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Episode: Field Trip: A Hawaiian Breadfruit Rev-u’lu-tion

Author: Alie Ward
Duration: 00:37:00

Episode Shownotes

What even IS a breadfruit? How do you cook it? Why have Pacific Islanders grown it for so long? Can it solve world hunger? And what does it have to do with an infamous 18th century mutiny on the high seas? Pack your bags and hop aboard for not one

but two island excursions to learn all about this rev-u’lu-tionary tropical staple. We start on a breezy Catalina Island dock to hear about the ethnobotany and ecobiology of breadfruit from Dr. Noa Kekuewa Lincoln before making our way to a farm tucked away on Hawaii’s Big Island for a tour from research assistant and PhD candidate Dolly Autufuga. On the itinerary: learning where it grows to planting one in your backyard to what’s that white sticky stuff and how do you make sure it doesn’t drop on your noggin? Let’s go Field Tripping. Learn more about the Rev-u’lu-tion at EatBreadfruit.comFollow Dr. Noa Kekuewa Lincoln at the Hawai‘i ‘Ulu CooperativeA donation went to the Chef Hui Fund, via EatBreadfruit.comMore episode sources and linksSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesOther episodes you may enjoy:Indigenous Cusinology (NATIVE COOKING), Ethnoecology (ETHNOBOTANY/NATIVE PLANTS), Indigenous Fashionology (NATIVE CLOTHING), Pomology (APPLES), Indigenous Pedology (SOIL SCIENCE), Island Ecology (ISLANDS), Foraging Ecology (EATING WILD PLANTS), Coffeeology (YEP, COFFEE), Black American Magriology (FOOD, RACE, & CULTURE), Diabetology (BLOOD SUGAR), Dendrology Encore, Oceanology Encore, Volcanology,More Field Trips you may enjoy:Birds of Prey and Raptor Facts, I Chased the 2024 Eclipse with Umbraphiles, I Take You to the Making of a Mural, I Go France and Learn Weird France StuffSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes!Follow Ologies on Instagram and BlueskyFollow Alie Ward on Instagram and TikTokProduced, researched, co-written, and edited by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio ProductionsAdditional editing by Jake ChaffeeManaging Director: Susan HaleScheduling Producer: Noel DilworthTranscripts by Aveline Malek Website by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Summary

In this episode of 'Ologies with Alie Ward,' titled 'Field Trip: A Hawaiian Breadfruit Rev-u’lu-tion,' Alie explores the historical and ecological significance of breadfruit, a staple food for Pacific Islanders. Dr. Noa Kekuewa Lincoln discusses the ethnobotany and challenges of promoting breadfruit cultivation amidst rising diabetes due to Western diets. The episode highlights the nutritional benefits of breadfruit and its potential role in addressing food security. In a visit to a farm, PhD candidate Dolly Autufuga shares practical tips on growing and cooking breadfruit, emphasizing its cultural and culinary versatility.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Field Trip: A Hawaiian Breadfruit Rev-u’lu-tion) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_03
Oh hey, it's that friend who looks so good in hats, they never don't wear a hat. Allie Ward, let's take a field trip. Coincidentally, not coincidentally at all, this is Indigenous History Month here in the United States of colonized America.

00:00:14 Speaker_03
So we're heading to the Pacific to chat about foods of Native populations and this movement to study and cultivate and reintroduce them. Last summer, I had this rare opportunity while doing a symposium for USC's Storytellers program.

00:00:28 Speaker_03
I was teaching climate scientists about SCICOM, and I got to meet some really lovely and super brilliant folks. And one of them told me that he was working in breadfruit.

00:00:38 Speaker_03
And knowing Jack about it, of course, I had to corner him on a boat dock on Catalina Island to start asking him one million questions. One of these you may have, like me, is what is a breadfruit? Is it a baked good?

00:00:51 Speaker_03
Is it a sweet, juicy thing on a vine? Is it a carb? Is it meat? What's happening here? And we'll dig in, but first a quick primer is that the islands of Hawaii are right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

00:01:02 Speaker_03
It's like 2,000 miles in either direction from Polynesia or North America. So about a thousand years ago, folks from Polynesia cruised over on these big double-hulled canoes guided by stars. They got to Hawaii.

00:01:17 Speaker_03
They were like, these volcano-made islands are great. Let's live here. Let's bring our pigs, chickens, dogs, and foods like coconut and sugarcane and bananas and taro root. and breadfruit.

00:01:28 Speaker_03
So many centuries later, European explorers, we'll call them landed, then thought the islands were sweet and they were pretty, they liked the food.

00:01:37 Speaker_03
So the roasted breadfruit smelled like bread to these colonizers who called it breadfruit, although native Hawaiians have plenty of other names for it, which we'll hear about in a bit.

00:01:46 Speaker_03
But a botanist on Captain Cook's ship took some notes in praise of this food source. He wrote, their chiefest sustenance, breadfruit, is procured with no more trouble than that of climbing a tree and pulling it down.

00:01:59 Speaker_03
If a man should, in the course of his lifetime, plant ten such trees, which might take the labor of an hour, he would as completely fulfill his duty to his own as well as future generations

00:02:11 Speaker_03
that we Europeans can do by toiling in the cold of winter to sow and in the heat of summer to reap the annual produce of our soil." They were like, wow, what are we doing working so hard for wheat when breadfruit is good and easy to grow and harvest?

00:02:27 Speaker_03
Anyway, back to this dock outside of LA, California. at the USC Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability's Storymaker Symposium of all these climate scientists.

00:02:37 Speaker_03
So this wonderful breadfruit expert studied environmental engineering at Yale and did doctoral research at Stanford University in biogeochemistry and social ecology.

00:02:48 Speaker_03
He's now a professor of indigenous crops and cropping systems at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. And he said, if I were ever in Hawaii, he'd be happy to have me visit for a tour of his breadfruit farm.

00:02:59 Speaker_03
And so months later, already headed to Hawaii for some interviews and a visit to family, I stopped by, I met some breadfruit and some dogs and some other researchers in this world. And now we have this scrumptious field trip on which to take you.

00:03:15 Speaker_03
So all aboard, let's go breadfruit growing with ethnobotanist, indigenous ecobiologist, Dr. Noah Kekueva-Lincoln, and research assistant and soil scientist who's working on her PhD at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Dali Altafuna, for this field trip, a Hawaiian breadfruit revolution.

00:03:52 Speaker_03
So to set the scene, I've been on Catalina Island outside of LA for several days with about a half a dozen climate scientists and science communicators like Liz Neely and Ed Yong.

00:04:03 Speaker_03
And for days, we've all been sharing meals and telling campfire tales over glasses of wine, listening to stories of each other's lives and just becoming pals.

00:04:12 Speaker_03
So it's near the end of the trip and now Noah and I are walking down a hill from the USC Wrigley Institute to the rocky shoreline where a boat is docked, bobbing as it waits to take these climate scientists to a final dinner together.

00:04:26 Speaker_03
You have a minute while we walk? Yeah, we'll talk, we'll walk and talk.

00:04:30 Speaker_00
Noah Lincoln, he, him.

00:04:32 Speaker_03
And what's the genus and species of the breadfruit that you study the most?

00:04:37 Speaker_00
Well, they're all the same species. They are? Ardocarpus altilis.

00:04:41 Speaker_03
Okay. Are you an ardocarpologist? Have you looked up to see if that's an ology? You knew I was going to be here. Did you look up earlier?

00:04:49 Speaker_00
I did not. I tend to lump it all under our broader work of ethnobotany or ethnobiology. I guess we want an ology in there.

00:04:56 Speaker_03
I was going to say, how dare you with the ethony. You might as well come at me with an X. I can't do anything with that or an ism. And a quick primer, breadfruit is in the fig family and it's closely related to jackfruit.

00:05:07 Speaker_03
And there are three related species in the genus Ardocarpus, which means in Greek, breadfruit, literally. So most of the cultivated breadfruits descend from the species known as breadnut, which is native to the Papua New Guinea area.

00:05:21 Speaker_03
And in general, breadfruit is bigger than you might picture it, like some way as much as a watermelon, and they look like huge green dragon eggs. Though their varieties can be as tiny as an apple, some of them.

00:05:35 Speaker_03
Also, like blackberries, breadfruit are a compound fruit. So each big old breadfruit is actually up to 2,000 flowers fused into one mega fruit, which is why it looks spiky or scaled like lizard or I suppose dragon skin. Okay, breadfruit.

00:05:53 Speaker_03
What was the first time you ever ate it? Because you're born on Hawaii.

00:05:57 Speaker_00
Yes. So, I mean, we had it as kids, you know, but pretty sparsely. Okay. And probably been working on breadfruit for about 10 years now.

00:06:06 Speaker_00
And I would say one of the things that was an epiphany to me was how challenging it is, right, to change our personal habits and particularly around the way we eat. And so, you know, especially with our staple foods, they're our comfort foods, right?

00:06:22 Speaker_00
We grew up on rice and transitioning to, you know, particularly our indigenous starches, of which breadfruits won. It was a very challenging and deliberate switch that took a lot of years.

00:06:36 Speaker_03
And staple foods are the ones that we tend to eat every day. And different cultures tend to lean toward their own staple foods. Think like wheat and rice and corn and millet and yam, potatoes, sweet potatoes.

00:06:50 Speaker_03
And according to the book, Thinking Like an Island, Navigating a Sustainable Future in Hawaii, before the Western colonization of Hawaii by whalers and missionaries, the hundreds of thousands of people on the Hawaiian islands were self-sufficient for food.

00:07:04 Speaker_03
but now 85% of food is imported. So breadfruit has held this important place in terms of staple foods, and Noah and his colleagues are bringing it back. And so the first time you tried it, do you remember? Was it mixed in with something else you had?

00:07:19 Speaker_03
Was it fresh off a tree? Can you eat it right off a tree or must it be cooked?

