The first sentence saying "this giant fruit" and the first image lead me to believe that it's big enough to fill a room. That was pretty confusing for a minute.
It's big as a watermelon, but with a different shape. Their trees are tall, what makes dangerous to stay under them due to risk of the jackfruit falling over you.
But the picture accidentally makes use of forced perspective to make the fruit appear as though it's on a hardwood floor in an otherwise empty room, which it dominates.
Doesn't taste like pulled pork to me. To me the flavor is bubblegum pineapple. Which is fantastic!
Ranch 99 will have Jackfruit on occasion. Wear latex gloves while cutting. The "latex like substance" is in the white pith of the fruit. There is a lot of the stuff and it's really, really sticky.
It tasted like banana for me. But yeah, definitely not pullpork. I ate a lot of those in India, I really loved it with fresh mango (I never eat imported ones now). I remember we bought a whole pre cutted fruit with friends after a 2 hours walk in the mountains (close to Kodaikanal, a beautiful place). It was far bigger than the one in the video. The trees are really impressive.
You are describing the taste after the fruit ripened. Before it is ripe (in raw), "stuff" when cut would look like pulled pork. From my little experience with pork, I do not agree with the conclusion about the taste, but it does look a bit like it.
The latex is what makes it a real pain in the ass to prepare fresh.
It is also much easier to find in cans in the U.S. than as whole fresh fruit.
I agree with the flavor being characterized as bubblegum pineapple. Maybe a bit banana-ish. I enjoy it, myself, but the rest of the family thinks it smells bad and tastes odd. It has never crossed my mind that it might resemble pulled pork in any way.
And for a "poor man's fruit", it is certainly very expensive to lay hands on outside of its normal growing range.
If you have a bad history with fruit allergies (I'm apples, plums, peaches) watch out with Jackfruit. I had a piece once and it was one of the worst oral allergic reactions in my life.
I was thinking the same thing. The title could almost be the click-baitish "One crazy trick to solve world hunger! You won't believe this fruit tastes like pork!"
Fortunately I did learn a bit about a fruit I have never seen nor heard of before. So I guess it was worthwhile.
I live in Florida, and sometimes as I drive throughout the state and see the hundreds and hundreds (though it may be thousands) of oranges alongside the road I wonder just how many go to waste that could be sent to places in need, and then I wonder if there's other places that do the same... Most of the United States is uninhabited, so I always wonder how much vegetation is just sitting there that could feed others. Now I understand there would be a cost in transporting these goods, as well as other factors, but still...
What if the same companies that sell you oranges could give some of those same oranges to the homeless? Or use a portion of their profits to (without deceit) send them to countries in need? Maybe I don't know enough about these things to really talk, but having fed the homeless once upon a time for about a year without the aid of government assistance I think we make too many excuses for things that really should just be done. Ah well, maybe someday soon we'll see true change that benefits all.
Forget the ones by the road. Your mind would be blown if you knew how much produce was discarded right out of the gate, even from the farm, simply because it doesn't look quite right.
Years ago I watched a documentary on California oranges. They said the crop was basically divided into thirds by quality, with the first third going to the markets, the second third being juiced for frozen concentrate, and the last third was simply plowed under.
There is a movie from a decade ago called "Life and Debt." It explores how international loans and aid have actually suppressed the local economies of the countries they tried to help.
For example, chicken breast meat is very popular in the western world. Once they remove the white meat where does the rest of it go. What the producers can't sell domestically in the US or Canada they export to developing countries at cut rate prices. This drives the local farmers out of business.
Before donating fruits to countries in need (and can grow the same fruit) think long and hard about the impact that help might have on their local economy. In any other scenario this would be considered dumping and that country would be taken to WTO court.
Never though about how it could affect the local economy, but what about those who cannot afford the local economy... This gets a little further than I can honestly handle thinking about... But thanks for your input (and everyone else's for that matter, there's plenty I haven't seen before shared).
Well of course. Any attempt at helping one person hurts another person. If you give someone a free house, you put a builder out of work. If you give someone free food, you put a farmer out of work.
But I don't think it's a zero-sum game. I think the total utility generated by free food is worse than the disutility of the farmer losing his business. Now those people have money to spend on other things that they would have spent on food.
Protectionism benefits producers at the expense of consumers.
Of course ideally you wouldn't send food directly, but just money, which they could use to buy food, or whatever they need.
> Well of course. Any attempt at helping one person hurts another person. If you give someone a free house, you put a builder out of work. If you give someone free food, you put a farmer out of work. <
I'm not sure i follow. Someone would have had to build something or farm something in the first place for it to be given away.
In this case, that someone is a big company from another country. In the case of donating food in general, instead of the money going to some local farmer, it goes to some farmer in Brazil.
The economics of this are a bit more complicated than that though. If importing food from Brazil was cheaper, someone should already be doing it without any charitable intentions. And if if it's not, then it makes more sense for the charity to buy the food locally than pay more to import it.
What if the same companies that sell you oranges could give some of those same oranges to the homeless?
A lot of (mostly urban) businesses do, in fact, give food to help feed the homeless. In downtown San Diego, one or more Starbucks locations gives away leftover items to a women's services center to help provide a free coffee and pastry breakfast to indigent women. Presumably they get a write off for it, plus they only serve fresh goods to their customers.
Or use a portion of their profits to (without deceit) send them to countries in need?
According to Diet for a Small Planet, the vast majority of starvation is caused by internal political strife and sometimes food aid gets sold off to put money in the pockets of corrupt politicians or simply rots on the docks because they don't want it delivered to the hungry masses who are often de facto a populace they are internally at war with.
Furthermore, when Western foods are delivered to other countries, locals develop a desire for a lifestyle that is economically out of their reach and frequently not sustainable locally. In other words, they hunger for foods that cannot be grown locally, at least not without ruining the local environment.
There have been all kinds of problems caused in the past by food aid, such as women being given just enough baby formula for their baby that their own natural milk production dried up, then the free aid stopped. I think the intent was to create a larger market for baby formula, but these women could not afford to buy baby formula. As a result, babies died.
On the one hand, help for the homeless can be life saving in the short run. On the other hand, in the long run, the homeless need the same things any middle class or wealthy person needs: The ability to solve their own problems and support themselves. Too much focus on treating homeless individuals like helpless charity cases can actively undermine the possibility of them getting their act together. It's a hard balance to strike. International aid is typically even more fucked up, from what I gather.
I know you mean well, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Your suggestion has all kinds of potential to pave a road to hell.
> There have been all kinds of problems caused in the past by food aid, such as women being given just enough baby formula for their baby that their own natural milk production dried up, then the free aid stopped.
That's not what happened. It was Nestle actively encouraging hospitals to recommend baby formula, by bribing doctors and providing the formula for free. Then, when the mothers left the hospital, they were pretty much forced into buying formula, and those who couldn't afford it basically had their babies starve to death.
In other words, it was Nestle literally killing babies in search of profit. There was no "food aid" element to this at all.
I knew that, I just see little difference between this deadly marketing ploy and the outcomes of a lot of things that do more strictly merit the label of food aid. But perhaps the detail that this specific incident was a twisted marketing ploy will help others more readily comprehend how and why well meaning food aid can have unintended negative consequences -- in short, how they can have a dark side.
I'm going to disagree with that statement (or perhaps with your wording). Less than half of the land area is urban, sure. But more than half is rural rather than uninhabited.
I guess it depends on how you define uninhabited - if I've got a 50,000 acre ranch with a 2800 sq ft house on it, most people are going to call the bulk of that land uninhabited.
> I guess it depends on how you define uninhabited - if I've got a 50,000 acre ranch with a 2800 sq ft house on it, most people are going to call the bulk of that land uninhabited.
Okay, but then then suburbs are uninhabited too. The neighborhood I'm in has 1500-2000 sqft houses on 10ksqft lots. That's 80-85% uninhabited, especially once you start to add up the amount of extra land for streets, ditches, canals, parks, etc. I bet most suburban landscapes are 90% uninhabited.
That's a silly comparison to make. 50k acres is 80 square miles, a square nearly 9 miles long on each side. At that point you're going to have dozens of people living either on that land or nearby.
Here's an agricultural company that owns 10 combines and some 20+ other trucks and they claim to harvest 1500 acres a day. If you've got a 50k acre farm you're talking spending a full month with those folks harvesting your crop. So that's probably 2-3 dozen people. http://www.frederickharvesting.com/equipment.html
There are a few initiatives to end food waste. A lot of it is caused by supermarkets having exacting standards for produce. Food that doesn't meet those standards is sold off for other uses, or just wasted. There are a bunch of "ugly fruit" distribution outfits. Here are two, and a radio programme about other initiatives.
I think the other commenters have addressed the issue of "giving food the homeless" here, but as far as sending them to other countries...
