During each of the past two Septembers, I’ve dipped my Old Town Pack canoe into the Potomac River and gone searching for America’s largest edible native tree fruit1. I’m referring, of course, to the pawpaw — a fruit resembling the potato in appearance (though not at all in taste or texture) that hangs in late summer in pendulous bunches from moderately sized trees.
Pawpaws, sources say, were an important food for the Indigenous people of eastern North America and the colonists who displaced them. They were supposedly beloved by George Washington and sustained the Lewis and Clark party. But somewhere along the way, the pawpaw got shunted aside in favor of more shelf-stable, supermarket-friendly fare2. Now it’s mainly the province of foragers. And while every year a new crop of excitable journalists “discovers” the pawpaw and breathlessly heralds an impending revival3, that revival never seems to quite arrive.
When I first sampled a pawpaw, I was less than wowed. Something in the rich, yellow, custardy flesh seemed off — not quite meant for human consumption. Writers often describe the flavor as a marriage between and a banana and a mango, but to me, that comes off as a semi-desperate attempt to recast the pawpaw’s weirdness into familiar terms — to tame the pawpaw. Bananas and mangoes have been domesticated and bred over generations to be sweet and unobjectionable. Pawpaw is — and tastes — feral, funky, unique. It’s like nothing you’ve had before.
Despite my initial aversion, something else drew me to give pawpaw another try, and another. Over time, I was converted. Now I look forward to pawpaw season — when the sun is in full retreat from its summer apex; when leaves on the trees look tired and worn like an old sweater, and yellows and browns creep into the green canopy; when flowers and insects and birds make their final, frenzied bids for procreation; when the Jewish high holidays roll around, always before I’m ready. Pawpaw feels like a sweet reward for enduring the long, hot mid-Atlantic summer.
I’m excited by the fruit, but also by the getting of the fruit. As far as I know, pawpaws can’t be bought in stores — a fact that seems to bother pawpaw-promoting journalists to no end, although I appreciated a New York Times’ writer describing it as an “anticapitalist fruit.” You might see pawpaws at the occasional farmers market or festival, but for the most part, you need to grow them or plunge into the woods and find them. And that’s exciting.
So I leave my office at 5, and while my colleagues head home for dinners and child bedtimes, I head in another direction: toward the river. I toss the boat off my car, change discreetly (I hope) into paddling clothes and am off. The river here is wide and flat, dotted with islands. After a day of sitting and staring at screens, it’s a relief to feast my eyes on long sightlines and feel in my muscles the resistance of the paddle against the water as my boat glides under the reddening sky.
Let me digress to say that the Potomac River, while lacking the lore of the Mississippi or the Ohio, is still a marvel. It flows through the heart of the capital city of one of the world’s richest countries yet has avoided the tamed, channelized fate of so many urban rivers. Here, amid the wealth-drenched exurbs of Maryland and Virginia, if I turn away from the open wound that is the Trump golf course, I could be in a wilderness. Herons stalk prey in the shallows, cormorants sun themselves and fish launch themselves from the water in search of a meal as bald eagles weave overhead. It’s as stunning a scene as I’ve seen anywhere.
I beach my canoe on an island that was probably created when George Washington — or more accurately, the indentured servants and enslaved laborers employed by his company — dug the failed Patowmack Canal and accidentally created prime pawpaw habitat. Towering sycamores and silver maples hold fast to the shoreline, but the interior understory is mostly spicebush and pawpaw. The ground is littered with fallen pawpaw fruit, most of which has already been attacked by ants.
To thwart insect competition, I shake the skinny trunks to dislodge pawpaws that are ready to fall, bowing my head to avoid a direct hit. Fruits plunk to the ground and I scurry after them. Some are so ripe my fingers break the skin and sink into the soft flesh. I succumb and devour one, sucking the pulp from the seeds one by one and spitting them out — a delightfully uncivilized experience. One feature of pawpaws is that they’re so rich, it’s almost impossible to eat more than one at a time. So I abandon other overripe fruits to the ants.
It’s an imperfect analogy but it strikes me that my short journey across the river has removed me from the human realm to one where nature still rules. If I want pawpaws, I have to get myself in tune with them. It’s a kind of resonance few people cultivate in today’s harried, technologized, de-seasonized world — one where we’re encouraged to eat the same foods and experience the same climates year round and pay little heed to nature’s rhythms and cycles. Foraging means taking a toe out of the modern world and placing it back in the wild. It means crossing the river.
* * *
Foraging for pawpaws — or for anything — can be fraught. A few years ago I heard an unsettling suggestion that pawpaws contain a chemical that can cause an unusual type of Parkinson’s disease. An Internet search took me to a forum on fruit growing, with a long thread about a video showing Neal Peterson, probably the best-known pawpaw breeder and promoter, with his hands shaking. The discussion got heated as commenters fumed that Peterson had concealed his condition; someone even accused him of doing it for profit. Finally Peterson chimed in, clarifying that the shaking is caused by a medicine he takes for an unrelated condition.
