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OCTOBER 4, 2022SHARE<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By the time I arrived at Brooklyn\u2019s Park Slope farmers\u2019 market in search of a pawpaw one morning last week, it was already too late: The weird green fruit had sold out within an hour. \u201cYou have to get here early,\u201d Jeff Rowe of Orchard Hill Organics, the market\u2019s lone pawpaw vendor, told me. The day before, I had struck out in Manhattan\u2019s expansive Union Square Greenmarket, where a seller told me pawpaws were extremely rare. The most upscale grocery stores\u2014the kind that sell black garlic and cotton-candy grapes\u2014also had none to offer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I yearned to taste the enigmatic fruit that so many people seem to be talking about lately. Food writers marvel at how \u201cmagical\u201d<\/a> it is. Bartenders mix rum-and-pawpaw cocktails<\/a>. At pawpaw festivals<\/a> across the country, chefs whip up dishes such as pawpaw chicken wraps and pawpaw curry puffs. The pawpaw is having a moment, perhaps because it is a mass of contradictions: Its custardy flesh, ranging in color from butter yellow to sunset orange, tastes like a mix of banana, mango, and pineapple (or so I\u2019d heard). But unlike those fruits, pawpaws are not native to the tropics; instead, the fruit grows across the Eastern United States and up into Canada. Pawpaw trees thrive along creeks and rivers, and there\u2019s a good chance you\u2019ve passed one without even knowing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But even though the prized fruit grows quite literally in America\u2019s backyard, it\u2019s not easy to try a pawpaw for yourself. During the short window between August and early October when pawpaws are in season, foragers hunt down pawpaw patches and a few farmers\u2019 markets put them up for sale. But because of the challenges in growing and shipping the fruit, they\u2019re just about impossible to find in supermarkets. Miraculously, a friend who was part of a food co-op tracked three down. They were the size of dinner rolls, with smooth, green skin that had already begun to brown and collapse beneath our fingers from over-ripeness. They resembled ugly mangoes, or maybe Baby Yoda. I swaddled one in a puffer vest and guarded it with my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The pawpaw\u2019s sheer elusiveness has relegated the fruit to niche status at best, even in spite of the interest in it. But its conspicuous absence from grocery stores feels a bit strange compared with our standards: Americans have come to expect even highly seasonal produce, even in the dead of winter, in part because a mind-bending amount of science and technology goes into making that happen. Indeed, American agriculture has a strong track record of making once-obscure plants go mainstream. Avocados, a little-known California crop for most of the 20th century, are ubiquitous in stores<\/a> and on slices of toast. Kale, once used to garnish Pizza Hut salad bars<\/a>, became a grocery staple in the early aughts following its unlikely rise among the fashion elite<\/a>. Someday, will we all be eating pawpaws?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pawpaws just might be the most quintessentially American fruit. Unlike apples<\/a> or cherries<\/a>, they are native to this continent. Pawpaw groves, long fostered by some Native American tribes<\/a>, sustained hungry members of the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1806<\/a> and supplemented the meager diets of enslaved Africans<\/a>. At least six states have towns named after the pawpaw. But starting in the 1900s, the fruit faded from view as industrial farming took over. Its homely looks may also be to blame: A 1912 New York Times<\/em> article<\/a> claimed that a woman could not eat a pawpaw in front of her lover because \u201cthe sight is disgusting to the point of utter disillusion.\u201d In rural communities, some people continued foraging for pawpaws, leading to the nicknames \u201chillbilly banana\u201d and \u201cpoor man\u2019s banana.\u201d But in recent years, as Americans have started to embrace local food and foraging<\/a> has become a movement itself, the pawpaw has boomed. Today, wild pawpaws cannot seem to sustain the demand for the fruit: Rowe, the farmers\u2019-market vendor, said he\u2019s constantly selling out of pawpaws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The biggest problem stopping the pawpaw from going big is the fruit itself. The apple from your grocery store might have been picked up to a year ago<\/a>, but the pawpaw resists attempts to be eaten in anything but its freshest state. Once plucked, it must be consumed within three to five days<\/a>, if stored at room temperature. Dallying inevitably results in a wet, brown mass of mush, a transformation hastened by the tenderness of the fruit\u2019s skin. Such fragility stands little chance against a truck ride across the country or the rigors of a Whole Foods produce display. \u201cYou have to get it and eat it or do something with it, otherwise it\u2019s gone,\u201d Chris Chmiel, the owner of Integration Acres in Ohio, one of the world\u2019s biggest pawpaw processors, told me. \u201cIt\u2019s effervescent.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are other problems too. Most pawpaws stay green throughout their life cycle, which means growers must gently caress each one to gauge its softness and willingness to release from the branch\u2014no small task when each fruit on a tree matures at different times. Many commercially grown fruits, including apples, grapes, and strawberries<\/a>, are affordable because they are handpicked in sprawling fields by low-wage workers at a breakneck pace. Because the pawpaws you can buy at farmers\u2019 markets are usually foraged or hand-harvested in small orchards, then packed and transported quickly, they come with a pretty hefty cost: Prices generally range from $3 to $8 a pound<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But wilder, fussier fruits have been tamed before. A century ago, the only way to get blueberries was to forage for them in the woods. \u201cPeople tried really hard to grow them out from seed, but it\u2019s super hard,\u201d Anya Osatuke, a Cornell University fruit-production specialist who works with pawpaw growers in New York, told me. In 1916, agriculturalists ranked pawpaws over blueberries<\/a> as the American fruit most likely to succeed. Eventually, farmers discovered that blueberries thrived when they dug entire bushes out from the forest and planted them in full sun. Decades of selective breeding for better berries ensued, together with the development of ultraefficient packing methods and mechanical harvesters. Now blueberries are the second-most-produced berry<\/a> in the United States after strawberries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To actually get pawpaws into grocery stores, the fruit will need to go through similarly dedicated breeding efforts. To a certain degree, that is<\/em> happening. At Kentucky State University, researchers at the world\u2019s only full-time pawpaw-research program have worked since the 1990s to develop a better, more commercially viable fruit: one that is firm and tasty, with thick skin that changes color when ripe. So far, the program has bred and released three new varieties. The most recent one, the Chapell, has a reputation as the most vigorous and fast-growing pawpaw tree and produces creamy fruit with especially strong notes of banana and pineapple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But creating a better pawpaw is slow work. To breed new varieties, researchers cross individual trees\u2014say, one with pineapple-forward fruit and another with a tougher skin that is better suited to shipping. Growing a fruit-producing tree from a seed takes around eight years, and propagating more trees from the new plant takes another four. Factor in more time to run replicated-variety trials and collect several years\u2019 worth of data and the process can take as long as 15 years, Sheri Crabtree, a pawpaw expert at Kentucky State, told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even with the improvements over wild pawpaws, \u201cI don\u2019t know how close we are to getting something that\u2019s dramatically better at shipping and storing,\u201d Crabtree said. Unlike so-called climacteric fruits such as oranges and grapes, pawpaws continue to ripen once they\u2019re picked. They both release and respond to a hormone called ethylene, whose levels increase during ripening. But not all fruit in this category is doomed to become goo like the pawpaw: Green bananas, once picked, stay unripe until deliberately exposed to ethylene during storage, ensuring that markets receive perfectly yellow bunches. Pawpaws are less accommodating. \u201cTo my knowledge, no one has ever been able to pick a pawpaw that didn\u2019t just naturally ripen on its own accord,\u201d Rob Brannan, a food scientist at Ohio University, told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Brannan has studied the browning process in pawpaws, which involves polyphenol oxidase, the same enzyme that gives cut apples and avocados their muddy color. The enzyme can be deactivated by heat or extremely high pressure, which is why supermarket guacamole stays bright green, he said. But the technique didn\u2019t work on pawpaws. \u201cWe did the same thing, and it doesn\u2019t inactivate the enzyme,\u201d Brannan said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That doesn\u2019t mean the pawpaw is destined to be foraged and nothing else. If the pawpaw\u2019s challenges had proven insurmountable with other produce, the American diet would look very different. Bright-red tomatoes are available in the dead of winter thanks to tightly controlled greenhouses that operate around the clock. Some Gala apples are imported<\/a> all the way from New Zealand. Eventually, the pawpaw could get there too. \u201cI\u2019m sure if someone puts their mind to it, they could do it,\u201d Osatuke said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pawpaws are in a weird spot: They are highly coveted by some people, but not in-demand enough to lead to money for widespread research that would deliver the next generation of pawpaws. With enough time and money, commercial harvests could reach a point where shipping pawpaws would actually be realistic. The National Institute of Food and Agriculture funds development of new plant varieties, but \u201cthere has to be an economic argument\u201d for doing so, Brannan said. What the fruit needs is a patron, he added, much like the pair of Beverly Hills billionaires<\/a> who kick-started the modern American pomegranate industry in the early 2000s by planting 6,000 acres of trees in California. Barring that, enthusiasts will have to accept pawpaws for what they have always been: a rare treat able to be savored for only a few fleeting weeks each year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For now, the best we can do is refrigerate pawpaws to eke a few more days out of the fruit, or harvest and freeze the pulp to store it long-term. Processed pawpaw products\u2014ice cream, baked goods, dessert wines, sour beers\u2014may be the fruit\u2019s best shot at commercial success. Integration Acres, which Chmiel founded in the \u201990s after observing the abundance of wasted pawpaws under Ohio\u2019s native trees, churns out frozen pulp, jams, and vinaigrettes. \u201cWhen you have lemons, you make lemonade. When you have a lot of pawpaws, you make pawpaw pulp,\u201d he said. In 1999, he founded the Ohio Pawpaw Festival, which draws as many as 10,000 attendees<\/a> to partake in fruit-eating and cooking competitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It may not be the worst thing in the world for pawpaws to play hard to get. Even if it was possible to scale production and ship the fruit nationwide, doing so would be at odds with the urge for local, sustainable food that fueled the pawpaw boom in the first place. Planting huge pawpaw orchards might just add to the ecological toll of mass farming. Breeders could use genetic modification to improve the fruit, Brannan said, but \u201cthat\u2019s 180 degrees from what people think of the pawpaw. The pawpaw is real, natural, authentic, and local.\u201d For all the weird, frustrating aspects of pawpaws, they are a reminder of just how far food science has come in a century-plus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the time I returned home, my lone pawpaw was squishy and the color of trampled moss. Slicing it open, I spooned the flesh into my mouth and began to understand the fascination: With a scent like banana bread and a pleasant, persimmon-like sweetness, it was different from any American fruit I had ever tasted. Rather, it surfaced a childhood memory from the Philippines of eating atis<\/em>, a relative of the pawpaw known in English as a sweetsop or sugar apple. What was more intriguing than the pawpaw\u2019s flavor was the novelty of being whisked away to the tropics by a wild American fruit that I had hunted down for a week. Would it have been as good if I\u2019d bought it from a stack at Trader Joe\u2019s?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Have you ever heard of a pawpaw? With a bit of science, maybe someday we will all eat pawpaws. By Yasmin Tayag OCTOBER 4, 2022SHARE By the time I arrived at Brooklyn\u2019s Park Slope farmers\u2019 market in search of a pawpaw one morning last week, it was already too late: The weird green fruit had sold<\/p>\n
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