Conveniently enough, I found a guide to orange carton dimensions and weights: http://www.south-africa-fruits.com/citrus-packaging.html
So, let's see how much it costs to ship a carton of oranges from, say, Florida to Kenya (they could definitely use some citrus)! Oranges, while a pretty hardy fruit, have a shelf life of, at most, a few weeks at room temperature, according to multiple sources. I don't know if they'd be great sitting around in a cargo ship, with uncertain temperature and humidity changes for a month. So let's fly them over. Here's a calculator: http://www.worldfreightrates.com/en/freight
I calculated $154.74 - $171.02 per carton. That's quite a hefty premium on a carton of oranges (about 100 oranges, according to multiple sources). Sure, you might argue that a benevolent organization could come along and send bulk pallets (unfortunately, I couldn't find anything that would let me calculate the costs for a pallet of oranges), but I doubt you're going to find more than a 20% costs savings -- competition in this industry is stiff, and jet fuel is expensive.
In Boston, can buy navel oranges at my local grocery store for a dollar an orange, or less (I just checked Peapod!). So, yeah, it literally costs more to ship an orange across the ocean than oranges here cost, even with the relatively high cost of labor in the US. As wealthy Americans, we frequently pay for exotic foods (bananas in the middle of winter!) that cost very little to produce, and we're paying almost entirely for shipping. We don't think much about shipping costs, or think that it's unusual to get our food shipped to us, but that sort of thinking is dangerous.
It's far far cheaper to grow more food in starving countries than it is to ship them food. In Kenya, and all over Africa, food prices are much cheaper than they are here, even on open markets with relatively inefficient food delivery practices. It is cheaper (not to mention more environmentally sound!) to produce the food there, than it is to produce it here, and then transport it there. You make no sense. I mean, people in many African countries (let's be honest, Kenya is one of the wealthier ones) commonly feed their entire families on just a few dollars a day -- why not compost the fucking oranges, send them the money we would have spent on spilling fuel into the atmosphere, invigorate their economy, and let them eat like kings for the cost of flying over three oranges?
Saying "Now I understand there would be a cost in transporting these goods, as well as other factors, but still..." is just irresponsible. Yes, seeing oranges go to waste makes you feel bad. But the solution is not to ship it outside the relatively small radius where it makes environmental and economic sense to do so, when there are many other solutions for hunger that don't waste resources and kill the environment faster.
You would love a project I am working on, one that has consumed the better part of the last 2 years.
Food is the tip of the iceberg, many problems we face today actually have painfully simple solutions. Food waste for instance which is at 1.3B tons for stuff before super markets feeds all the hungry people needed.
Proper management of surplus resources (in this case food) can solve a lot of problems. But we would need a transparent, robust, and powerful system to make it profitable and beneficial for people.
My project is called Woeigo, the name is an acronym for what on earth is going on.
Shameless Plug:
If you want to get involved in anyway, please let me know :) We help people make a (positive) difference, simply.
chris@woeigo.com
Or, if you feel like knowing where your donation dollars go and how you can do the most good with the least amount of time... Then join our wait list. We are still testing with NFP's and small user groups at the moment to make things better before we open up completely.
USDA zone 9b or warmer. If you are looking for a versitile, exotic fruit with high protein content that will grow outdoors in many cooler climates, check out the pawpaw:
We just had a local pawpaw festival, I had no idea such a fruit existed - like a cross between a banana, mango, and papaya, but growing plentifully at 42 degrees north.
Apparently they have a short shelf-life - the fruit must be eaten or preserved within a couple days of being picked. But they are quite tasty.
Mountain papaya (Vasconcellea pubescens) will also grow in temperate to cold regions. I have seen them growing in areas that get heavy frosts (but the probably wouldn't cope with actual snow). Interestingly, yellow papayas are what I would call a pawpaw and I didn't know that there was a completely different fruit called a pawpaw.
Not popular in India? News to me. Maybe not all over India. But in Kerala, the state I am from, Jackfruit is pretty popular there and is used to make a wide variety of dishes. My grandparents house has many jackfruit trees and we always had jackfruit to eat.
It tastes nothing like pulled pork to me though. It's mainly sweet and very slightly tangy/sour. Fresh jackfruit has a kind of "crunch" to it. I can't really describe the flavor without being self-referential... I mean, it kinda tastes like... jackfruit. Or maybe like pineapple mixed with banana?
