For the many of you who are new to Bastiat’s Window, on quiet Sundays, I often like to publish essays on odd topics—a bit off the map. Here’s one I hope you’ll enjoy.
Screenplay Treatment
Thanks for seeing me on a Sunday. Today, I’d like to pitch a screenplay idea to you—Lost Daughter of the Tropics. It’s a biopic—true from start to finish. The protagonist is one of the most fascinating historical characters I’ve ever come across, yet hardly anyone, anywhere knows her story. Here’s my treatment:
“The action begins with a large, prominent family of fruit-growers, with plantations stretched across the tropics, around the globe. After that background is established, the film settles on one daughter, Asimina, who develops an insatiable and inexplicable wanderlust. She leaves her family behind and travels slowly northward into what would one day become the United States. The family never hears from her again, but her journey through North America is remarkable.
Asimina is small of stature and exotically beautiful. For quite some time, she lives among Native Americans. Eventually, she wends her way into colonial society, where her culinary talents make her famous—an early superstar in the world of haute cuisine. She is invited to the kitchen and the table of practically every prominent family in the colonies. George Washington, in particular, encounters her and falls deeply in love. She is the toast of American society.
But Asimina is also beloved by humble farmers and modest laborers—the poor, the hungry, the wanderers. She feeds them as eagerly as she feeds the wealthy and powerful. In time, her egalitarian nature earns her the disdain of the snobbish upper classes. They abandon her, and she becomes a wandering recluse.
She is spotted now and then, here and there, huddled on riverbanks, mostly in desolate and abandoned places. In her wanderings, she lives on the Eastern plains, throughout the Appalachians, and in the valleys of the Ohio, Tennessee, and Mississippi rivers. In time, sadly, even the poor whom she served forget about her. Though some people have faint recollections of Asimina, she is mostly forgotten, unloved, and alone.
For a brief moment, a benefactor in a new century strives to restore her to her well-deserved heights in American society—and it appears that he might succeed. Through his efforts, a new generation takes note. Tragically, though, her benefactor dies a premature death, and she slips back into obscurity.
As the film ends, it is many years later. Asimina has been invited into the company of a small band of people who recall her long-ago fame, glory, and generosity. They are joined by others who hear of her for the first time and are equally enthralled. As the closing credits roll, the viewer has reason to hope that Asimina’s long, lonely exile is finally at an end.”
Oh. By the way, I told you that this was a “biopic,” but that was a little deceptive. It’s not a biographical pic. Rather, it’s a biological pic. While every word of the story described above is entirely true, Asimina is not a person. Rather, she is Asimina triloba—the American pawpaw tree. Once one of the most celebrated fruit crops in America, changes in society, culture, economics, and technology led to a rapid and wholesale abandonment of the fruit. Not only did Americans stop eating pawpaw fruit—they forgot that it existed at all.
A year ago, I discovered the tree and learned that it has a truly weird story—one that encompasses a number of my life’s great passions—dendrology (the study of trees), geography, history, economics, sociology, and foodways. The story even touches ever-so-tangentially on a subject that I often write about—eugenics.
Intermission
In a recent post (“Whence Fall Snowflakes”), I mentioned that, as a child in Petersburg, Virginia, I became something of an expert on trees. I had a stack of guidebooks, and in those innocent years of the 1960s, I had free rein to wander the woods on my own. Eventually, I could identify perhaps 100 species of trees that grew in Eastern Virginia (plus quite a few bushes). From my books, I knew perhaps another 50 that grew in places I had never visited. But back then, and in the almost 60 years since, I never encountered the pawpaw tree or knew a thing about it.
A year ago, having moved some of my laurels into better soil and light, I had to fill a sizable blank spot in my yard. I asked an arborist to suggest something strange and interesting, and he took me over to several rows of pawpaw trees. I suppose I had heard the name, but knew nothing more than that. Soon, I owned two of them. (Without a companion tree, a pawpaw will rarely produce fruit.) I read a book or two and numerous articles on the species. And I joined a pawpaw fan page on Facebook.
In the process, I discovered that the rivers running through all the places I’ve lived in Virginia—Petersburg, Charlottesville, Richmond, Radford, Williamsburg, Alexandria—are all lined with pawpaw trees. They are all dropping North America’s biggest edible tree fruits onto the ground, mostly to rot or to be consumed by animals. How could I have failed to hear of this once-celebrated tree? The answer lay in its strange natural history and its collision with a mechanized economy.
For background here, I’ll rely heavily upon one book, Andrew Moore’s Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit, and a BBC article by Jonathan Shipley, “The Revival of a Forgotten American Fruit.”
Lost Daughter of the Tropics: The Real Story
Here, I’ll translate my mock screenplay treatment into a brief factual history of the pawpaw in America.
