by Andrew Moore
Pawpaw lovers have begun traveling great distances to attend the Ohio festival. This year I meet Kim Bailey, who has traveled from Ducktown, Georgia. In her spare time, she works at Cane Creek Farm, a seventeen-acre farm producing fruits and vegetables, including muscadines, blueberries, figs, and pawpaws, for her weekly CSA. Kim has traveled a great distance today, but it’s not the farthest she has traveled for nature, an honor that might belong to one of the seven trips she’s taken to Michoacan, Mexico, to study monarch butterflies. Her first taste of pawpaws came when, while on business in Columbus, Ohio, she found the fruit at a local grocery store. “That’s when my interest turned to full-out infatuation!” Kim recalls. The thought of “growing tropical crème brûlée on trees,” while also attracting butterflies, has led her to plant a number of pawpaws at her home.
I ask Kim whether other Georgians, those who aren’t rare-fruit growers, are as familiar with the fruit as are folks in southern Ohio. “I don’t think hardly anybody I know knows too much about pawpaws unless their families go back,” she says. But with her ear to the ground, Kim did meet a fellow gardener (and beekeeper) with pawpaw tips in Dahlonega, Georgia. “He told me about the pawpaw pickin’ place on the Etowah River. I went up there, actually that same weekend, and I couldn’t find any. I found the trees, but no pawpaws.” I suppose it’s another reason why she, and so many others, come to the festival: Fruit is sure to be found here.
I meet other folks from South Carolina, New York, Virginia, Illinois. Some years, the truly dedicated have even traveled from Europe (nurserymen and plant researchers, typically). And the enthusiasm is spreading. Pawpaw festivals are popping up elsewhere in the country, in North Carolina, Delaware, Maryland, and even Rhode Island, which is at the northeastern edge of the fruit’s range. It’s being embraced by all manner of plant-minded communities too: Pawpaws are part of the Washington Botanical Society’s newest logo; they’re included in habitat restoration plantings from North Carolina to Missouri; various local and national news outlets feature pawpaw write-ups each September; and chefs, breweries, bakeries, and creameries create unique pawpaw beers, wines, sauces, breads, and gelatos. I often wonder where it will all lead.
I once asked Neal Peterson if he thought pawpaws could replace bananas in the American market. At the festival, this is the kind of talk you’ll hear: “Why are we importing these tropical fruits when we have our own native fruit growing right here?” When I told Neal of the vision (which I’ve sometimes shared) that pawpaws could reduce the amount of tropical imports, he responded, “And why would they want to do that?” Bananas are produced and consumed year-round, while pawpaws are limited to just one month. And despite the nicknames—poor man’s banana, insert-your-state-here banana—they’re quite different. If a person wants a banana or mango or avocado, a pawpaw simply won’t cut it. But even if in practice the pawpaw can’t be a stand-in for bananas, it still represents the goal of the local-food ethos, that this native fruit that produces a tropical-like custard apple in the temperate North should at least be given a chance to become a regular part of our diets, and be cultivated, wild-harvested, and eaten each September. It should at least be known. We can eat bananas, but we should eat pawpaws too. Looking back, pawpaw was never the “staple” in Native American diets that many supporters might claim it was. There wouldn’t have been enough, and ripe fruit was available for such a brief period each year, that it couldn’t have been. But they ate or dried or cooked as many pawpaws as was possible, and it was used to its fullest extent and value as a yearly, cherished treat.
But the locavore idea, and ideal, persists. And although much improvement has been made since the days of the Banana Republics, bananas are still a poster child for frustrations with agribusiness, often representing exploitation and corruption. Bananas can be found in every grocery store throughout the United States, but only with a heavy reliance on fossil fuels, pesticides, and fungicides. To many, pawpaws represent a way out of that global model. It is a symbol of a different, perhaps older way of feeding ourselves and our families.