The smell can be overwhelming, especially when it goes bad. But it's not that bad when it's fresh.
Oh and that sticky stuff is really sticky - hard to get off your clothes or your hands.
I think western writers have a silly perspective on India. It's more diverse than the European Union, really! How can one say anything at all about all of India at once?
Ignorance that's enabled by the whole place having a single name. Europe gets different treatment because all the countries have their own names, governments, etc.
The regions of the US are surprisingly different in many ways, but may not even line up with the various state boundaries so most of the time it's just "America" too. Probably not as diverse as India (I've never been, so it's just a guess) but still nowhere near as homogeneous as some European countries are.
The sheer diversity of language and culture in a place that is a third of the size of Europe. India "officially" has 122 languages, but over 780 have been counted.
Going from one state to another is like going from one EU country to another; each of the 29 states has a different language, different writing-system, different culture, different cuisine, different traditions, different everything. Of course, there are similarities and towards the borders between states you get a kind of continuum of language and culture.
Fair enough. I realise that the Indian states are very different, much like different EU countries.
I don't think the EU has quite as many languages (and dialects) as that, though there are more than many people think. Have a quick look at the list here, for example:
Many that previously existed have died out, of course. And as TV and radio became more prevelant, it did kill off a large number of dialects. I've noticed in the UK that in certain regions, it's the older folk who have the broadest accents and use the most dialect words, compared with younger people.
Do you see the same thing happening in India, or are they managing to preserve local tradition alongside the mainstream?
There are so many people that there will definitely be enough people to continue tradition. Usually, it is more convenient to marry someone who is from the same state, so that is what ends up happening (also: in, Arranged Marriage, the suitors are generally from the same state and maybe caste).
However, there is also a lot of intermingling...but I don't see it becoming one homogeneous race (like the Han Chinese) anytime soon.
> Do you see the same thing happening in India, or are they managing to preserve local tradition alongside the mainstream?
It is complex! Some dialects are dying out, but the regions seem to be clustering around the 22 'scheduled languages'. In Karnataka (population ~ 60 million) for example, there are at least 4 dialects of Kannada. With the proliferation of social media, TV, and cinema, two things are happening: (1) the non-majority dialects are losing out to a 'standardized' mean similar to the Wisconsin-mean in the US, (2) paradoxically, non-standard dialects are gaining popularity because of their quirks. This is similar to how Irish dialects are highlighted in movies like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, In Bruges, etc. giving them more visibility than it would otherwise get. Another analogy is how we all know about Minnesotan 'dialects' and Californian dude-isms from Coen brothers' explorations of these themes.
The primary bulwark against the disappearance of dialects and languages in India is just the largeness of the masses of people who speak these languages. For example, Bhojpuri, a dialect that is different from standardized movie/TV 'Hindi' has tens of millions of speakers.
Somehow standardized languages seem to co-exist with dialects in much of India.
It is nearly impossible that any of the 22 languages will die out in the next few centuries. Even most dialects will survive because of the strength in numbers. (Note, the 22 languages includes Sanskrit, which like Latin and classical Greek has in some sense 'died out'. But the masses never 'spoke' Sanskrit, it was more of a formalized language for literature and administration.)
> But the masses never 'spoke' Sanskrit, it was more of a formalized language for literature and administration.
That's a strange thing to say. Panini formalized it, but the language was in widespread use for a long time before that, quite like Latin and classical Greek were. Why else would people start using it for literature and administration? Of course, using it for these two purposes gave it a certain degree of prestige and made the language live on long after it was spoken by the masses.
The common people spoke 'Prakrit's and Dravidian languages, basically ancestors of modern languages. The word 'sanskrit' itself comes from the same root as 'samskara'. One of the meanings of 'samskara' is 'purification (rite)'. In all likelihood, only Brahmins and other scholars 'spoke' Sanskrit [1]. It is also likely that all Sanskrit speakers were bilingual. This exclusivity of Sanskrit learning is also one of the likely reasons why Buddhist teachings are in Prakrits (dharma = dhamma, etc.).
"But there are evidences to show that to all intents and purposes, Sanskrit was a living language and view that it was spoken by at least a large section of the people."
The author then writes a more nuanced answer.
> This exclusivity of Sanskrit learning is also one of the likely reasons why Buddhist teachings are in Prakrits (dharma = dhamma, etc.).
This, while possibly true, is misleading in this context. All it means is that Sanskrit was on its way out by that time period, and in that region. It does not square with your previous claim that Sanskrit was never spoken by the masses.