There’s a family of trees—the Annonaceae—spread across the tropics and subtropics—in Latin America and the Caribbean, in Africa, in Indonesia. Fruit-bearing members of the family include the custard-apple, cherimoya, soursop, sweetsop, and ylang-ylang. Somehow, millions of years ago, one member of the family decided to wander northward into the Eastern United States. Over time, it adapted to cold weather, to the point that it cannot tolerate the subtropical climate of Florida.
The pawpaw is a smallish tree, normally reaching 35’ or so in height. It has huge, drooping green leaves that give it a lush, tropical appearance unlike almost anything around it. (It is related to the similarly tropical-looking magnolias.) If Americans know the name “pawpaw,” it is likely from the song, “Bare Necessities,” in the Disney film, The Jungle Book. But that song refers to a colloquial name for the Asian papaya, which is not related to the American pawpaw. However, pawpaw fruits superficially resemble papaya fruit, which likely explains the name.
The fruits of the pawpaw are only available for a short time in late summer and early fall. For Native Americans, however, they appear to have been an important food source. Stands of pawpaws are often found in desolate, abandoned places—and some stands are believed to be the remnants of long-ago Native American villages.
In colonial times, pawpaw became something of an early food craze. George Washington had them planted at Mount Vernon, and specimens still grow along the Potomac near that site (which is just a few miles from my own home). Legend has it that chilled pawpaw was the first president’s favorite dessert. John James Audubon used pawpaw leaves and fruit for the background of his painting of the yellow-billed cuckoo. You can see those in the painting that sits atop this essay. The Lewis and Clark Expedition feasted on pawpaws. From Moore’s book:
“Our party entirely out of provisions subsisting on poppaws … [but] the party appear perfectly contented and tell us they can live very well on the pappaws.”
In the colonial era and throughout much of the 19th century, pawpaw fruit remained something of a national sensation. Its innate characteristics made it perfectly suited when everyone—rich or poor—was a foraging locavore. Pawpaws are independent-spirited things, not keen on domestication. Hence, they tended to grow wild. At the right time of year, people of all classes would wander the woods and the riverbanks in search of the fruit.
But the rise of an urbanized, mechanized, industrial society was not well-suited for the pawpaw’s eccentricities. With the advent of grocery stories, the rising economic classes came to look down on foraging as something poor people did out of necessity—a look that upwardly mobile people wished to avoid. Henceforth, the middle and upper classes would get their fruit from grocers—not from trees out in the woods.
As working-class Americans left the farms and moved into cities for work, their new homes were typically far from the remote places favored by pawpaws. As cities began to sprawl over the countryside, pawpaw trees in great numbers were obliterated, further isolating the fruit from an American population on the move.
Increasingly, Americans of all classes were buying fruit from grocers, but the obstinate pawpaw does not like the very idea of grocers and threw up all sorts of obstacles to commercialization. First, pawpaws are available for only a few weeks a year, so it’s difficult to generate consumer loyalty. Second, pawpaws that are picked too early or too late are unpalatable and can cause gastrointestinal disturbances. Third, pawpaws give little if any outward visual sign of ripeness, so the only way to determine when a particular piece of fruit is ready for picking is to gently and expertly squeeze it; no mechanized crop-picking. Fourth, the act of squeezing can cause unsightly bruising, and modern consumers detest imperfect-looking fruit. Fifth, pawpaw fruits are fragile, and prone to damage in shipping. And sixth, separating the sweet, custardy pulp from the huge seeds is an arduous task, also resistant to mechanization. You may want a pawpaw, but it’s not clear that the pawpaw wants you.
Hence, by the early 20th century, pawpaws were mostly a treat for country folk—or merely a nostalgic memory of elderly country folk. To a remarkable degree the tree was not only unused—it was forgotten. That almost changed in 1916, when, as Moore wrote:
“the American [Genetic] Association announced a contest to find the best pawpaws in America. … Writing in their publication, the Journal of Heredity, they asserted that the pawpaw’s ‘drawbacks [could] probably be removed by intelligent breeding.’”
(In passing, I’ll note that the American Genetic Association (AGA), founded in 1903 as the American Breeder’s Association, was, according to a University of Missouri site, “the first scientific organization in the U.S. to recognize the importance of Mendel’s Laws and to support eugenic research.” They were a group that contemplated breeding people the way you breed cattle or soybeans. But today’s article is on breeding fruit, not people, so we’ll save the eugenics for another day.)
A contestant had to send a photo of his or her tree, plus six pieces of fruit, to the AGA’s offices in Washington, DC. Again, from Moore:
“Six fruits arriving in good condition is a tall order even with today’s modern advances in speed and packaging. Again, picked too early, and the fruit won’t ripen; picked too late, and the package arrives rank, sticky, and full of flies. Nevertheless, it was accomplished. The association received reports from more than 230 different sites, and fruit from seventy-five trees [in at least 18 states].”