Many interests are represented at this festival, including Chmiel’s own business, environmental groups, and Ohio historians, but there is an overriding, genuine excitement that prevails above all else. The energy stems from this symbol of the pawpaw as an opportunity to start over, to get agriculture (or permaculture, or just plain culture) right. People are excited because through the lens of the pawpaw they’re seeing their backyards, their home states, and their shared histories with fresh eyes. It’s not just the flavor of pawpaw that makes the festival a success, it’s this palpable energy, which even if you’re not a dyed-in-the-wool believer you can recognize and appreciate for its earnestness, the notion that this wild fruit might in fact be the next big thing, and it’s been growing in our backyards all along.
The Peterson Pawpaws crew eventually sells every bit of their six hundred pounds from Deep Run. Meanwhile, Chmiel’s seemingly endless stream of pawpaws continues. By all accounts it’s another successful festival. But when the sun goes down Saturday night the party has just begun. Bands, including headliner and zydeco legend C. J. Chenier and his Red Hot Louisiana Band, play late into the night, there’s dancing and laughing, and although fresh fruit consumption has largely ended at this point, pints of pawpaw beer continue to flow under the beer tent. When the stage is finally shut down, guitars and drums are played around the warmth of scattered campfires. I look up, and amid the bright stars, I recall that this waxing moon, called a;si-mini-ki-sTwa (a? · ši mini-ki · šo wa) by the Shawnee, is the Pawpaw Moon.1
— CHAPTER TEN —
TOBACCO, ACETOGENINS, AND ICE CREAM
Kentucky State University is the only American university with a dedicated pawpaw research program. I discovered this fact early on in my research, and as luck would have it this particular September the university is hosting an open house of sorts in the form of the Third International Pawpaw Conference. More than one hundred people, representing eighteen states and several countries, have traveled to attend.
The gathering is predictably more professional and scholarly than the Ohio Pawpaw Festival, but no less passionate. “You’ve got some very unique individuals interested in pawpaw,” says Kirk Pomper, who heads the program at KSU. “I guess anything that’s new, it tends to draw people who are risk takers, or a little out of the mainstream.” Curious newcomers like myself are here, but so are the plant’s great champions, like Neal Peterson; Indiana’s persimmon and pawpaw expert, Jerry Lehman; Ontario’s Dan Bissonnette, who is working to restore a vanishing pawpaw population in Essex County; a nurseryman from the Netherlands; scientists from Romania; novice fruit growers; others who have grown, bred, and propagated pawpaws for decades; the globe-trekking botanical explorer Joseph Simcox; Sean Spender, a Canadian living and working on a farm in South Africa; Robert Hamilton, “the Atlanta Fruit Man”; Ken Drabik; Woody Walker, who discovered and promoted the Kentucky Champion pawpaw tree (standing more than thirty feet tall); and two gentlemen from Plant City, Florida, who, despite their ability to grow many tropical fruits, can’t shake their desire to grow and consume Asimina triloba as far south as possible. It’s a gathering of the pawpaw’s most capable and energetic supporters.
KSU’s pawpaw program was started by horticulturalist Brett Callaway in 1990, who saw not just the potential of the fruit, but the possibility that pawpaws could help people. “All along, I’ve been interested in things that would benefit small farmers,” Callaway told Colleen Anderson in 1998. “Crops like corn and wheat, [small farmers] can’t compete. But specialty crops can help a farm stay alive.”1 Historically that specialty niche was filled by tobacco, a crop that by the early 1990s was no longer viable. It was part of the university’s mission, as a land grant institution, to aid struggling farmers. Pawpaws, Brett thought, might fill the void left by tobacco. Brett looked to the Kentucky Nut Growers Association, the Northern Nut Growers Association, and other strong agricultural gr
oups in the state, and collected pawpaw seeds from the Kentucky State Fair, from the forest, and from others’ collections. This material formed the basis of the first KSU pawpaw orchard. But like Neal Peterson, Callaway had also read about the 1916 Journal of Heredity contest, and was inspired to conduct another national search. “Organic Gardening advertised it and published the results,” he recalled. “I had well over four hundred entries. They came in any way you can imagine. First class mail in shoeboxes. One lady stuffed her pawpaws into a nylon stocking. I got little pawpaws, big pawpaws. I got some real nice ones.” The entries were judged by a panel of eight, who saw only sliced fruit on a plate. “The winner weighed well over four hundred grams and scored high on the taste test.”2 That cultivar, named Wells, remains available.
