Curated playlist
Tropical fruit
- PapayaPapaya's white sap can tenderize meat, but it also stops jelly from setting. The enzyme papain is the reason.
- Cooking bananaCooking bananas feed more than 70 million people across Africa alone. They are starchy and largely inedible raw.
- BananaAlmost every banana eaten in the Western world is a single seedless clone. That sameness is its greatest weakness.
- CoconutEvery coconut on a remote Pacific island arrived because a person brought it. Ocean currents alone could not do it.
- AvocadoEvery Hass avocado tree alive descends from one mother tree. A California mail carrier raised it from a single seedling.
- Cocoa beanThe cocoa bean, the dried and fermented seed of the cacao tree, once paid for rabbit dinners in Mesoamerica. Before the Spanish conquest, it served as common money across the region. Beans bought small items such as tamales and rabbit…
- PineappleThe pineapple, Ananas comosus, once inspired a British aristocrat to crown a hothouse with a stone cupola 14 metres tall, built in the shape of the fruit. That aristocrat was John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, and the rooftop ornament is…
- EggplantEggplant, known to science as Solanum melongena, carries a different name depending on who is talking. North Americans, Australians and Filipinos say eggplant. The British, Irish and New Zealanders say aubergine. Across India, Bangladesh,…
- BreadfruitA single breadfruit tree can hand a household 200 or more grapefruit-sized fruits in one season, and it asks for very little care in return. That makes Artocarpus altilis one of the highest-yielding food plants known. It belongs to…
- JackfruitThe jackfruit, Artocarpus heterophyllus, can weigh as much as 55 kilograms, which makes it the largest fruit that grows on a tree. A mature tree produces around 200 of them each year, and older trees can bear up to 500. This giant belongs…