The Fruit that Could Save the World

King George wants his people to be as strong as your people.

He wants your breadfruit to nourish them.

Atocarpus incisa.

Isn't it amazing?

Such a delicate sprig with the power to feed a continent.

You know, there's evidence to prove that a diet of breadfruit can sustain life all by itself.

That last voice, that's an actor playing a real-life botanist who once set sail on the good ship Bounty.

Before everything went to hell in a handbasket, the Bounty, the real life ship of Mutiny on the Bounty fame, it was heading out to sea to get hold of this life-sustaining tree.

So last episode, as you may recall, we were in Hawaii and we liked it so much we decided to stay.

At least for another episode.

We, of course, are Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Nicola Twilley, and I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And this episode, we're going to get to know one of the other canoe crops, one of the foods that Polynesians brought to Hawaii and that helped feed native Hawaiians for hundreds and hundreds of years.

But this one is a crop that also has a dark history elsewhere in the world, as well as a starring role alongside the coconut in the mutiny on the bounty.

We're talking about the breadfruit, which is a fruit but is also sort of bread-like, but also can be a pudding.

All that coming up, plus, how the breadfruit could be the tree that really might save the world.

Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.

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Mike Opkenorth is the director of the Kahano Botanical Garden.

It's at the southern tip of Maui and it's the most lush and tropical spot on the island.

We're in the heart of the breadfruit collection here at Kahanu Garden.

150 varieties, over 300 trees

from throughout the Pacific, over 30 islands consists of what it took to put this collection together.

Before we went to Hawaii, I had never seen a breadfruit tree.

But once you've seen one, you'll see why experts like Diane Ragoni call it an extremely handsome tree.

Diane is basically the world's number one breadfruit expert.

She's director emeritus of the Breadfruit Institute at the Botanical Garden.

They have a grayish trunk, a large trunk and many, many branches, and dark green, just very beautiful leaves that have a lot of deep lobing, kind of like

some of the oak leaves, but much deeper and much larger.

Everything about the breadfruit tree is large.

So some of these trees are so tall that we can't get a picker to them.

And when the fruits fall and they hit the ground, you can hear it from like 100 feet away.

The trees can grow up to about 80 feet tall, which is around the height of two telephone poles atop one another, although the trees can be pruned to be smaller.

The trunks are really wide, and even the flower is big and long and kind of brownish.

The male flower of breadfruit is a very suggestive form.

It's actually the Hawaiian name for the male flowers, ule, which also means, you know, the male reproductive parts, parts, right?

To me, it looked more like a long, skinny, sweet potato.

I guess for once my mind is not in the gutter.

So the trees and the leaves and the flowers are all huge, and so of course is the fruit.

The fruits are round or oval, and they can be, gosh, up to the size of maybe a softball, even up to the size of a volleyball.

and with a little pebbly or bumpy green surface.

These fruit are really weird looking, honestly.

They're these big green dimple-skinned round balls hanging off the branch like some kind of dinosaur Christmas ornaments.

But of course the trees aren't just ornamental.

It produces an abundance of very nutritious fruit that is a fruit when it's soft and sweet and also when it's starchy.

It's like an annual field crop and it can then be used as any kind of starchy staple like rice or potatoes.

In Hawaii, breadfruit is called ulu and globally it's really the only starchy staple food that grows on a tree.

Which makes ulu somewhat unique.

It is probably, in terms of taste consistency, probably most analogous to a potato.

In fact, you can almost think of it as, and this is, you know, I'm oversimplifying things, but you can almost think of it as a potato on a tree.

If you listen to our most recent episode about tarot, you might recognize Scott's voice.

Scott Fisher is not only the director of INA Stewardship with the Hawaii Land Trust, he's also recently become a breadfruit farmer.

He told us that breadfruit has a lot of charms for a newbie farmer.

They're a very durable species.

They're a great crop for beginning farmers.

Because once you get the tree started and you protect it from deer and other animals as it's starting to get big, and maybe you do some pruning, other than that, it's really not all that labor intensive.

If you were to farm corn or rice or wheat, you basically have to plant every year.