00:07:23 Speaker_00
You can. You know, breadfruit is a fruit. It ripens, it goes through stages. So unlike most of our staple foods like, you know, rice or potatoes, but it's diverse.

00:07:35 Speaker_00
You know, in its youngest stage, maybe about the size of a baseball, it's a lot like a vegetable. You can pickle it. People make things that taste like artichoke hearts, basically. Oh, yum. And then, you know, it matures.

00:07:47 Speaker_00
And that's it's, you know, basically at that point, it's a big potato on a tree. So that's when most people eat it. That's the stage I first had it. And it doesn't stick in your mind, per se. Like nobody grabs a potato and tears into it and goes, yum!

00:08:01 Speaker_00
You don't know. You sure about that? You slather up sour cream and bacon and butter and then it, you know, takes on the flavor of what you're doing. But, you know, it's a staple.

00:08:11 Speaker_00
It's a starch and in some cases is a little bland, but if you know what to do with it, it can be delicious.

00:08:18 Speaker_03
We kept ambling toward the dock where other scientists from the symposium had started to gather to board the boat to dinner. Does it take a while for the tree to mature in order to bear fruit, or does it make fruit even when it's young?

00:08:32 Speaker_00
This is a lot of the work we're doing, kind of these basic agronomy questions.

00:08:36 Speaker_00
And so, for instance, we have a trial in Hawaii, spread out across the state in different habitats, you know, a sea spray habitat, a high wind habitat, a high elevation cold temperature habitat.

00:08:48 Speaker_00
And we've seen fruit as young as 18 months, and we've seen trees take up to seven years to start producing. So it depends on your site, your environment, your variety you're growing, all those things.

00:09:01 Speaker_03
And for more on this, you can see NOAA's co-authored 2020 paper, Cultivation Potential Projections of Breadfruit Under Climate Change Scenarios Using an Empirically Validated Suitability Model Calibrated in Hawaii, which warns that if we want to figure out how to grow food that can withstand future climate change, we've got to figure it out now to get ahead of it.

00:09:21 Speaker_03
And in perhaps the only good news about climate change, this study concluded that there is substantial and increasing potential for future breadfruit production in Hawaii as the climate heats up. The trees like the warmth.

00:09:35 Speaker_03
And grows best in the tropics or closer to the equator.

00:09:39 Speaker_00
It is definitely a tropical tree. So even in Hawaii, you know, we're technically subtropics. Everyone thinks of us as tropical, but compared to places like Tahiti and Bali, like, we're actually kind of cold. Oh, wow.

00:09:51 Speaker_00
So when you move up the mountain in Hawaii, breadfruit will pretty much only grow below about a thousand feet. And above that, it starts getting too cold.

00:09:59 Speaker_04
You wouldn't even have thought of that, because the volcanoes are so tall.

00:10:03 Speaker_00
They are, yeah. Mauna Kea is technically the tallest mountain on Earth, if you measure it from the sea floor. 14,000 feet above sea level.

00:10:12 Speaker_00
So, yeah, you'll sit on the beach, 85 degrees, sunny, drinking a Mai Tai, and there's snow on top of the mountain right up there.

00:10:18 Speaker_04
Oh, God, that's crazy.

00:10:20 Speaker_03
And our very first episode of Ologies was volcanology, in case you need a primer on that. But with beaches all the way up to these huge volcanic mountains, essentially, Hawaii has a broad range of soil types and elevations and thus ecosystems.

00:10:35 Speaker_03
And there's a classification called Holdridge Life Zones. And out of the 38 types of zone on the planet, Hawaii has 27 of them.

00:10:45 Speaker_03
And though breadfruit isn't native to the islands themselves, again it originated in New Guinea and it was brought to Hawaii by early Polynesian settlers nearly a thousand years ago, breadfruit grows well in many parts of the islands.

00:10:58 Speaker_03
And there's a seedless variety, those are the ones that are commonly eaten, they have to be propagated by grafting a lot like apples, which we have a whole palmology episode about that.

00:11:08 Speaker_03
Oh, and remember the Captain Cook expedition that I talked about in the intro? Well, once the European colonizers found out how great breadfruit was, they wanted to take it to the tropics to use it as a staple food for enslaved populations.

00:11:23 Speaker_03
And one absolutely bonker story, I'll sum it up quick, it involves that botanist that I mentioned in the intro traveling on a ship for a breadfruit tree gathering mission.

00:11:33 Speaker_03
And in order to fit this breadfruit tree nursery in the ship, he had to cramp the ship's crew in super close quarters, which they hated. A bunch of the crew got blackout drunk, I guess, spreading a bunch of pretty sexy diseases between them.

00:11:47 Speaker_03
The angry captain would flog his underlings. There was a coconut heist from the captain's personal stash. And then what has been called the most notorious mutiny in naval history, the mutiny on the bounty.

