How the Pawpaw Became North America's Best-Kept Secret

What fruit was a favorite of George Washington, saved the Lewis and Clark expedition, and tastes like a mango-banana creme brulee? We are talking about the pawpaw, and, chances are, you’ve never tried one. …Unless you’ve hunted down the growing number of pawpaw festivals in the U.S., from Paw Paw, Illinois, to Athens, Ohio. The pawpaw is having a moment: In the last decade the pawpaw has gone from obscurity to full-on cult fruit. Pawpaws are seasonal, historic, and…just weird enough. Melani: The pawpaw is indigenous to the United States. It's the only tropical fruit north of the equator. You don't find it in the supermarkets because it only stays fresh three days off the vine and three weeks in refrigeration. Pawpaws bruise easily, so they can’t be shipped. If you don’t find one during the season, you have to wait, and all that patience only enhances the taste. Because pawpaws are scarce and so distinctive, the regions where they grow have developed fierce local pride—everyone wants to claim the fruit as their own. That gets us a wonderful assortment of names: Hoosier Banana, Kentucky Banana, West Virginia Banana, Kansas Banana. Plus vivid descriptors like Custard Apple and Hillbilly Mango. Today the pawpaw is grown on a small scale in Europe and Asia. But its heartland is still the eastern half of the United States, where some of the fruit’s fans have channeled their fascination into research. JP: They compare pawpaws with raspberries because they have a similar shelf life and perishability. JP: One thing that they're developing pawpaw fruit for now is thicker skin with the belief that thicker skin will improve the shelf stability. However, there's a compound in pawpaws—annonacin, is the name of it. And It has been determined that it has neurodegenerative effects. It's concentrated in the skin. So the cultivars that have been bred to improve shelf stability accidentally been bred to also increase the amount of neurotoxic compounds in the fruit. So there is this kind of resistance towards domestication that the fruit seems to have. The qualities as we're discovering and learning more about them are making it more difficult to commercialize. Melani: I worked at Ohio University and a local businessman came to the university, and he's like, I would love for you to do research with this fruit. And then he pulls up the sleeve and he has this pawpaw tattoo on his arm. We looked at the fruit, and it had a really custardlike texture to it. We thought maybe it would be cool as a fat replacer in baked goods because you can use applesauce, so why not try pawpaw fruit? So we did. That's where my pawpaw story began. When Melani and her team published their findings—about a naturally creamy, tropical-tasting low-fat baking ingredient hiding in America’s forests—people took note. But the pawpaw’s story is much older. Pawpaw seeds have been found in archaeological sites, and fossils of the fruit’s ancestors go back more than 50 million years. Indigenous cultures prized the pawpaw. In addition to eating it raw, the Iroquois dried it into cakes, and the Cherokee used the bark of the pawpaw tree to make ropes. Its genus name, Asimina, derives from an Algonquin word for pawpaws. JP: There's a long history of looking at the pawpaw in somewhat derogatory light. When white people started moving here, they brought their culture with them. They didn't come here with the view of let me learn about what's already there. With pawpaws, they were considered very inferior. The people who are subsisting off the land and trading with Native Americans, they had a very positive associations with pawpaws. JP: The pawpaw is like a real people's fruit. It demands attention, and it's delicious. But you can't just have it. You have to earn it.