You're worried about weeding and fertilizing and all the stuff you have to do year after year to grow each new crop.

If you think about having a life that that isn't spent tilling and replanting every single year, breadfruit frees up a lot of your time because if you put it in a good environment, it'll grow great for 50, 100 years and you just enjoy the fruit and prune the trees.

There are trees that I have been shown that were well into their eighth decade and they were still productive.

And when Diane says productive, she really means it.

Breadfruit trees can produce 600 or more fruit each year.

We did one study of ma'afala variety, and 50 breadfruit trees on a hectare

were as productive

as rice and more productive than corn.

And these are two super industrialized, bred to be super highly productive crops.

On average, if you look across the archipelago, you find that the average tree produces about 300 pounds annually.

And so it's a great crop.

Diane said breadfruit is mostly found in the Pacific Islands and that's because this is the region where it was born.

Breadfruit originated in the western Pacific, Papua New Guinea, and has been distributed across the region for close to 5,000 years.

And from island to island as people settled and colonized and lived on new islands they brought up crops with them in their canoes.

They brought crops and plants and food like pigs.

Crops like taro and coconut and of course breadfruit.

And over time, as humans always do, these early people developed different varieties of breadfruit, ones that grew better in different conditions or were more or less starchy or ripened earlier.

One of my favorite names for a breadfruit variety is the crying baby breadfruit because you can cook it so quickly and feed it to a baby who's crying.

Diane's been on a mission since the 1980s to collect and save all the breadfruit varieties.

For more than three decades, she's traveled around the Pacific from island to island to build her collection.

These are planted in a few different botanical gardens in the region, and the one with the most varieties in the world was right where we were standing in Maui.

I collected and documented, personally, well over 500 breadfruit trees, and of that, maybe 300 or 400 varieties.

We have varieties in the collection that are rare and at risk.

Some of them may be gone in their home islands.

When I collected one particular tree variety from the Cook Islands, my my

agricultural agent that I was working with told me that they only knew of one tree left on that island, of that variety.

That was 1985.

A lot of Pacific islands, like Tahiti, were once home to dozens of varieties.

Weirdly, though, Hawaii has only had one.

The Hawaiian archipelago was pretty much the last islands to be settled by Polynesians with their canoe crops, and for whatever reason, they only brought one type of breadfruit with them.

Thinking about the exploration of Polynesians throughout the Pacific, Hawaii was one of the last frontiers, right?

And so with that, as you take your favorite variety to the next island, Hawaii was at the very end, it's really the like quintessential breadfruit.

But even though that variety might have been the favorite breadfruit, breadfruit wasn't really the Hawaiians' favorite food.

As you might remember, that number one position went to taro.

It went kalo, sweet potato, oola, and then breadfruit was kind of a third.

But I think it was one of those, it was oftentimes grown as one of those, I I wouldn't say a famine food, but as sort of a backup in case another crop failed.

But it was consumed a lot as well.

I mean, I don't mean to make it sound like in Hawaii it wasn't consumed quite a bit.

It was.

Basically, breadfruit wasn't king of the dinner table for early Hawaiians, but it did have their backs when things went wrong.

The thing I love most, part of the mythology associated with Ulu that's probably the most telling, is that there was a famine that struck the Hawaiian Islands.

There was a drought and a famine that struck Hawaii.

And this is, you know, during during the mythological times, the god Ku was living with his family and noticed that the family was on the verge of starvation.

And what he did is he basically buried himself in the ground.

And from that spot where he buried himself in the ground, the ulu tree grew up.

And so the ulu tree is sort of, you can think of it as sort of the salvation.

It was what saved his family at that time of dire need.

from starving to death.

And the idea that breadfruit can be salvation, that it can protect you from hunger, in Hawaii, the relationship would traditionally start when you were a baby.

One common practice was when your child was born, you would plant an oolu.

And so you can, again, get that idea of like it's meant to be identified with an individual, but that's a protector.

Part of why it was a protector is because of that abundance we talked about, which also gave breadfruit a reputation as something that was often fed to animals rather than humans.

In Hawaii, breadfruit is harvested in the fall and there's a lot of it all at once.