Pawpaws nevertheless do contain annonacins, a class of chemical that has been shown in lab studies to damage nerve cells, and to induce Parkinsons disease-like symptoms in mice at high concentrations. Studies of a community from the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe that consumed large amounts of soursop, a tropical pawpaw relative also containing annonacins, have found high rates of atypical parkinsonism.
Unsurprisingly, given pawpaw’s obscurity, little research has been done on its health effects. One case study details a man who died of atypical parkinsonism after eating large amounts of pawpaw for many years. I asked the author of that study whether she recommended avoiding pawpaw. She responded, “A single case does not constitute evidence of a causative link between pawpaw consumption and parkinsonism.”
Another paper analyzed neurotoxic chemicals in pawpaws. The author of that study replied to my query: “In my opinion, neither my study nor any other that I am aware of would indicate that most people should limit their consumption of the pawpaw fruit (but the seeds should not be eaten).”
On his website, Peterson notes that legumes, tomatoes, potatoes and coffee, among other common foods, contain chemicals known to be toxic. He writes, “Moderation in eating pawpaw is the sensible approach. Consumption of fresh fruits in season is normal; it is how humans have consumed them throughout the ages, and can do no harm.”
These assurances are comforting — but how comforting should they be? Clearly we have more to learn about pawpaws, annonacins and neurology. I recall my initial negative reaction — one shared by many others. Were my taste buds warning me? Even now that I’ve acquired a taste for pawpaw, I still sometimes find ones that taste chalky or otherwise off. Am I taking an unnecessary risk by eating fruits that haven’t been approved by regulators and stamped with the imprimatur of the supermarket? Even as I assure myself that a centuries-long record of human consumption represents another, equally valid form of approval, the question nags.
* * *
Foraging also presents ethical quandaries. It’s easy to get greedy. There are so many pawpaws on this island, and just me to harvest them. I have only a few weeks to get a year’s supply. Any I don’t take will become ant food, and are ants as important as I am?
I justify my foraging by noting that I represent one of the few routes pawpaw genes have to escape this island and reach new habitats. Its seeds are too large to ride the wind or float down river. In the past it was probably dispersed by now-extinct animals like mastodons; it has become an evolutionary anachronism. Or has it? By appealing to people like me, pawpaw ensures its seeds end up in my compost pile and eventually my garden, where some sprout every year. I dig up these seedlings and offer them to enthusiastic neighbors, who, I hope, will plant and tend them. We are the new mastodons.
Such arguments go only so far. Pawpaw fruits represent the accumulated sweetness of a season of photosynthesizing. They are what the tree has to offer the ecosystems it’s part of — all the animals and fungi and soil microbes that inhabit this island. And wild pawpaws are stingy compared to orchard trees like the apple and cherry — even in a good year, which this one is not, their yield is modest.
According to Indigenous ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, these pawpaws are gifts — and not just for me. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer reminds us to take only what we need, and to leave more than we take. Interestingly to me, coming from a different tradition, the Torah contains a similar teaching: “You shall not pick your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger.” (Lev 19:10) It seems only natural to expand the circle or concern to nonhumans as well.
And who am I to put myself above the ants, anyway? Their evolutionary lineage has succeeded as well as ours and may well outlast us. Ants invented agriculture millions of years before we did and practice a highly successful style of communal living. And as far as the ants on this island, I can buy food grown around the world, while they’re limited to what they can find here. For them, a good pawpaw crop could be the difference between life and death.
* * *
Doubts swirl, and I don’t resolve them all. But I must make choices, so I put in my boat only as many fruits as I think I can use, knowing they will last only a few days on my counter. I paddle back across the river, pause by a fallen tree to enjoy the sunset and eat a picnic dinner, then head home.
September becomes pawpaw month: pawpaw coconut pie, pawpaw mousse, pawpaws devoured as dessert. Excess pulp is frozen for later. Pawpaws are extremely filling and reduce the temptation to nosh on less healthy fare. They are also a great source of Vitamin C and numerous minerals and contain an unusually high amount of protein for a fruit.
But accessing nutrients is not why we eat. We eat for sustenance, pleasure and community. And when, what and how we eat helps create our culture.
If pawpaw was widely consumed in the past, a pawpaw culture must have existed as well. That culture is long gone, but we now have the opportunity to create a new one.
Whether or not they realize it, journalists who write articles implying that the pawpaw is deficient because it isn’t domesticated, farmed and sold in stores are placing the fruit within a capitalist cultural paradigm — one that instructs us to monetize and exploit resources like the pawpaw.
That is certainly an option. But we can also choose to see the pawpaw as a foundation stone in an alternative food culture built around mutuality, responsibility and care. This culture would celebrate pawpaw for what it is — a miracle.