00:12:00 Speaker_03
which resulted in a lot of destroyed breadfruit trees, and then the ousted captain's new ship run aground on the Great Barrier Reef. Some of the mutineers also started a new colony on an island. So, breadfruit.

00:12:14 Speaker_03
In a moment, we're going to talk about a new type of revolution, this time in the hands of Native Hawaiians and ethnobotany enthusiasts like Noah.

00:12:23 Speaker_00
My academic trainings has been in ecology and soil science, but you know as a child I was very strongly engaged in our traditional plants, our crops. I was taught how to make herbal medicines, use our traditional foods, and essentially that is what

00:12:41 Speaker_00
people go off to school for her to learn to become an ethnobotanist. Yeah.

00:12:45 Speaker_00
And so, you know, I had very informal training in ethnobotany and have kind of come full circle in my life back around and really re-engaged with a lot of these crops that I was exposed to as a kid.

00:12:56 Speaker_03
Yeah. Now, were your parents also born in Hawaii or did they move there at a certain point? How did your family end up there?

00:13:03 Speaker_00
Well, my father's side is ancestrally Hawaiian. So, you know, we can trace our lineage back 16 generations, probably further, but that's where, you know, it kind of fizzles in terms of tracking things down. That whole side of my family is in Hawaii.

00:13:18 Speaker_00
We're based in Hawaii. in Hawaii and yeah, it's home.

00:13:21 Speaker_03
And when you first started trying to promote more agriculture around breadfruit, it wasn't as easy a sell as you thought it was going to be. Did you think people were going to say, yes, absolutely. It's time that breadfruit got its due in the sun.

00:13:37 Speaker_03
But what was difficult about convincing communities that this was something worth investing in?

00:13:42 Speaker_00
Mm-hmm. I would say I absolutely did not expect people to jump on it. I mean, we were passionate about breadfruit because we knew about it. And that's one of the big barriers. People don't know about it.

00:13:53 Speaker_03
Did you know about it? Now you know about it.

00:13:56 Speaker_00
And to get people excited about it, you know, to get them to engage in it, to use it, to bring it back into the food system, we knew was going to be a big educational push. And that's kind of what we've been hanging our coat on, right?

00:14:09 Speaker_00
If we can just teach people, expose people, all these wonderful things about the food, like, of course, they're going to have it. But, you know, if you just put it in the shelf, people walk into a store, they got no idea what it is.

00:14:19 Speaker_00
You know, that's scary. I don't want to grab a new food. I don't know how to cook or use or anything.

00:14:24 Speaker_03
Is it going to sit in the crisper until it's rotting? And then you're like, I spent seven bucks on that.

00:14:29 Speaker_04
Why'd I do that?

00:14:31 Speaker_03
Is seven bucks an exaggeration? We did some fact-checking, and the actual going rate for a whole breadfruit, it depends on where you live.

00:14:38 Speaker_03
But in some places, it's less than two bucks a pound, with the average breadfruit weighing two and a half pounds, just over a kilo. So what, that's like five, seven bucks.

00:14:47 Speaker_03
But a 2019 study, Interactions Between People and Breadfruit in Hawaii, Consumption, Preparation, and Sourcing Patterns, in the journal Sustainability, found that most Hawaiians ate breadfruit three times a year or less.

00:15:01 Speaker_03
And over 70% of those people got it from a friend's tree. Although having your own breadfruit tree meant eating it about four times more than the people without the trees. So imagine having a tree with three pound potatoes just grown in your yard.

00:15:17 Speaker_03
In Hawaiian, it's ulu. Revolution. Do you get it? And their logo has a fist uprising, clutching a branch bearing a big old breadfruit.

00:15:39 Speaker_00
So we got into the broader food system of Ulu out of establishing a breadfruit farm. And so we've had a lot of time on the farm with groups of people and friends, you know, doing hard physical labor and oftentimes raining.

00:15:54 Speaker_00
But then afterwards, you're often sitting around and just kind of kicking ideas. And that's when a lot of, I think, kind of the catchphrases have come out. how do we get, how do we share this excitement, right?

00:16:06 Speaker_00
We're so stoked on this food and how do we get it out? So there's a lot of things that came out of those early sessions. We called it a solutionary food, which is the revolutionary solution that like our food systems need.

00:16:19 Speaker_00
You know, I do science because I want to see the effect of it in our communities. I want to see it applied and change to make the world a better place. And I think unless you really get it outside of our little circles, it's never going to do that.

00:16:35 Speaker_03
And Noah had just become a tenured professor, but he was at the Wrigley Storymakers Program to hone skills at communicating his science to a broader public and especially to the communities affected by food scarcity and whose lives will be impacted positively through more sustainable farming.

00:16:53 Speaker_03
Where can people find out more about what you do or about Breadfruit? If people are like, a bread what? Where do you point them?

00:16:59 Speaker_00
Well, if you want to learn about Breadfruit, I would definitely suggest going to eatbreadfruit.com. That is the Hawaii Ulu Producers Cooperative. We work collectively with them to get a lot of the information and stories out there.