People did eat it, but they couldn't eat it all, and breadfruit doesn't store well.

Excess breadfruit, breadfruit that couldn't be used for other purposes throughout the Pacific is always fed to the pigs and it's not a lessening of the value of breadfruit.

It's actually an enhancement of the value because all the production of the tree is used.

Nothing goes to waste.

And when you convert your starch into protein and fat, it's so essential.

So feeding breadfruit to pigs was a way to have a very portable, very nutritious source of protein and fat.

We're making it sound like breadfruit was something kind of grown on the side.

Like families had their own breadfruit trees that they planted when their babies were born.

But Hawaiians did also grow it on a large scale, particularly on the island of Hawaii, which is also called the Big Island.

The area was known as the breadfruit belt.

It's a very narrow band, so only about a half mile wide on the landscape, but stretched for 18 miles long, kind of encircling around the slopes of Mauna Loa.

This is Noah Kekoeva Linkin.

You will have heard him on our tarot episode, too.

He's a researcher at the University of Hawaii, where he focuses on indigenous crops and farming techniques, and he told us that this breadfruit belt was known as Kalu Ulu, and it was planted to take advantage of the precise conditions at this particular elevation where other crops were sort of dicey, but breadfruit did really well.

And in this area, it's kind of dry, but on a good year, it's pretty wet, but then on a bad year, it's really dry.

So if you were growing annual crops in that area, like collo or sweet potato or even yams or bananas, what happens is on that bad year, when you have a drought year, all these annual crops would die.

But by having a long-lived tree, once you get it established, they can thrive during the wet years, and then even in a bad year, even in a drought year, the tree persists and it still produces some fruit, still contributes to your overall food system and food security.

This was good food all the time, but it was also like a food bank if your other crops happened to fail.

Noah modeled what those old systems might have looked like.

He and his colleagues collected information about rainfall and how the whole system would have worked and yield.

And they found that this breadfruit belt alone would have produced about 50,000 tons annually.

I I can't picture exactly how much breadfruit that is, but I know it is a lot.

Which, if you convert it to a pure caloric value, just the breadfruit alone would have been enough to feed about 30,000 people, which is roughly the population of that area today.

That's impressive.

But what's even more impressive is that breadfruit wasn't the only crop that Hawaiians grew in the breadfruit belt.

It was a whole agroforestry system.

The early European explorers who who first saw these systems were very impressed by them, and so they wrote about them extensively.

And then they describe a whole diversity of crops grown within this breadfruit system, taking advantage of the kind of micro-habitats that the trees produce.

They used the shade from the breadfruit to grow paper mulberry, and then they used the bark of the paper mulberry to make cloth for bedding and also ropes.

And they also used the shade to grow kava, which was the key ingredient for a ceremonial drink.

The floor of the system, the ground cover, would be a lot of rhizome-based crops.

So, things like the shampoo ginger, turmeric, pia, which is the Polynesian arrowroot, a very starchy, like cornstarch type of plant.

Agroforestry systems have been developed in lots of places around the world because they're truly amazing, and people have been both studying this traditional approach and trying to recreate agroforestry systems today.

Think about it, you get trees that produce food and that you don't really have to take care of much or worry about.

And then you can grow all sorts of other useful crops in and around those trees.

And one of the really special things too about breadfruit is it provides all of these other ecosystem services.

If you think about its ability to attract pollinators, its ability to sequester carbon, provide shade, building materials,

many other practical uses.

The sap is a useful type of sticky, like almost like a gum.

There's all of these different things that breadfruit offers.

At this point, you might be thinking, is there nothing breadfruit cannot do?

We were kind of thinking that ourselves.

In fact, I was thinking, you know, it must not taste that good or it would have already taken over the world.

I wondered the same thing.

I mean, I've traveled to tropical areas before and I've never tried it.

So is this wonderfruit actually not so wonderful to eat?

Time for a taste test.

That's coming up after the break.

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We're getting the band back together this episode, so it's time for another star from our tarot episode, Chef Sheldon Simeon of Tin Roof and Tiffany's.

It's breadfruit season two right now, so it's you go to the market and it's everywhere.

I was just eyeing up the one right up the road at the fire department.

I was gonna go knock on their door.

It's like, hey, guys,

let me make you guys some food if you share your ulu,

your breadfruit with us.

Sheldon did not happen to score the firehouse's breadfruit for our particular day's offerings, but he did get a big one.

Yeah, so this is

a breadfruit that we got at the market this past weekend.

I love it.

This is my favorite part where it's at this ripeness.

You can kind of feel a little softness in it.

It's gorgeous.

I love it.

It's like

this is a variety that doesn't have any seeds, just some small seeds here.

But beautiful flesh.

This is a grade A breadfruit right here.

Traditionally, Hawaiians would cook their breadfruit in the same stone pit ovens they used for taro, or sometimes they'd even just throw them whole in the embers of a fire to roast.

Sheldon cooked them in the oven.

We're gonna do it as the most simplest form.

So I roasted the breadfruit whole and then peeled it and then quartered it.

Then we'll top it off with a little bit of coconut oil and some Hawaiian chili pepper.

That breadfruit and coconut pairing.

Turns out that the two aren't just both canoe crops, they're also entwined in mythology.

Scott told us that the breadfruit was the bodily form of the goddess Hina, and coconut was the bodily form of the god Ku, and the two are a pair.

So Sheldon was right on the money.

How's your guys spice?

We like spice.

Oh yeah, okay we'll break up these sawai and chilies.

Alright so we'll take this out and then we'll plate it.

Top it off.

Let's flavor it with coconut oil.

A little bit of pake

or some sea salt.

Sheldon had cut the breadfruit into chunks like wedges and they were a pretty yellow color.

They looked sort of fibrous like pineapple, but then they weren't like pineapple at all as soon as we dug in.

Cut right into it, and uh, yeah, have at it.

Oh, it's so soft!

Yeah,

I wasn't expecting it to be so like, yeah, it's so tender to slice through.

Yeah, yeah, it's uh,

I want you, I want to see you guys' reaction to it.

Okay, all right, here we go.

Okay,

It's delicious.

That is great.

I love the texture.

Nikki and I might have started out a little dubious about how good breadfruit are to eat, but I am here to tell you, from the very first bite, we were in love.

It was like a perfect, soft, slightly nutty and starchy potato.

It reminded me of yucca.

It was totally delicious.

The coconut is perfect on it.

It's really good.

Yeah.

You could take this and slatter it with butter and garlic and sour cream, and it'd be like the the best potato, baked potato you'll ever have.

Yum.

Speaking of potatoes, Sheldon wanted to make us something less traditional too to show us how versatile the breadfruit really is.

So he made like a breadfruit version of a German potato salad.

We made a vinaigrette with some shallots and some garlic.

The base is rooted.

here in Hawaii, but flavors from around the world.

I'll give this a toss

This puffed rice that we mixed with some lemon oil and some nori

for texture.

We headed back to the table for breadfruit take two.

Thank you.

Oh, the vinaigrette goes right through.

Yeah, it just absorbs all of that flavor.

I'm just gonna sit here enjoying.

You can just leave me.

This is good.

So good.

Yeah.

Like he says, Sheldon grew up eating both taro and breadfruit.

Taro the traditional way and breadfruit exactly like a potato.

And it was always a treat when the neighbor's

tree was full with ulu.

My dad, we put a little bit of butter and garlic on top of it and he likes his spicy so he puts a lot of chili pepper on it too.

But yeah, we loved breadfruit and we ate a lot of this growing up.

We know it's hard to choose favorites.

Of course, you love them all.

But we did ask Sheldon which one would be his pick on a desert island, taro or breadfruit.

If I had to choose between both of them, I'd probably choose breadfruit as my favorite.

Why?

I just,

I've been having so much fun in this past few years just like cooking with...

Ulu again the amount that one tree can feed and the amount of fruit that you can get and just like changing different people's ideas of what what ulu can be one of the reasons sheldon loves breadfruit is that it is so versatile and you can do different things with it at different stages of ripeness too when it's nice and still young it's very firm so you can slice it on a mandolin and then you get some chips as it ripens up it will get start to get sweeter on you too the texture will change Scott told us that at each stage of ripeness the breadfruit can taste really different.

The very young stage you can actually consume that that's edible but it tastes a lot like an artichoke.

It's comparable to an artichoke.

As it gets into those more mature stages that's when it tastes more like a potato.

Up to this point breadfruit is 100% savory but then it starts to get a little sweeter.

When it's at its ripe or overripe stage meaning that it's very very soft you can eat it right off the tree and it tastes a lot like kind of a sour pudding.

It has a banana-esque flavor, remotely banana, I guess you'd say, like not exactly like a banana, but.

Scott loves breadfruit, Sheldon loves breadfruit.

We've fallen completely in love with it, but it does have a dark side.

That story coming up after the break.

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You selling something, Chum?

I'm not a peddler.

I'm a gardener.

Assistant botanist at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew.

You know Kew Gardens, of course.

Kew's outside London.

You lost your way, mate.

Well, I hadn't lost my way if this boat, I beg your pardon.

If the ship is the bounty.

Aye, it's the bounty, all right.

Yes, we're not in Hawaii anymore.

The year is now 1787, and we are in England, and we're about to set sail from Portsmouth.

Well, we're actually in a movie from 1962.

It's one of many big screen versions of that classic pirate tale, The Mutiny on the Bounty.

Remember in our coconut episode how the theft of a coconut spurred that mutiny?

Well, the entire reason the bounty had set sail in the first place was to collect breadfruit saplings in the Pacific and bring them to the Caribbean.

Breadfruit?

Breadfruit?

You mean where we're ground bread grows on trees?

Bread trees?

Well, that's daft enough for our ship lower there.

There's nothing daft about breadfruit.

This is a very real food.

A staple like wheat.

Here, goofy-looking weed.

It's funny that nobody's ever heard of this before, then.

No one ever heard of the potato until Sir Francis Drake brought it from South America.

It altered European economy.

Breadfruit may alter it again.

I wonder what it tastes like.

The West Indies Company plans to feed it to the slaves in Jamaica, no matter what it tastes like.

But then, if it becomes popular, they'll feed it to the world.

What had happened is that when Captain Cook went to Tahiti, he brought the famous naturalist Joseph Banks with him, and Banks collected a bunch of plants along the way.

But he had a favorite.

He was absolutely enamored with breadfruit and also became enamored with its potential for the British slave colonies in the Caribbean.

And so he was behind the efforts to introduce Tahitian breadfruit to the Caribbean islands.

and convinced George III to do that.

And that is how William Bly and a lucky botanist from Kew Gardens ended up on the docks at Portsmouth, ready to set sail on the good ship Bounty, headed for the Pacific.

The mutiny on the bounty is so widely known in pop culture that, to be honest, I didn't even realize that it was based on a true story.

But it turns out there was a bounty, and there was a mutiny.

Bly was apparently a pretty nasty captain, and when one sailor was accused of stealing a coconut, he cut everyone's rum and food rations.

And then, according to the story, he took some of their drinking water to keep the precious breadfruit alive.

It's the privilege

Better than with dead men, sir.

You're forgetting the traditional answer mills.

Mission comes first, and the lives of men second.

So, not everyone on board felt that way.

And, long story short, the breadfruit trees were all thrown overboard along with Mr.

Unpopular Captain Bly.

Well, if that's the case, then how on earth is there breadfruit in the Caribbean?

And that's because Captain Bly went back

with two ships and collected breadfruit varieties and successfully introduced them into the Caribbean and to St.

Vincent and then to Jamaica.

And from those first introductions and a couple that the French made at about the same time,

breadfruit has been in the Caribbean and slowly adopted and tied together with the whole culture and horror of slavery.

And that's a real tragic history because it's taking something that is culturally so valuable to the people of Oceania and just desecrating it in the use of that as a food for slaves.

Obviously, not everyone in the Caribbean was a huge fan of breadfruit when it was first introduced.

By the time it did catch on, 40 or 50 years after Captain Bligh introduced it, slavery had, thankfully, been banned in the British Empire.

Given the dark history, breadfruit isn't popular today everywhere in the Caribbean, but it is definitely a staple on some islands.