As another factor of note, we are talking about a large geographic region and a large time period. I am not even sure what qualifies as "Prakrit". If it just means "vernacular", it would still qualify as Sanskrit. As you mentioned previously, Kannada has at least four dialects. Raichur Kannada sounds quite different from the Kannada of textbooks or news reports. But it's still considered Kannada. Can we use a similar approach to consider Prakrit as just a dialect of Sanskrit? I don't know. I am neither a linguist, nor a Sanskrit historian.
Prakrit is not one language. I was careful to use it as 'Prakrits'. Given the formality of Sanskrit, I seriously doubt Prakrits can be considered its dialects. In fact, the relationship probably goes the other way- Sanskrit is a formalized version of the Prakrits that people spoke. In fact, the names are descriptive and are indicative of the relationship: Prakrit has the same root as 'prakriti' = 'nature', Sanskrit means 'refined'.
Sanskrit and Prakrits are different enough to not be dialects. It is perhaps a relationship more like literary Kannada and Tulu, which are wholly different languages with many similarities. (A relationship also shared by (Kannada, Tamil, Tulu, Telugu, Malayalam) and (Oriya, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi) which are all wholly different languages belonging to two families (Dravidian former, Indo-Aryan latter), with similar roots, but do not share a 'dialect' relationship between each other or with any other extant languages)
Buddhism definitely had egalitarian pan-caste aspirations compared to Vedic doctrine. It is only natural that Buddha and others preached in colloquial languages, rather than literary. It is true at the same time, that later Buddhist scholars wrote many works in literary Sanskrit.
Edit: Also, I did not claim that Brahmins were not numerous. They were probably the same percentage of the population as today, which is about 5-10%, which is still a 'large section', but far from the majority.
> Sanskrit is a formalized version of the Prakrits that people spoke.
Panini, and to some extent, his near-contemporaries formalized Sanskrit. It wasn't formalized before that. Vedic Sanskrit was never formalized. Moreover, the book you cited says, "there are many sutras in the Astadhyayi of Panini which are meaningless unless they have any reference to a living speech".
> Sanskrit and Prakrits are different enough to not be dialects.
From the book, "It has been said in Bharata's Natyashastra that Prakrit and Sanskrit are different branches of one and the same language. In the earliest known forms of Prakrit, there are passages which can easily be translated into Sanskrit by the application of simple phonetic rules."
I agree with what you wrote about Buddha's choice of language.
But my point throughout is that there has to have been a time and a place where what was then considered Sanskrit was spoken by the masses. I'd find it hard to conceive of a situation where the educated classes created a dialect/language for themselves, and only this dialect could carry the name "Sanskrit".
As a westerner it's frustrating to me that my compatriots can't turn their statements around and see how it feels. If I said "okra is very popular in the U.S." Or heck even pineapple. I'd be half right and half wrong.
I am originally from Gujarat (a western state) and jackfruit is definitely not as popular as it is in South. There are no dishes in Gujarat which are made using jackfruit. I know this because I grew up in Surat (a city in Gujarat) but worked in Mangalore for 2.5 years. I personally love jack fruit especially fried jackfruit chips! Luckily, Indian Grocery stores in NYC carry those jackfruit chips. Completely agree that it's impossible to describe the taste, you just have to try it.
Unripe jackfruit is totally like pork in texture - pulled or cubed. Only, as is typical of plant-based food, it is not as juicy. You can use it in all the ways that you can use pork - stews, jambalayas, with rice - except in a sandwich. I'm pretty sure jackfruit is too dry for sandwiches. Though, if it lends itself to pickling like cabbage, that may be a good way to incorporate it into a sandwich.
It's supposed to resemble pulled pork before it's ripened. I've never seen it personally, however, since I've only been able to find fresh jackfruit in the midwest in the last few years.
No kidding. Jackfruit is everywhere in Bengali cuisine[0]! It's really popular with vegetarians and people on vrat, because it has a tougher texture (like meat) with certain preparations.
I don't know what pulled pork tastes like, but I dislike even the smell of pork, whereas jackfruit is delicious. So I'm skeptical of that comparison as well.
While they might look similar, jackfruit is much less offensive to most people. Jackfruit has a sweet and floral aroma that will leave your hands smelling quite nice for a while.
Ripe jackfruit tastes a bit like a mix between cantaloupe, pineapple and mango, plus some floral notes. I absolutely love it and wish I could find it in my neighborhood more often.