00:17:12 Speaker_00
So you can learn about it, you can learn how to cook it, you can buy it, you can engage with it, you can read stories about the farmers, you can see cooking demonstration videos. So yeah, that's again part of this educational campaign.

00:17:25 Speaker_00
So yeah, you want to learn about breadfruit, eatbreadfruit.com.

00:17:28 Speaker_03
Again, that's eatbreadfruit.com. Favorite recipe?

00:17:32 Speaker_00
Oh boy. So for early engagement, I really like twice-cooked patties. So you steam them, mash it up with some diced onions, lee and perrins, salt, pepper, garlic, a little bit of oregano maybe. Slam those out into patties and then pan fry them. Nice.

00:17:49 Speaker_00
That's a good one. Sounds like a latke. Yes. A little bit like a latke, but less oily. To me, our favorite product we actually have out is a breadfruit chocolate mousse. So I told you breadfruit goes through stages.

00:18:03 Speaker_00
So after that mature potato stage, it actually ripens, it sweetens, it softens. And you take that ripe, sweet, soft breadfruit, and we blend it with local honey, coconut milk, and local cacao. And then we freeze those, so it's a mousse.

00:18:19 Speaker_00
But it's vegan, 100% local, and 95% breadfruit. But you would never know that when you stick it in your mouth. It's delicious.

00:18:28 Speaker_03
I later finally made it to the Big Island in Hawaii, and I was able to visit the Ulu Co-op and take home some breadfruit flour. And yes, I got to try this chocolate breadfruit mousse, and it was great.

00:18:39 Speaker_03
It was like a frozen yogurt custard texture and had this nutty flavor. I loved it.

00:18:44 Speaker_04
And a complete protein too?

00:18:46 Speaker_00
It is, yeah. Breadfruit has a strong human health component to it. So yeah, complete protein, all seven amino acids, fairly high in vitamins and minerals.

00:18:56 Speaker_00
There's a lot of emerging research, you know, it's a little bit more close to home, but particularly for our Native Hawaiian Pacific Islanders are very high at risk for type 2 diabetes, hypertension,

00:19:09 Speaker_00
And there's a lot of research emerging showing that returning to traditional staples and starches drastically reduce those kind of diet-related diseases.

00:19:19 Speaker_00
And so with breadfruit, that's related to a relatively low glycemic index, meaning that when you eat it, you're full for a while. You don't burn right through it, want to eat again in an hour or so.

00:19:30 Speaker_03
And for more on how your body processes food, you can see the wonderful two-part diabetology episodes on blood sugar with Dr. Mike Natter, who is a self-described diabetic diabetologist.

00:19:42 Speaker_03
And in it, we go over the glycemic index, which essentially rates foods based on their blood sugar and insulin impact. And the higher the number on the glycemic index, the more potential for some adverse blood sugar effects. And plain white bread,

00:19:57 Speaker_03
is up there at 90 out of 100. White rice is 70. Boiled potatoes are high at 70. But breadfruit is low to medium at 47 up to 70. And how it's prepared and what it's mixed with also makes a huge difference.

00:20:13 Speaker_03
Now, a 2015 study in the journal Trends in Food Science and Technology titled Breadfruit, a traditional crop with potential to prevent hunger and mitigate diabetes in Oceania, explained that around 1950, studies found that Pacific Islanders were, quote, remarkably physically fit with no evidence of malnutrition or obesity and no incidence of diabetes.

00:20:36 Speaker_03
But just 30 years later in the 1980s, incidence of diabetes and obesity had skyrocketed. and that now Pacific Island nations have some of the highest rates of diabetes worldwide.

00:20:49 Speaker_03
And obesity I know is a loaded word, but it's the medical term that researchers and doctors use when describing certain body compositions that may put people at greater risk for metabolic and cardiovascular disease.

00:21:02 Speaker_03
Now, other recent papers have found that a diabetes prevalence of 40% in adults is common among Pacific countries as diets stray away from traditional crops to these imported and westernized foods.

00:21:16 Speaker_03
And even back in 2009, there was a paper titled Against the Tide of Change, Diet and Health in the Pacific Islands. It was in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.

00:21:26 Speaker_03
And it warned that for many of the small dispersed countries of the Pacific, there is a grave concern about international trading in food, not only because of the adverse effects on health, like diabetes, but also in terms of food security.

00:21:42 Speaker_03
because there's an increasing level of dependence on these food imports. And that's another issue because the staple foods that are westernized that are being imported tend not to grow well near the equator.

00:21:53 Speaker_03
So breadfruit is kind of on the way to swoop in and solve a lot of pressing problems for Pacific Islanders. Wow, it must be so easy to be passionate about this because it's outside, it's food, it's tasty, it's tied to your heritage and culture.

00:22:06 Speaker_03
It like maybe can save massive amounts of people from hunger. I mean, it must be hard to put your laptop away at night and be like, okay, it's time for me to just kick back.