In 1916, the year of the contest, two wild undomesticated plants were poised to become the next big fruit crops for cultivation and mass marketing. Both were untamed species whose fruits one gathered in the wild. Both were resistant to human cultivation. One was the pawpaw. The other was the blueberry. Moore describes how blueberry cultivation benefited in that period from relentless work by U.S. Department of Agriculture botanist Frederick Vernon Coville. The first domesticated blueberries were released in 1916.
Pawpaw cultivation suffered from bad luck. It, too, had a champion—cultivator George A. Zimmerman, who began selective breeding of the tree in 1923. But, tragically, Zimmerman suffered an early death in 1941, and, for many decades, that put an end to his efforts and, to a considerable extent, to pawpaw cultivation efforts in general.
Shipley’s 2022 article notes that pawpaws did linger in one distant corner of America’s collective memory. It’s in a somewhat-remembered children’s song called “Where Is Suzie?”
"Where, oh where, is pretty little Suzie? Where, oh where, is pretty little Suzie? Where, oh where, is pretty little Suzie?" asks the traditional folk song. "Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch."
But very likely, few people hearing that song had any idea what it referred to. But the thrust of Shipley’s lengthy article is that:
“Across large swaths of North America, an ancient fruit is growing wild but largely forgotten. However, a community of foodies, farmers and scientists is eagerly trying to change that.”
Over a century has passed since the AGA’s contest, and over 80 years have passed since Zimmerman’s death. In recent years however, studies resurfaced from the 1916 contest, from Zimmerman’s efforts, and from others in the field. A new generation of pawpaw enthusiasts rekindled the effort to domesticate the tree and to make its fruit mass marketable. Orchards of trees most amenable to domestication have been planted. Kentucky State University established a research program devoted to pawpaws. Pawpaws show up at farmer’s markets for an ever-so-brief time in late summer, early fall.
I’ve not mentioned what pawpaws taste like. Why? Because I haven’t the faintest idea. While I’m the proud owner of two fairly immature young trees, I’ve never seen a tree growing in the wild. Never seen a piece of their fruit. Never seen them at farmer’s markets. Shipley quotes one of the University of Kentucky experts, who explains the flavor:
“The fruit's texture has been compared to custard, and the flavour is ‘a blend of banana and mango, with undertones of vanilla, caramel, pineapple, coconut and melon, depending on the cultivar’, said Sheri Crabtree, a horticulture and research extension associate at Kentucky State University's pawpaw research programme.”
Maybe this fall, my trees will yield fruit (though probably not yet). Maybe I’ll wander the banks of the Potomac near Mount Vernon and forage a bit. Maybe I’ll find some at a farmer’s market.
I’ve been a tree enthusiast for at least 60 years. So, how did I not know about a tree that I’ve lived near for most of my life? The story above is the key to understanding how that happened. I still have some of my childhood tree books. Notably, I have a replacement copy of the little book that usually accompanied me on my meanderings through the woods: Trees: A Guide to Familiar American Trees, by Herbert S. Zim and Alexander C. Martin—with its lovely mid-century illustrations by Dorothea and Sy Barlow. The pawpaw is nowhere to found among the books 143 species. The same with other books I examined. For the most part, 20th century life erased the memory of this tree—even from those whose task in life was to explain the variety of trees to others in America. What else is all around us that we don’t know about.
Lagniappe
I have no idea how many times over the past nine years that I’ve watched this stunning video depicting the destruction of Pompeii in 79 AD. It was produced by Australia’s Zero One Studios for a 2009 immersive exhibit at the Melbourne Museum. At a little over eight minutes in length, the video is a worthy distraction—just long enough for one cup of coffee. As brilliant and evocative as the animation is, for me, the most haunting part is the stark words on the screen just before the end-credits roll—a description of what followed in the years following the apocalypse. In just a few years, the memory of where Pompeii had stood vanished from the collective memory of Rome as completely as the memory of the pawpaw vanished from the American memory in the 20th century.
Okay - call me a sucker for the unique. I have some space that seems to grow trees well. I found this book:
https://a.co/d/fQ3NZ18
For the Love of Pawpaws: A Mini Manual for Growing and Caring for Pawpaws--From Seed to Table
Maybe in a few years I'll have some to try.
As usual - love your writing.
I love this so much. I'm a big believer in humanity's need to re-establish its kinship with the more-than-human world and this is a beautiful vehicle for folks to enter that journey. I'm a performer and producer and I'd be happy to be a sounding-board for you as you develop this...