Consider that the wild versions of many globally commercialized fruits, such as the apple, are imperiled in their region of origin. In pawpaw, we have a wild fruit that has survived — even thrived — through eras of mass extinction, colonization, deforestation and industrialization.
It’s hard to see how domestication and cultivation would do the pawpaw any good. Pawpaw already grows abundantly along every major river in the mid-Atlantic, as far west as Texas and Nebraska, as far south as northern Florida and as far north as southern Ontario. As far as I can tell, it’s doing fine. Turning pawpaw into another insipid, shippable, year-round fruit like the Cavendish banana or the Red Delicious apple, as breeders have apparently been doing since at least 1916(!)4, would drastically narrow the genetic base and wipe out many of the very things that make it unique and cool.
And I would argue that pawpaw commercialization wouldn’t benefit us much either. Pawpaw trees are not tucked away in remote refuges; they live where people do. 100 million people probably live within a short drive or bike ride from a pawpaw patch. There is no lack of access; there is merely a lack of attention and attunement. Pawpaw invites us to break away from our modern way of gathering fruit — maneuvering a cart zombielike through grocery aisles — and flex our muscles and ancestral memories.
The annonacins lurking in pawpaw may even hold a useful message: Enjoy, but don’t overdo it. Rather than pursue the commercial imperative to extend the pawpaw season to infinity, we can attune ourselves to all the other wild fruits that share space and divide the growing season with pawpaw here in the eastern part of the country: serviceberry, mulberry, wineberry, elderberry, blueberry, plum, fig, grape and persimmon, to name a few. Pawpaw is a thread in a rich botanical tapestry that offers us free nourishment for at least half the year. Let it be your gateway drug!
So here’s my plea: Resist the urge to tame the pawpaw. Keep it wild and weird; let it be the remarkable being that it is. And let it remind us of the remarkable beings that we are: animals woven with the rest of the living world into an unbreakable web of interdependence; animals who have every right to reclaim a direct, bold, bodily relationship with nature.
Thank you for reading! Long-time subscribers to The Nature Beat will note that this is my first post in half a year — and that even before that hiatus, my posting frequency had dropped substantially. To make a long story short, a little over a year ago, I transitioned from being a full-time freelance journalist to a staff writer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. I had been feeling a lot of burnout after 10 years of freelancing, and that burnout apparently extended to my newsletter writing. Basically, I needed to rest and recharge. Hopefully I’ve done that and can return to regular posting.
If any paid subscriber feels that you haven’t gotten your money’s worth, please contact me for a refund.
To newer subscribers and followers, welcome! The Nature Beat is intended to be a source for something you won’t find in the mainstream journalism world — thoughtful, informed journalism focusing on the natural word. Sometimes this takes the form of a personal essay, as in the piece you just read about pawpaws. Sometimes it’s a story on a new study or development, informed by more than a decade of experience reporting on and exploring nature. No matter the format, The Nature Beat represents my views alone and is supported entirely by reader subscriptions.
Lastly, it feels important to say that this publication is entirely separate and independent from my employer and my “day job.” No matter who else I may be writing for at any given time, on The Nature Beat I will never shy away from telling it exactly as I see it.
Correction: Originally this read “largest native fruit in America.” Many sources call pawpaw the largest edible fruit native to North America, but I find this hard to believe, given that I’ve seen larger fruits on travels to Mexico and Central America. Noted Maryland naturalist Rick Borchelt also pointed out that many pumpkins and gourds native to the Americas (including the present-day United States) produce larger fruits, and suggested “largest edible native tree fruit north of Mexico.” For simplicity, I’ve chosen to use “America” to mean “North America north of Mexico,” but as with many things botanical and geographical, there seems to be no perfect way to express pawpaw’s superlativeness.
A 2021 JSTOR article offers an interesting, if rather academic, history of the pawpaw’s fall from grace.
Here is a sampling of articles that attempt to make the case for commercializing the pawpaw or lament that pawpaws can’t be bought in stores.
From Orchard to Aisle: An Uncertain Path for Emerging Crops
The Pawpaw, a Beloved Native Fruit, Could Seed a More Sustainable Future for Small Farms
Why Is the Most American Fruit So Hard to Buy?
Missouri's 'forgotten fruit' no longer, researchers explore ways to commercialize pawpaws
Delightfully, I recently discovered that journalists have been lamenting the neglect of the pawpaw for more than a century!
According to Andrew Moore’s book on the pawpaw, via JSTOR
Thanks for reminding me about pawpaws!
I didn't learn about pawpaws until I'd moved away from the east coast, but I've developed a similar relationship with stinging nettle, which is abundant in the Pacific Northwest where I live now. The window of edibility is somewhat narrow and it's a bit tricky to work with flavor-wise (to say nothing of the sting). Occasionally I come across it in restaurants--I had a nettle soup a few years ago that was delicious--but I rather like that it's unlikely to go mainstream.