Ditto. I'm from the north, U.P., and growing up unripe jackfruit (कटहल) was actually my absolute favorite dish, dry stir fried not the one with curry. Even in the U.S. we occasionally get the canned version which is generally Thai in origin.
It is extremely sticky, so the trick to cut it is to apply cooking oil in your hands and then cut it. :)
I can't speak for everyone in Andhra, but cooked jackfruit regularly appears at my family's meals. More commonly eaten in the village than the city, perhaps. Popular with devout or health-conscious folks as a meat substitute.
My cousin's father-in-law served jackfruit biryani at his wedding banquet.
Same here. This is very popular in Kerala. I think it is unfair to say Jackfruit is not popular in India, Kerala is in India. Pulled pork? That's news ... It is a fruit that needs getting used to. To those who love it, there is nothing as great as the jackfruit!
It was surprising. Jackfruit is available even in a city like Delhi. I fondly remember feasting on sweet jackfruit at my grandparents place when I was younger. I would say it is a popular native fruit. I am skeptical about the 75 % wastage mentioned. That cannot be true.
Climbing up a jackfruit tree and carefully bringing the fruit down without getting eaten alive by ants is a feat of endurance. Jackfruit trees grow tall and the fruits are heavy, 30+ pounds on average. Also plucking the bulbs out of the fruit is a laborious task. This is truly a fruit of love to be savored from the backyard garden and rarely farmed at a large scale. Also eating too many raw bulbs causes stomach upsets in most people and is most commonly consumed as a well cooked dessert.
short jackfruit trees might be crossbreeds. The original ones grow very tall. The fruits can be harvested by climbing the tree and making use of rope to bring down the fruit gracefully to the ground.
Interesting. My experience with jackfruit trees has been from the western coast of Mexico, so maybe there's a difference there.
Though a google image search for "jackfruit tree" seems to show the trees I'm familiar with. Not very tall with a good portion of fruit within arm's reach.
Yes I have personally done it myself in Kerala State India. There is lot of ants which can bite , but not poisonous. Usually when we put up a small smoke fire under the tree , the ants will scram. After reaching a branch , someone will throw a rope up and I tie the rope around the jackfruit and wrap it around a branch sort of acting as a pully system. Once the person in the ground has got a good grip on the rope. I cut the fruit and the person on the ground slowly releases the rope bringing the fruit down slowly.
This is useful especially when the fruit is very ripe as it likely to smash into pieces on impact. The rope trick is employed widely in Kerala to harvest this gigantic fruit from the jackfruit tree.
If some enterprising farmers can figure out how to minimize the seeds and other less useful qualities, then there's a good chance this will be a new staple.
I eat this all the time when I am in the Philippines. It has one unique property that was not mentioned in the article. Just as asparagus makes urine smell like asparagus, jackfruit makes feces smell sweet like the fruit.
The article misses some really important information. If you let some pieces of Jack Fruit soaked in rum for months... It saves body and soul!! ;-) Recipe from Reunion Island available if you ping me...
I was recently informed that the popularity of Ethiopian food in North America has driven the price of their bread up to a level where Ethiopian people can't really afford it anymore. While publicity is good, I hope such a pattern doesn't emerge for the jackfruit, so that it can be maintained as a cheap food.
Seems to be a close relative of the Breadfruit which is similarly thought to be a good way to feed people or so the tour guide told us when I visited the National Botanical Garden.
This article presumes that India has one cuisine, where Jackfruit is avoided. This is false as India has several cuisines and Jackfruit is used in several of those cuisines.
But if the article writer was looking for Tandoori Jackfruit, then yes, that is true -- there is not tandoori jackfruit!
I am from the Kerala state in India where this fruit is in abundance. My home has 2 of those big trees.
About the pulled pork reference , I have had pulled pork in Arizona Phoenix where I work now. The unripe jackfruit do not taste like that. Just an "unripe" taste that's all. Unripe fruit has lot of milky sticky liquid oozing from the hives inside the fruit.
In its unripe form , its used for frying , something like potato sticks lookalike. In its ripe form its mixed with beef and made into squishy form. Keralites eat a lot of beef,unlike other states in India. (where beef is banned)
The seeds of the jackfruit , ( a single fruit has hundreds of seeds ) is used to make curry mixed with sour mango and sun dried shrimp. The outer casing of the jackfruit is re purposed as food to the cows. The jackfruit wood is good for carpentry and is used to make door , almirahs , windows in Kerala homes.
