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Our thanks to Zoë Schlanger for this corrective. Breadfruit has appeared more than once in our pages, but never with appreciation like this:

Too Few Americans Are Eating a Remarkable Fruit

Breadfruit is a staple in tropical places—and climate change is pushing its range north.

Someplace in the lush backroads of San Sebastián, in western Puerto Rico, my friend Carina pulled the car over. At a crest in the road stood a breadfruit tree, full of basketball-size, lime-green fruits, knobbled and prehistoric, like a dinosaur egg covered in ostrich leather. One had recently fallen. I jumped out to scoop it up, thinking about the breadfruit tostones we would make that afternoon. We’d fry chunks of the white, spongy flesh, then smash them with the back of a cast-iron pan, then fry them again. In a wooden pilón, Carina would pound garlic and oil with oregano brujo, a pungent weedy plant in the mint family, and spoon the sauce over the frittered discs. For me, little in this world is above a breadfruit tostón, crisp and flaky on the outside, creamy on the inside. My mouth is watering writing this paragraph.

In Puerto Rico, the word for breadfruit is panapén, almost always shortened to pana, which is also the word for your close friend, your crew, your people. Breadfruit trees feel like kin there: They are everywhere, their huge lobed leaves splayed over roads and porches like the hands of a benevolent giant.

Finding a roadside breadfruit tree is like spending a moment in Eden. Our human effort is irrelevant; these trees, remarkable growers and givers, will simply provide. A three-year-old tree can reach 20 feet high. They start making fruit years faster than other tropical fruit trees, such as mango, and can produce 400 pounds or more in a year with little to no human intervention. That fruit is more calorie- and calcium-dense than a potato, to which its starchy flesh is often compared. It can be steamed, roasted, or fried, or dehydrated into a useful flour. If allowed to ripen past its hard stage, a breadfruit’s flesh softens into a sweet custard that can be a base for desserts. As a grower in the Florida Keys, Patrick Garvey, put it to me: “One tree feeds a family of four for a lifetime.” Or at least 50 years, per researchers’ findings. And thanks to climate change, this fruit may soon be coming to the southern United States in a major way for the first time.

Read the whole article here.