00:22:17 Speaker_00
Yeah, and you left out working with the farmers, which is one of the best parts, because every time you go visit a farmer, talk to them, share with them, you leave with big baskets of fresh mangoes and lychee and all sorts of goodies.

00:22:30 Speaker_03
Thank you so much for doing this.

00:22:31 Speaker_00
This is great. Amazing.

00:22:34 Speaker_03
So Noah said if I were ever in Hawaii, come on down to the farm and as it happened, months later I was headed there for a few interviews and field trips and to see some family.

00:22:42 Speaker_03
So we got to tour a breadfruit farm and taste it and get lost in a jungle and even harvest some. Now all of that will be after the break but first let's donate to a cause and this week it's going to the Hawaii-based Chef Hui Fund.

00:22:55 Speaker_03
which connects the culinary world with their community through a strong network of local chefs, produce providers, and educators to deepen the connection to farmers and ranchers and schools and community organizations in an effort to build a more robust food system.

00:23:10 Speaker_03
So a link to them is up at eatbreadfruit.com and we'll link in the show notes. So thank you to sponsors of the show for making that possible. Okay, hop in.

00:23:19 Speaker_03
Let's find this farm, which is one of many research sites that Noah and his team of scientists are monitoring and cultivating to learn where and how to grow and distribute more ulu as a staple crop for the islands.

00:23:33 Speaker_01
And it's absolutely beautiful, all of it. Allie, I'm guessing you don't have very good service to make a phone call.

00:23:40 Speaker_04
I don't. I can try and see. I've got one bar. Hey, Dolly. Hey, it's Allie.

00:23:47 Speaker_03
Yeah, we were lost.

00:23:48 Speaker_04
Yeah, sorry, we're in kind of a spotty jungle. We've been through over two little bridges, and we're now crossing another one-lane bridge. Okay, so we're headed the right direction? Awesome, thank you so much. See you in a sec. Bye. We're really close.

00:24:06 Speaker_04
Is that her truck? Yeah, there we go. Yeah, okay, cool, she waved. Hi, Dolly. Oh, look, this looks like an orchard on our left.

00:24:15 Speaker_01
Oh, she's opening the gate.

00:24:18 Speaker_03
Hi Dolly! So first off, can you tell me your first and last name? So we're looking at some very huge trees with giant leaves and a couple of roosters, which is amazing. How many breadfruit trees do you have here? We have 30 trees. 30 trees!

00:24:34 Speaker_03
And there's four varieties plus the ancestry, so five in total. If someone comes in here and is like, I don't even know what a breadfruit is, what do you show them? The fruit first.

00:24:45 Speaker_05
Okay, cool.

00:24:47 Speaker_04
Yeah, so these ones are ready. They're matured. And so do they get smoother when they're mature like that?

00:24:52 Speaker_05
Yes. When they're smaller, there's a lot spikier. These are different varieties. What? This is the Hawaiian variety. Okay. And this is the ancestry one. This is the breadnut. So this one is like similar to a jackfruit, a durian.

00:25:05 Speaker_05
And this one is the breadfruit, which is, it becomes smoother as it matures.

00:25:10 Speaker_03
These are the size of an oblong cantaloupe or a large baby's head. And when you say ancestry, does that mean it's an older like cultivar? Yes, the old, the ancestry first kind. And then is there an advantage to having different cultivars?

00:25:26 Speaker_03
Like are these easier to grow or harvest or do they take like less time to mature?

00:25:30 Speaker_05
While these ones are more woody in terms of their growth, they are bigger in size compared to other varieties. They're a lot smaller, so these can feed the whole family. And they're different in flesh, too.

00:25:43 Speaker_05
The smaller one, which is our mafala, is the yellow flesh. So you can do chips, stuff like that. But this one, you can put them in coconut milk or, you know, roast it.

00:25:53 Speaker_03
And then what about the Ancestry one?

00:25:55 Speaker_05
So this one, it has a lot of seeds in it. A lot of people say you can roast the seed and eat it. But because of that, we're growing these for propagation reasons.

00:26:06 Speaker_03
So you will take the seeds and then you'll use those to make more trees?

00:26:09 Speaker_05
How old are these trees? These are seven years old, seven, eight years old. They were planted in 2017. So this is one of seven fresh fruit sites we have around the island.

00:26:20 Speaker_03
Dolly told me that their research involves seven different growing sites in various ecosystems, from a sea spray environment to mountains on several different islands, including Maui and this one we're at on the Big Island. What environment is this?

00:26:34 Speaker_03
Is this a sea spray? Is this a jungle? It has more rain.

00:26:37 Speaker_05
It gets more rain compared to other sites and good soil.

00:26:41 Speaker_03
I visited this farm with my wonderful in-laws and your pod mom, Jarrett, who asked about some patches of dried sappy stuff.

00:26:48 Speaker_01
What's the significance of this kind of like almost like syrup or something that dried on the outside?

00:26:51 Speaker_05
So they call that a latex. It's not only on the fruit, but throughout the whole tree.