That's Jamaican musician Chicheng on the subject of breadfruit.

He seems like a fan.

Apparently in Jamaica, breadfruit is seen as a symbol of perseverance, which seems appropriate.

There's plenty of breadfruit growing in Jamaica, and in fact, today, there's more breadfruit growing in the Caribbean than in Hawaii because it basically died out in Hawaii.

By the 1920s, there was no more breadfruit commercially cultivated there.

Remember the breadfruit belt on the Big Island?

That was all ripped out.

It just converted the plants

from ulu, from breadfruit, to coffee.

And so essentially, what was that breadfruit belt two centuries ago is now the Kona coffee belt.

So a big shift in terms of the role that those lands play from one of, you know, feeding our local population and providing abundance and calories to our people to one of kind of exporting a commodity crop for economic benefit.

This is part of the whole shift we talked about in our tarot episode.

Once Europeans arrived in Hawaii, they took the land and water and used it for plantation crops, not the traditional foods that had made the islands self-sufficient.

Like coffee, those plantation crops were mostly sent off the islands, which means that today, Hawaii relies on everywhere else but Hawaii for nearly all of its food.

Nearly 95% of all the food eaten in Hawaii comes from elsewhere.

So one thing that we realized as COVID swept through our communities was how few days we have until the shelves are empty.

If you have a tree like this at breadfruit, you go into your backyard and it's there for you.

Me personally and my partner, Jeff Schaefer, the two of us thought, well, how can we address the issue of our vulnerability to everything from climate change to just any number of disruptions?

Then this is our answer.

And

we love working in the earth.

We love being, you know, hulina lima aika lepo maona ka opu is the ole loiao, which is a Hawaiian proverb that's, you know, you turn your hands into the soil and you have, basically, literally, your stomach will be full.

You know, you will have abundant food.

So, this is our hulina lima ika lepo.

This is our turning of the hands into the soil.

In different ways, Scott, Mike, Diane, Noah, and Sheldon are all at the vanguard of this exciting and still pretty new breadfruit resurgence in Hawaii.

I think the way I see that is as a facet of what you might think of as the overall Hawaiian Renaissance, the rebirth of the Hawaiian language, the desire to actually restore tarot patches.

And so, Ulu, I think, is a little bit on the tail end.

You know, the origin of the Hawaiian Renaissance goes back to about 1970.

And so, you know, it wasn't really until like the early 2000s that sort of the Ulu Renaissance.

As part of that resurgence and renaissance, Noah and his colleagues are working to bring back the breadfruit belt.

I think one of our big drivers is to have a working reference so we can see

this system of the past and see it in action today

and start to have these conversations about do these have a role today?

Is this something we want for our food system?

And also for,

I think, the Hawaiian population to be able to, you know, see firsthand, like, hey, this is what your ancestors were doing, right?

It wasn't that long ago

that these systems existed.

At the Breadfruit Institute, Diane has also done a lot to restore the breadfruit to the Hawaiian landscape and Hawaiian consciousness, too.

Through workshops, cooking competitions, cookbooks, festivals, and a lot of programs and also tree distributions.

I mean, the Breadfront Institute distributed 10,000 trees statewide, partnering with over 200 organizations to get trees out into communities.

We want to see it in the the schools.

We want to see, you know, it would be just a wonderful thing to see

locally produced crops here on Maui, produced here on Maui, consumed here on Maui.

Scott may have planted a breadfruit farm, but he still thinks everyone should grow their own.

If something were to ever happen, you know, you want to be resilient and you can rely on breadfruit.

And so, you know, plant a breadfruit in every person's yard, but still buy your breadfruit from Ulu Brothers Farm.

And all these breadfruit fans are also part of a movement to plant breadfruit trees worldwide because because according to the Breadfruit Institute, about 80% of the hundreds of millions of people in the world who suffer from hunger and malnutrition live in areas perfect for growing breadfruit.

I work in Madagascar on a project doing mangrove restoration and I'm going there in a couple months and I'm really hoping that I can get something started there where we can actually bring ULU to that part of the world because the people we're working with are already experiencing the impacts of climate change and the impact of climate change is food vulnerability.