Probably the author is just an author. Might not have experience with the real fruit and do not know much about India as is with many western countries.
One of my amazing classmates in medical school is the founder of a company called Global Village Fruit [1] where she works on making jackfruit available internationally. In the Boston area her company has supplied numerous local restaurants with the fruit (Veggie Galaxy makes a delicious jackfruit sandwich out of her company's product), and she's done a wonderful job spreading awareness of the jackfruit. I urge you to check out the company and learn how you might be able to incorporate the jackfruit into your own recipes!
I live in Cambodia and have always been put off jackfruit by its smell. With plenty of other fruit I love, I've just never bothered to try it...till today. I shall give it a go this evening. I doubt the pork taste very much, as a vegetarian I hear that a lot, "it taste just like bacon", no, no it doesn't.
There are three very similar fruits I've met so far:
- Durian (looks similar to Jackfruit, a little rounder, and spikier), which is very popular in Malaysia and Singapore, and has a very strong smell. It has a more creamy consistency, and tastes quite different from jackfruit. People say, it's an acquired taste. Some love it, some hate it with passion.
- Jackfruit, I got to know this first in Viet Nam, but it can also found it in other places in Asia, smells and tastes sweeter. Also the reaction to it is less extreme than to Durian; I've seen it on the Seychelles as well.
- Breadfruit, I saw and eat it first on the Seychelles. It looks more similar to Durian, in shape, but less spiky. Apparently it has a very short shelf life, but you can make great fries from it.
It's very hard to describe taste. But I encourage to try it for yourself. (Or for Durian, maybe start with chocolate coated Durian candy, or Durian ice cream, and then go for the real thing; word of advice, if you buy it at the market in pre cut pieces to eat right away, and you do not intend to make it into cake or some derived dish, go for the more expensive packs, they are usually better, less mushy. You will likely have to get over the smell already, so taking the very mushy consistency out of the equation, may make for a slightly more pleasant introduction to Durian.
Jackfruit on the other hand is pretty easy, I would say. Just pay attention to get fresh, not squishy (e.g. they are too ripe, or old) pieces.
The unripe fruit tastes very different from the ripe fruit. It's common in Indonesia as well, where gudeg (unripe jackfruit curry) is the unofficial dish of Yogyakarta:
De-skining the jackfruit is an art. You liberally apply coconut/olive oil on your hands and then get to the fruit !!! Hope you enjoy it more next time :)
My ancestral home is Mangalore, so I've been there qutie often. The jackrfuit is my favorite fruit! Once you rip it open, removing the compartments is relatively easy. The seed is easier to remove. It's one of those fruits that is incredibly sweet, tasty, and you can eat A LOT of it. It can be a meal by itself and you won't feel sick of eating it.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadWhere near Kodai? Yes, lots of jackfruit grows there, some height below the town.
Jack fruit Curry, tastes Awesome!!! http://www.blendwithspices.com/2011/12/andhra-panasa-pottu-k...
It is also much easier to find in cans in the U.S. than as whole fresh fruit.
I agree with the flavor being characterized as bubblegum pineapple. Maybe a bit banana-ish. I enjoy it, myself, but the rest of the family thinks it smells bad and tastes odd. It has never crossed my mind that it might resemble pulled pork in any way.
And for a "poor man's fruit", it is certainly very expensive to lay hands on outside of its normal growing range.
Fortunately I did learn a bit about a fruit I have never seen nor heard of before. So I guess it was worthwhile.
(see http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html )
What if the same companies that sell you oranges could give some of those same oranges to the homeless? Or use a portion of their profits to (without deceit) send them to countries in need? Maybe I don't know enough about these things to really talk, but having fed the homeless once upon a time for about a year without the aid of government assistance I think we make too many excuses for things that really should just be done. Ah well, maybe someday soon we'll see true change that benefits all.
For example, chicken breast meat is very popular in the western world. Once they remove the white meat where does the rest of it go. What the producers can't sell domestically in the US or Canada they export to developing countries at cut rate prices. This drives the local farmers out of business.
Before donating fruits to countries in need (and can grow the same fruit) think long and hard about the impact that help might have on their local economy. In any other scenario this would be considered dumping and that country would be taken to WTO court.
But I don't think it's a zero-sum game. I think the total utility generated by free food is worse than the disutility of the farmer losing his business. Now those people have money to spend on other things that they would have spent on food.
Protectionism benefits producers at the expense of consumers.