00:26:58 Speaker_03
But that's one indicator of maturity. And by latex, they don't mean the latex you're probably thinking about. Latex just means liquid in Latin, and it is just like a milky liquid from plants.

00:27:09 Speaker_03
and latex can be composed of a whole botanic soup of proteins and alkaloids and starches and sugars and oils and tannins and resins which gum up when they're exposed to air and they act kind of like a free band-aid for the tree.

00:27:25 Speaker_03
And for more on this, you can see the wonderful dendrology two-parter with J. Casey Clapp and breadfruit latex specifically. Should you lap it off a tree? Let's not.

00:27:35 Speaker_03
Traditionally, it's been used for boat cocking and bird trapping and healing skin infections, nerve pain, and I guess you could ingest it to help with diarrhea if you have that issue.

00:27:48 Speaker_03
Now, it was April when we were crunching around the leaves, which serve as great mulch for the trees, Dolly told me. But when is it breadfruit season? I was clueless. But Dolly said that harvest season is from June or July all the way to December.

00:28:03 Speaker_03
And in the past, they have harvested a thousand pounds of breadfruit in one day from this one small orchard. But this little farm we're recording at is a champion producer with an even longer harvest window.

00:28:15 Speaker_05
It goes on to like January, February, just because I think it gets perfect rain, good soil, just a good site. You know, like what's the biggest spread for you guys? Oh, definitely the Ulu Hawai'i. Yeah. It's about four kg. It's big.

00:28:32 Speaker_05
It's like bigger than my head. Huge, huge fruits we get off from those.

00:28:36 Speaker_03
That's like eight pounds, like the size of a bowling ball.

00:28:40 Speaker_05
The leaves are more broader and then the fruits are very different. They are more yellow compared to other varieties. So this is from the Rotuman, Fijian side. Yellow flesh fruit, really good for making ulu chips.

00:28:55 Speaker_05
And then it kind of like an ostrich skin texture on the outside. It also goes smoother in texture when it goes yellow, it's mature. Then you know it's just like a green light. You're like, okay, sweet, get that. How do you get up there?

00:29:08 Speaker_05
So we maintain our trees by pruning every year. You got to at least have 12 feet high in order for us to get all the fruit. So it's just me. So I have fruit pickers. I just load them in the truck and that's it.

00:29:23 Speaker_05
How do you make sure that there's not a bunch of breadfruit on the ground just being wasted? So I try to, every time I harvest, I would know all these ones would be ready by next week.

00:29:32 Speaker_05
Or if something happens, I don't turn up next week, I know they're going to be ready, so I just take them ahead of time.

00:29:39 Speaker_03
Oh, and they can ripen off the tree?

00:29:41 Speaker_05
Yes, they can.

00:29:42 Speaker_03
Oh, kind of like a banana or apples? Yes.

00:29:44 Speaker_05
Have you always studied fruit? How did you get into this? So I started with Noah Lincoln as a master's student from Samoa. I came here in 2018 on a scholarship, but I was mainly focusing on soil fertility.

00:29:58 Speaker_05
And then he had this grant on breadfruit and I jumped it. And then I'm from Samoa, we eat ulu all the time. So yeah, it's perfect. Do you have a way that you like it prepared? So I'm traditional.

00:30:10 Speaker_05
I like it the old way of putting in coconut milk when it's like perfect maturity, a little bit soft, but still firm. And then you peel that and put it in water, boil, take out the water and put coconut milk. Yeah, that's my favorite way.

00:30:24 Speaker_03
Okay, let's say that you plant one, but you're hungry and impatient.

00:30:28 Speaker_01
And it takes how long for a tree to produce fruit in the first place?

00:30:32 Speaker_05
From like three to five years, you'll get fruits. And then I've read in literature that it can go up to 50 years. It will still produce.

00:30:40 Speaker_01
That's just so much year round. Yeah. Are there ways to preserve it for the off months?

00:30:45 Speaker_05
So there is one island that used to do a lot of the fermenting. They dig a hole and put all the ulu inside. And we have new organizations now like Ulu Co-op that takes all the fruit in and make use of all that harvest.

00:31:00 Speaker_05
They froze it, they dry it, they pre-cook it. Yeah, they do all sorts of kinds of stuff.

00:31:04 Speaker_03
Yeah, flour. Do you have any tips for anyone who either has a breadfruit tree or is thinking about planting one? Like, any tips on how to make your trees happy?

00:31:15 Speaker_05
Well, as long as they're in a nice, cool environment and with space, because ulu are big trees and they require space to grow in. keep watering them every day and good soil. They'll be happy. Yeah, they'll be happy.

00:31:28 Speaker_03
And of course, location, location, location, breadfruit is grown successfully in 90 countries throughout South and Southeast Asia and Madagascar, the Caribbean, and of course, the Pacific Islands.

00:31:40 Speaker_03
Now, if you're in a tropical region, pretty much good to go. But apparently, like many Americans, breadfruit hasn't been able to thrive in Florida. Mexico and Brazil, though, have breadfruit.

