num_pages: 320
description: The largest edible fruit native to the United States tastes like a cross between a banana and a mango. It grows wild in twenty-six states gracing Eastern forests each fall with sweet-smelling tropical-flavored abundance. Historically it fed and sustained Native Americans and European explorers presidents and enslaved African Americans inspiring folk songs poetry and scores of place names from Georgia to Illinois. Its trees are an organic growers dream requiring no pesticides or herbicides to thrive and containing compounds that are among the most potent anticancer agents yet discovered.So why have so few people heard of the pawpaw much less tasted one? In Pawpaw author Andrew Moore explores the past present and future of this unique fruit traveling from the Ozarks to Monticello; canoeing the lower Mississippi in search of wild fruit; drinking pawpaw beer in Durham North Carolina; tracking down lost cultivars in Appalachian hollers; and helping out during harvest season in a Maryland orchard. Along the way he gathers pawpaw lore and knowledge not only from the plant breeders and horticulturists working to bring pawpaws into the mainstream (including Neal Peterson known in pawpaw circles as the fruits own Johnny Pawpawseed) but also regular folks who remember eating them in the woods as kids but havent had one in over fifty years.As much as Pawpaw is a compendium of pawpaw knowledge it also plumbs deeper questions about American foodwayshow economic biologic and cultural forces combine leading us to eat what we eat and sometimes to ignore the incredible delicious food growing all around us. If you havent yet eaten a pawpaw this book wont let you rest until you do.
language: English
title: Pawpaw: In Search of America's Forgotten Fruit
publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing