The Anticapitalism of the Pawpaw

A fruit can't really be anticapitalist but pawpaws just seem to be laughing at us all.

If you’re in NYC, there’s still time to get tickets to the School of Making Thinking’s Whoreticulture fundraiser! I’m creating a sensual savory landscape of snacks and a giant mushroom dirt trifle and shrub popsicle rings. There will be music and art and tarot and good vibes and good people.

---

I’d heard they taste like a cross between a mango and a banana, but I wasn’t getting banana — what hit me was that streak of funkiness that some people (me) love in durian and jackfruit, intensified here almost to the level of black licorice. The texture, it’s true, was something like a mango but totally smooth and without strings, like a ripe avocado.

It was my first pawpaw, which is apparently something of a cult-initiation moment. I was immediately smitten, which isn’t the case for everybody, but more than that I was fascinated. It’s rare for me at this age to taste a totally new fruit and even more surprising that it’s one that is native to the region I’ve spent my whole life in. Pawpaws are the largest edible native fruit in the United States, with a range from Ontario to Florida and as far west as Nebraska. They’ve been cultivated for thousands of years and existed for millions, long ago traveling the continent in the digestive tracts of mastodons and giant sloths.

There are a number of reasons that they wouldn’t make it to the farmer’s markets in the cities I’ve lived in, though. They have a very brief season, from early September until around now, and can’t be harvested until fully ripe. That means they’re extremely soft once picked and bruise easily, making them difficult to transport. They’re good only briefly before they start to rot and — though researchers are working on it — they resist techniques like high-pressure processing that extend the shelf-life of other fruits. Overall, they’ve made themselves highly inconvenient for commodification. They don’t change color as they ripen and don’t ripen all at once, so you can’t know if they’re ready without gently squeezing each one. They don’t like being transplanted. And their thin skin and numerous seeds make it laborious to extract the pulp for processing.

After my first taste I wanted more, so I drove to the Flowering Sun Ecology Center, which is a cooperative farm and research/education center that specializes in sustainable produce and — not coincidentally — mushrooms. A few guys were carefully packing pawpaws into boxes for shipping. The fruit came from a variety of small farms they’ve been working with on cultivation in the Catskills and Pennsylvania. Though pawpaws are unsuited for mass production, they can be an economical addition to a small farm, since they’re perennial, require little attention until harvest, and provide another source of income as apple season fades away. (The co-op sells them for $27/pound, so they’re high-value too.)

Foraged and difficult-to-cultivate foods have an interesting relationship with capitalism because they are often the provenance of the very poor and the very rich. Pawpaws have been called “Missouri bananas” and “hillbilly mangos” in reference to their history as a foraged food for rural populations, and were also part of the diets of Indigenous and enslaved people. As with mushrooms, expertise and recipes were preserved through the 20th century as folk knowledge, only to be “discovered” in recent years by culinary cosmopolitans on the hunt for something new. So far, I haven’t seen pawpaws on too many NYC menus, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be the next ramps.

Should pawpaws be planted at bigger scale?, I ask Jax Hughes, a native food forest landscaper with whom we’re consulting for our own backyard. “I don’t think so,” he says initially, “because it’s not a crop that lends itself well to distribution.” But he changes his mind midway through speaking. “I mean, why not? If you have a vision to grow a ton of pawpaws and find ways to distribute them efficiently to a large group of people locally, that’s awesome. The fruit is resilient and doesn’t require much chemical inputs at all. But I don't think it's one of the more exciting perennial crops in terms of feeding people.” There are other ecological benefits to the pawpaw, which has a deep root system that helps with soil erosion and is the only host plant to the zebra swallowtail butterfly caterpillar. They grow well in an “agroforestry” environment, which is like building out the ecosystem of a forest, because they share pollinators with other plants and do best grazed by animals like goats.

After scooping out creamy bites of pawpaw, I roll the seeds around in my mouth then spit them out to stick in a pot of dirt. The seeds want to be planted right away, rather than drying out, and then to spend a winters-length of time in cold soil. I may not see any sign of life until next summer, or even the following. It could be 5-7 years before we get fruit. Luckily, my default approach to gardening is to forget all about my plants, which is bad for most plants but might work out in this case. Since I know hardly anything about what I’m doing, I take a scattershot approach to our yard, starting compost holes in random places and throwing ramp seeds around, more like a forest animal digging and pooping* and mucking about than a careful scientist.

I’m happy to enjoy the pawpaw I have now without trying to cook with it or preserve its flavor. I’ve shared it with Miro, who accepts the spoonfuls eagerly but with no more excitement than he does apples or bananas. I hope he’ll come to associate this particular flavor with the fall, and that it will take on a different meaning than it has for me. “I think with a lot of these ephemeral, special foods, they connect people to these different moments throughout the year,” says Jax about why he likes pawpaws. “They help to make people more connected to the natural world around them.”

I’ve known intellectually that the food system is something we’re part of, not something we created, but I’ve been feeling it more deeply since my move. Seeing the earth take my trash and turn it into fertilizer is very different from setting out bins for a taxpayer-provided garbage truck or even compost service. The difficulty of bending resources like the pawpaw to our mass market will, but the ease with which locals can come by enough of it to enjoy, is a reminder that scale is not always efficient. There is so much world outside of ours — or put another way, our world is so much more than what we’ve built and domesticated. To a pawpaw, we’re not so different from a giant sloth, patiently waiting for our sweet gift and carrying away its seeds to grow in new lands.

*I know you’re not supposed to put human feces in your garden compost!

What I’m Cooking

Lasagna doesn’t have to be a heavy cheesy casserole and pumpkin purée doesn’t have to be for baking! This is how I step into fall.