00:31:52 Speaker_05
And be patient with them for a couple of years, right? Yes. Within three to five years, you'll have fruits.

00:31:58 Speaker_03
So Dolly says that these ones can grow up to 50 feet tall, but some breadfruit trees can be 85 feet tall, like an eight-story building, almost 30 meters.

00:32:09 Speaker_03
But they prune theirs back to help with airflow and to reduce the chance of disease that can flourish when these dense leaf canopies stay too moist. They also prune them to keep them about 12 feet high just for practical ladder climbing reasons.

00:32:24 Speaker_03
I mean, you try getting a breadfruit out of something the size of a building. Ever been bonked on the noggin by a breadfruit? Nope. Knock on breadfruit trees, right?

00:32:34 Speaker_03
I imagine you'd have to look up if you're picking them, make sure nothing's coming down.

00:32:39 Speaker_05
Yeah. You have to just make sure you're holding it so it doesn't drop and make sure no one's... It might fall in there.

00:32:47 Speaker_04
Do they shatter when they drop? Like if they're ripe, do they?

00:32:49 Speaker_05
If they're ripe, they do. They like, yeah.

00:32:53 Speaker_03
And then you're picking up red fruit off the ground?

00:32:55 Speaker_05
Yes, but we take them before that stage.

00:32:58 Speaker_03
So they're not just goopy goops? Mm-hmm. So some cultivars are round and spikier. Others are egg-shaped, like a big green spaghetti squash with smooth reptile scales. I wanted to cradle one like an infant and tell it it was doing a great job.

00:33:14 Speaker_05
So I did bring some fruit pickers in case you guys want to pick some ulu and take with you.

00:33:20 Speaker_04
Oh, wow. I didn't know we get a souvenir.

00:33:23 Speaker_03
That's so cool. I had no idea. So this is the part where you don't stand under it. Yes. Right. Unless you want a concussion.

00:33:31 Speaker_04
Yeah. Look at that. Yeah. It just plunks it right down. Yeah. Like a little baby in the grass. Hello.

00:33:39 Speaker_05
Cool.

00:33:41 Speaker_04
That's so heavy.

00:33:43 Speaker_05
Yeah, you need muscles for this kind of work. Oh my gosh. Yeah, who needs to go to the gym, right?

00:33:50 Speaker_03
And Dolly bounces between sites doing field work as she's a third-year PhD student. And just the day before, she was on Kauai to collect soil and leaf samples at another breadfruit farm. You know, just island hopping, talking to plants.

00:34:04 Speaker_05
There's so much opportunity with breadfruit and it's fun and it's who would not want to come out to the open air and be away from the lab and be outside and do this kind of work. So yeah, it has been great. Yeah, the fieldwork situation there.

00:34:20 Speaker_05
Yeah, the gym work you mean?

00:34:21 Speaker_04
Yeah, the gym work and the fieldwork. This is great. Thank you so much for letting us come and check this out. Yeah, thank you for having me. I forgot to pick some. It's getting picked. I'm excited to eat them.

00:34:32 Speaker_03
So ask scholarly people culinary questions, and the answer might be indigenous botany. Thank you so, so much to Dr. Noah Kekueva-Lincoln and Dolly Altafuna for hanging out on a dock and in an orchard, respectively.

00:34:47 Speaker_03
And to find out more about their work and their mission, you can check out eatbreadfruit.org. And we'll also link to the Chef Hui Fund donation page for them. And we are at Instagram and on Blue Sky at ologies, and I'm at Allie Ward on both.

00:35:01 Speaker_03
Smallogies are our shorter, kid-friendly versions of classic episodes, and they are in their own feed. You can find Smallogies wherever you get podcasts. Kids safe. Allogies merch is at allogiesmerch.com.

00:35:12 Speaker_03
All of this is linked in the show notes and also at allywar.com slash allogies slash breadfruit. Erin Talbert, Admin Zoology's podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does the website.

00:35:24 Speaker_03
Noelle Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Susan Hale managing directs the whole shebang. Jake Chafee is one of our talented editors.

00:35:30 Speaker_03
And producer, researcher, and additional writing for this episode was done by the lovely Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Thank you so much, MM, for taking the lead on this so beautifully.

00:35:40 Speaker_03
Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music, and thank you also to Sam, Mason, Christine, Kyle, and your pod mother, Chair Sleeper.

00:35:47 Speaker_03
for going on this breadfruit adventure in Hawaii and the USC Storymakers program for having me so that I could meet your scientists and I could pepper them with questions. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret.

00:35:58 Speaker_03
And we got to the farm, two Australian sheepdogs barreled out of the gate like monsters. And I stooped down to greet them and they mowed me over into the grass. This is within seconds of meeting Dolly. And they pinned me down with face licks.

00:36:29 Speaker_03
I loved every second. This farm trip was already a success by that point. Okay, thanks for coming along on the field trip. I hope you had fun. Okay, bye-bye.

00:36:58 Speaker_00
You know, Skipper, these breadfruit plants are fantastic.