> Its disagreeable taste and odor are due to bitter flavonoid constituents, including karanjin, pongamol, tannin, and karanjachromene.[11] These compounds induce nausea and vomiting if ingested in its natural form
Wikipedia on the beans it produces.
Those, of course, you just cook in order to make them delicious. With these, this Terviva firm seems to have developed and patented a treatment process involving a solvent-based extraction under sonication. I’m only skimming a patent from a field that’s not my own, but it looks like they’re able to do it by mashing it up and washing it with either a methylated ketone like acetone (00120) or ethanol (00141) [0].
Apparently the wash works just as well for the protein-rich seedcake as it does for the oil you express [1].
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3...
A lot of times the issue is just logistics. Many of these are tropical and don't fruit at a predictable, narrow time of the year. Making it hard to time when you hire a bunch of labor and do your harvest.
Then ofc there's always the marketing problem of convincing people to use this new plant
I ordered some flour and put it in bread and other things. It’s a sweet flour that tastes like a very interesting chocolate.
It’s just hard to harvest, and to mill, and not a lot of people are willing to eat different things.
But the tree thrives on less then 8 inches of rain a year.
It's also got some of the deepest roots of any plant ever and can spread rhizomatically. It was introduced into the old world to hopefully fight desertification but has ended up being one of the worst invasive plants ever introduced. You'd basically need an excavator to get rid of one once established
70 years and there still isn't any particularly viable way to deal with this slow moving ecological apocalypse known as Kudzu.
These compounds induce nausea and vomiting if ingested in its natural form