When Callaway took a position elsewhere in 1993, Desmond Layne took over. Fresh out of grad school, Layne inherited a program that consisted of a few dozen trees in the ground and, through the results of Callaway’s contest, a cache of thousands of seeds. “Desmond Layne is a great scientist, and he’s also an excellent communicator,” Pomper says. “He really took everything to another level.” For one, Layne initiated the idea of the germplasm repository, that KSU would be the official USDA collection site for unique and exceptional pawpaw material. Germplasm, the material used to propagate a plant, can be stored in the form of DNA, seeds, cuttings, even tissue frozen in liquid nitrogen. In the case of KSU, the repository is the orchard itself. With the help of Kim Hummer, who ran the national germplasm repository at Corvallis, Oregon, Layne received a grant to collect pawpaw seed from throughout the country.
The purpose of the repository is to preserve the genes of special pawpaws. Specifically it’s used for distributing unique material to other researchers, for use in breeding and evaluation for unique characteristics. “We may find some that store longer, we may find some that are resistant to disease,” Pomper says. Some trees might also have characteristics that represent answers to problems or preferences yet to be identified.
Pomper came on in 1998, having previously worked with the physiology of strawberries and the breeding of hazelnuts. “When I came here I had a unique skill set where I’ve worked with some odd things, but also I’m kind of a jack-of-all-trades, which is exactly what pawpaw needed,” he says. Pomper now directs the germplasm collection, and his research has focused on pests, organic production, anticancer and antioxidant properties, and the genetic diversity of wild pawpaws, among other areas. In addition to visiting pawpaw growers, answering emails, phone calls, and letters, teaching, and experimenting with blackberries and hazelnuts, Pomper has organized an annual pawpaw field day to showcase the orchard and introduce the crop to potential growers.
Many small farmers lack access to USDA-inspected processing facilities like ACEnet in Athens, Ohio, which are not common. In 2010, recognizing this lack as a barrier to pawpaw growers’ ability to process and store pawpaws, Pomper secured a USDA-grant-funded mobile processing facility. The county’s pawpaw growers and sorghum growers, among others, are now able to extend their harvests and their capabilities to develop value-added pawpaw products.
Pomper has also, with the help of Sheri Crabtree, Neal Peterson, Ron Powell, and others, brought us all here today. On the first day of the conference, folks share their experiences growing, processing, and selling pawpaws; a few pawpaw-related products are pitched and sampled, including pawpaw pretzels and a pawpaw-chipotle barbecue sauce; and just before lunch, our appetites piqued, we taste cultivars selected by the university as well as advanced selections from amateur breeding programs.
To a packed room, Pomper introduces the first cultivar to be released from the program: the KSU-Atwood. With its greenish-blue skin, yellow-orange flesh, and low amount of seeds, this pawpaw stands out. The tree produces a heavy crop of up to 150 fruits and ripens midseason. And although it’s a superior selection—KSU wouldn’t have released it otherwise—Pomper says Atwood is just the very beginning. “What we have now is about another half dozen really good ones, which are high yielding and even larger fruit size than Atwood.” One fruit has an attractive russet appearance, several are exceptionally large (larger than Atwood), and others have a strong coconut flavor, a trait that is uncommon in most cultivars. But like any respectable plant breeder, Pomper is not rushing to release them. He has several years of data on the original trees, and has young grafted trees to observe when they begin producing in a few more years. In addition to the plantings at KSU, the trees have been planted at two sites in Ohio. One early standout from the KSU orchard, a fruit unofficially referred to as Pina Colada, had an outstanding and unusual pineapple-coconut flavor. But the trees, when grafted and planted out in Ohio, quickly died. “And so until I know I can actually propagate and maintain that good fruit quality, and look at yield,” Pomper says, “I don’t want to release it.”
