One Man's Jackfruit Is Another Man's Treasure

Week 5 [Reflection]:

What grows to maturity in 3 years, produces 5+ tons of food annually, and grows as widely as India, Brazil, Thailand, and Australia?

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If you read the title of this post, you can probably guess the answer: jackfruit trees!  I became infatuated with this fruit in Brazil, where it seemed to be growing abundantly everywhere, and was completely blown away by its versatility in the kitchen.  When it’s ripe, you can eat it raw, or make tarts, jams, and other sweet dishes.  Before ripening, when it’s “green”, it can be used for countless savory dishes.  You can also consume just about any part of the fruit (except the peel) -- the outer flesh, the stringy insides, the pods around the seeds, the seeds (boiled), and the core.  The stringy interior is also a great meat substitute, since it resembles the texture of pulled pork or beef stroganoff.  It’s small wonder that jackfruit is hailed by some as the “miracle fruit.”

You may be thinking, ”Is this an ad for jackfruit?”  While I’d love a fruit company endorsement for this blog, I’m hoping this description gives a context for my shock when I discovered that jackfruit is a hugely underexploited crop in its homeland, India, due to its image as a “poor man’s fruit.”

For this blog reflection, I want to discuss the general idea of how perceptions impact the food system.  Last week, I wrote about the Alkon and Agyeman article that addressed the perception of “alternative foods” stores, farmers markets, and CSA’s as “white spaces”, which could have an exclusionary effect on wider participation.  The perception of farming was also a theme in the Gottlieb and Joshi article, which reflected on the surge of immigrant farmers in the United States, and the knowledge and traditions they bring to the agricultural sector.  In fact, one of the conference participants in the article commented that farming is “at the root of so many cultures across the world [but is] being lost here in America” (137).  One could argue that this trend is also due to industrialized agriculture, loss of connection to the food process, etc.  But does perception of food and farming also factor into the decline?

Another example from last week’s Gottlieb and Joshi reading, the Nuestras Raices project in Holyoke, MA, spurred more questions about perception of farming.  The residents who founded the community gardens were farmers from Puerto Rico, who were able to improve their neighborhood with existing agricultural knowledge.  In the 1950’s and 60’s, when those residents immigrated to Massachusetts, there was a massive outmigration of Puerto Rican farmers to the United States.  At the same time, the introduction of the U.S. Operation Bootstrap in the 1940’s-1970’s, provoked accelerated industrialization and migration to urban centers of the island.  But there was a third, more pernicious, factor in the agricultural decline in Puerto Rico.  The idea of the traditional farmer, el jíbaro, had an extremely negative connotation attached to it.  In Nelson Álvarez Febles‘s article, “A Lo jíbaro como metáfora del futuro [agroecológico],” he describes the jíbaro of the 20th Century as both an idealized icon of nationality and also a negative “hillbilly” image that had associations of being ignorant, backwards, uneducated, etc.

Today, much of Puerto Rican agriculture suffers due to lack of workers.  In 2012, coffee farms experienced losses of about 2,500 - 3,000 tons of coffee due to lack of farm help (“Urgen manos para recoger café. El Nuevo Dia).  While there are several reasons for this trend, the perception of farming as “poor man’s work”, too difficult for the pay, or less dignified than other occupations may play a part in the scarcity of workers. Interestingly, the lack of agricultural workers has produced a similar outcome in Puerto Rico as in other parts of the U.S.  In the 1980’s, much of the coffee picking was carried out by Dominican workers.  Today, some say that Haitians now do much of the coffee picking in the Dominican Republic (“A Coffee Paradise Suffers Lack of Labor for the Harvest”, Donyelle Kesler, Cronkite Borderlands Initiative).

Like the jackfruit in India or the jíbaro in Puerto Rico, are there other instances that perceptions have affected the consumption or production of food?  What are the deeper causes of these perceptions (e.g. not enough pay for farmers, historic discrimination, politics, etc.)?  Does branding/marketing play a role?  How does your perception of food contribute to your food decisions?

“A jaca é lindo maravilhoso!!!”