get that you can't dry mango?

There are multiple ways to dry mango and the end results are different. You can get any kind in a normal grocery or even in bulk at Costco.

Oh, easy one. I was just very wrong apparently lol.

Uh… we buy bags full of dried mangos from Costco all the time. You can definitely dry mangos.

You can indeed freeze the pulp, that's what one of bigger places that sells pawpaws does:

https://integrationacres.com

The product page also supplies an additional hint why the fruit hasn't been commercialized: cooking with it can sometimes make people sick.

Only slightly related, but "pawpaw" is often used in the Southern United States as a nickname for grandpa.

Reading this article was pretty surreal and funny with this in mind. Everyone rushing to buy and eat their pawpaws for their mango and banana like flavor.

I wonder if you could cultivate it on a larger scale, the demand is there. Or maybe they are more like truffles and need to be foraged.

Interesting article, now I have to try it. On a similar note, people take for granted the fact that tomatoes, potatoes, chocolate, vanilla, and blueberries all originated in the Americas.

Imagine ancient Rome without the tomato. Some things are so commonplace that we forget their origins.

And peppers!

Imagine Szechwan, Thailand, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, and Europe waiting millennia for peppers to reach their shores.

Likewise, peanuts to Indonesia and Africa.

Somehow sweet potatoes got from the Amazon to Polynesia centuries before Europeans did.

Wow, that completely changes my perception of history.

There are two competing theories on the initial population of the Americas. The first was a land bridge theory which suggests hunter-gatherers tracked mammoths across the once-frozen Bering Strait bridge of modern Russia/Alaska, but a newer and more popular theory is that Polynesian peoples arrived by boat navigation.

Apparently, sweet potatoes arrived in Polynesia around 1,200 and 1,300 AD, which gives a lot of credit to the idea that the first human inhabitants of the Americas arrived by boat from Polynesia.

Genetic evidence suggests people got to the Americas about the same time as to Australia. That would have been by boat along Japan, the Aleutians, and down the west coast, maybe 50,000 years ago.

Polynesians came along tens of thousands of years later, starting from Taiwan and spreading out to southeast Asia, the Pacific, and Madagascar. They would have sailed from Pacific islands to Peru or Chile, and picked up sweet potato there. (Surprisingly, not potatoes or peanuts, although they could have taken and then lost those.)

We have certain evidence of hominins in California 130,000 years ago -- H. erectus, Neanderthal, Sap., or "other" -- although no evidence they left descendants.

In looking for more info about pawpaws, I came across https://attra.ncat.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/pawpaw.pdf which I found informative and think others here might like:

"This publication is intended as an overview of pawpaw production, including overall culture, pests, harvest, postharvest handling, marketing, and research that seeks to advance the pawpaw’s potential for commercial development"

These grow in my backyard (mid Atlantic US). They’re delicious and I’d describe them as a mix of a banana and a pear both in texture and flavor.

They’re pretty easy to find once you recognize the smell of the overripe rotting paw paws that have fell onto the ground (think fermented fruit with a sour scent). You can even gently shake a smaller tree and take cover as a few tennis ball sized fruits hit the ground.

Another new world native fruit that I would like to see more widely available is the quenepa.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melicoccus_bijugatus

They are delicious, but have many of the same problems as pawpaws.

I didn't even know this "Most American" fruit existed until I ate one direct from a tree in Brazil. Also known as the Annona.

Wondering how many learned the song as "pickin'em up the pawpaws" instead of "pickin' up the pawpaws".

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