And ULU is a way of addressing that.

These kinds of breadfruit planting projects are currently underway in a bunch of different places that do suffer from that kind of food vulnerability.

The Breadfruit Institute and another foundation, Trees That Feed, Between them, they've already planted and given away many thousands of trees.

And these trees have already proven to be super important and resilient.

There have been efforts to replant breadfruit in the Caribbean in places where it had fallen out of favor.

About a thousand trees were planted on Puerto Puerto Rico, and some had become established before Hurricane Maria hit in 2017.

After the hurricane, in some places where it was particularly destructive, some of the only trees that were still standing were breadfruits.

The breadfruit tree originally evolved in the Pacific where there are regular typhoons, which means they're pretty sturdy in a windstorm.

And if one does happen to fall, a little baby breadfruit tree is usually already growing to take its place.

One economist in Trinidad is so excited about the potential of breadfruit to help people on his home islands of Trinidad and Tobago that he's already planted thousands of trees, and they're expected to provide literally millions of pounds of food a year.

And a recent study out of Northwestern modeled crop yields in our climate-changed future and concluded that breadfruit, which is super resilient in droughts, storms, and more, it could be vital to food security around the world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.

And in case any of you listeners are concerned, the researchers also point out that most of the breadfruit trees that people grow for food are seedless, and so they aren't invasive.

And remember, they also sequester carbon, and they take almost no work.

Plus, as we pointed out, they're incredibly delicious.

Listen, I've tried not to just chug the breadfruit Kool-Aid.

I tried to be cynical.

I doubted that it tasted good, and I was totally wrong.

Frankly, I know it came in second or even third place in ancient Hawaiians' hearts, but breadfruit really is great.

And it's so low maintenance.

If you live in the right area of the world, it's easy to grow, it's not too hard to harvest.

And on top of that, it's really easy to prepare.

Mike literally just sticks it in the Instant Pot and clicks the right setting, and then it's done.

But the really important piece is economic development, is entrepreneurship, being able to do something with that fruit, process it in some way.

People are now grinding breadfruit into flour and then making flour into...

local baked goods.

For teen breadfruit, this tree is not just a way to make sure your family has something nutritious to eat, it's also a way to earn money by turning breadfruit into something that has legs.

We already said that breadfruit doesn't last very long, but today people are turning it into products that they can not only store, but that they can ship too.

Patagonia is making crackers out of breadfruit flour.

They advertise it not only as sustainable, but also gluten-free.

Diane told us the breadfruit flour is such a recent innovation that the FDA only approved it as a standard ingredient a few years ago.

But it's taking off fast.

But flour is not the only thing you can do with breadfruit.

John Cadman with the Maui Breadfruit Company, he turns them into these things called pono pies, and they are very similar in taste and consistency to cheesecake.

Nikki and I bought a few of these on our last couple of days in Maui, and my favorite was the one flavored with sweet potato.

I didn't expect to love sweet potato flavored breadfruit cheesecakey pudding so much, but I totally did.

I will confess to eating two in a row.

But the real killer app for breadfruit, as with so many foods, is the chip.

Mike and his colleague Hamo Helakai fried up some thinly sliced breadfruit for us.

Hmm.

They're delicious.

They're like starchier than a potato chip.

Definitely denser as well.

Not really sweet.

Really delicious.

If you had to compare them to a potato chip, what would you say?

Oh, this is way better.

They're more substantive.

I'm a fan.

Yeah.

Honestly.

And I say that as a committed potato lover.

You listeners all know that Nikki and I tend to raise our eyebrows a bit when someone tells us that any one particular food will help save the world.

But you know, with breadfruit, we've kind of been convinced.

Thanks this episode to Diane Rangoni, Mike Opkenorth, Noah Kakaway-Valincan, Scott Fisher, and Sheldon Simeon.

We have photos and links to their projects and restaurants on our website, gastropod.com.

Thanks as always to our amazing producer, Claudia Guide, for all her help this episode.

We'll be back in two weeks with a squeaking new episode, something you can really sink your teeth into.

Till then.

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