Neal Peterson’s fruit has great seed-to-pulp ratios, about 5 or 6 percent seed, and good flavor. “A flavor that wasn’t too strong, or too sweet,” Pomper says, “so you could actually eat more.” But in addition to low seed-to-pulp ratios and good flavor, KSU is looking for fruit that stores longer, is attractive, and shows a distinct color break, as well as trees that have higher yields. “We’re always looking for fruit that basically are more round,” Pomper says. As Sheri Crabtree explains, “the seeds are in a row or two down the middle of the fruit, so a thinner and/or smaller fruit won’t have as much pulp around the seeds as rounder fruit”—the greater the diameter, the greater the pulp.
Pomper also wants the germplasm collection to represent the genetic diversity of wild pawpaws. “We have a pretty good sampling of what’s out there,” he says, “but there are definitely unique selections that I’d like to get and bring in. We have yet to capture what’s out there, totally.” The collection contains genetically diverse selections from West Virginia, Kentucky, and Indiana, among other states, but lacks diversity from southern states, like Louisiana and Alabama, and northern regions like Ontario, Canada. “I’m sure that there could be bigger pawpaws out here, there could be rounder pawpaws out there,” Pomper says, “And some of this is not always apparent in what we see, sometimes it’s in the genes. And it’s not until you grow out the seeds that you see that.”
Pomper and his predecessors are not the only scientists working with pawpaws. In fact, retired Purdue researcher Jerry McLaughlin has been working with Asimina triloba for decades and is responsible for identifying the plant’s Annonaceous acetogenins. McLaughlin has shown that these chemical compounds might be the strongest cancer-fighting tool yet discovered.
McLaughlin’s first exposure to pawpaws came as a child in Michigan. “When I was about four years old my dad gave me some of these and said, ‘Jerry, you can eat these, these are Indiana bananas,’” he recalled during a lecture in 2003. “And I was hungry for bananas, because in World War II you couldn’t get bananas. I ate a whole bunch of them, and I threw up, and I threw up, and I never forgot this, and I had it in for this plant for a long, long time. I knew there was something in there, because if you throw up from eating something you know there’s something biologically active there.”
Young Jerry eventually grew up to be a distinguished pharmacognosist at Purdue University. In the mid-1970s, McLaughlin began analyzing more than thirty-five hundred unique species of plants, sourced from several continents, to locate bioactive components that might help in the fight against cancer. “My group went through all those plants, one by one, and guess which was the best one?” he asks. “Pawpaw, growing two miles from my office . . . the best thing I ran into to fight cancer. There are some relatives of pawpaw that are tropical that are equally potent, but by gosh, this one was right there, and we had plenty of it available locally.” The discovery would become McLaughlin’s life’s work.
In this search, McLaughlin isolated approximately 350 new compounds that were cytotoxic, meaning toxic to cells. To discover these compounds is expensive, time-consuming wor
k. “This is what I’m good at,” he says. “I can do grind-and-find research: I can grind up a plant, find what’s in there, and tell you if it’s biologically active.” And the Annonaceous acetogenins, the chemicals that pawpaw folks are so familiar with today, were the most important leads.
Lab work showed Annonaceous acetogenins to also be effective at killing insects: mosquito larvae at one part per million, and both blowfly larvae and Caenorhabditis elegans, a parasitic worm, at high potencies. So when McLaughlin decided to develop an herbal product from the compounds, it made sense to use it to attack bugs. “The best insects I could think of to kill that would help people were head lice,” he says. There was historical precedence for this, too. Medical journals from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reported doing the same. So with extracts from pawpaw trees, Nature’s Sunshine produced a shampoo. McLaughlin partnered with school nurses to administer the shampoo and reported 100 percent success. The next product to be developed was Paw Paw Para-Cleanse, used to remove intestinal parasites. Its ingredients include pawpaw, pumpkin seeds, black walnut hulls, Cascara sagrada, artemisia, elecampane, clove, and garlic, among others. Nature’s Sunshine sells as many as five to six thousand bottles of the para-cleanse a month.