Of course ideally you wouldn't send food directly, but just money, which they could use to buy food, or whatever they need.
I'm not sure i follow. Someone would have had to build something or farm something in the first place for it to be given away.
The economics of this are a bit more complicated than that though. If importing food from Brazil was cheaper, someone should already be doing it without any charitable intentions. And if if it's not, then it makes more sense for the charity to buy the food locally than pay more to import it.
A lot of (mostly urban) businesses do, in fact, give food to help feed the homeless. In downtown San Diego, one or more Starbucks locations gives away leftover items to a women's services center to help provide a free coffee and pastry breakfast to indigent women. Presumably they get a write off for it, plus they only serve fresh goods to their customers.
Or use a portion of their profits to (without deceit) send them to countries in need?
According to Diet for a Small Planet, the vast majority of starvation is caused by internal political strife and sometimes food aid gets sold off to put money in the pockets of corrupt politicians or simply rots on the docks because they don't want it delivered to the hungry masses who are often de facto a populace they are internally at war with.
Furthermore, when Western foods are delivered to other countries, locals develop a desire for a lifestyle that is economically out of their reach and frequently not sustainable locally. In other words, they hunger for foods that cannot be grown locally, at least not without ruining the local environment.
There have been all kinds of problems caused in the past by food aid, such as women being given just enough baby formula for their baby that their own natural milk production dried up, then the free aid stopped. I think the intent was to create a larger market for baby formula, but these women could not afford to buy baby formula. As a result, babies died.
On the one hand, help for the homeless can be life saving in the short run. On the other hand, in the long run, the homeless need the same things any middle class or wealthy person needs: The ability to solve their own problems and support themselves. Too much focus on treating homeless individuals like helpless charity cases can actively undermine the possibility of them getting their act together. It's a hard balance to strike. International aid is typically even more fucked up, from what I gather.
I know you mean well, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Your suggestion has all kinds of potential to pave a road to hell.
That's not what happened. It was Nestle actively encouraging hospitals to recommend baby formula, by bribing doctors and providing the formula for free. Then, when the mothers left the hospital, they were pretty much forced into buying formula, and those who couldn't afford it basically had their babies starve to death.
In other words, it was Nestle literally killing babies in search of profit. There was no "food aid" element to this at all.
I knew that, I just see little difference between this deadly marketing ploy and the outcomes of a lot of things that do more strictly merit the label of food aid. But perhaps the detail that this specific incident was a twisted marketing ploy will help others more readily comprehend how and why well meaning food aid can have unintended negative consequences -- in short, how they can have a dark side.
I'm going to disagree with that statement (or perhaps with your wording). Less than half of the land area is urban, sure. But more than half is rural rather than uninhabited.
Even if you're going to be really picky about the definition, Almost 45% of the census blocks in the US have a population of zero, which is pretty stunning if you think about it. http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/nobody-lives-here-a-beautif...
Okay, but then then suburbs are uninhabited too. The neighborhood I'm in has 1500-2000 sqft houses on 10ksqft lots. That's 80-85% uninhabited, especially once you start to add up the amount of extra land for streets, ditches, canals, parks, etc. I bet most suburban landscapes are 90% uninhabited.
Here's an agricultural company that owns 10 combines and some 20+ other trucks and they claim to harvest 1500 acres a day. If you've got a 50k acre farm you're talking spending a full month with those folks harvesting your crop. So that's probably 2-3 dozen people. http://www.frederickharvesting.com/equipment.html
http://www.frutafeia.pt/en
http://www.uglyfruits.eu/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05mpx0k
France recently passed law about supermarket food waste. (Although I'm not sure it is still law?)
http://www.thegrocer.co.uk/channels/supermarkets/france-supe...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33907737
Conveniently enough, I found a guide to orange carton dimensions and weights: http://www.south-africa-fruits.com/citrus-packaging.html So, let's see how much it costs to ship a carton of oranges from, say, Florida to Kenya (they could definitely use some citrus)! Oranges, while a pretty hardy fruit, have a shelf life of, at most, a few weeks at room temperature, according to multiple sources. I don't know if they'd be great sitting around in a cargo ship, with uncertain temperature and humidity changes for a month. So let's fly them over. Here's a calculator: http://www.worldfreightrates.com/en/freight
I calculated $154.74 - $171.02 per carton. That's quite a hefty premium on a carton of oranges (about 100 oranges, according to multiple sources). Sure, you might argue that a benevolent organization could come along and send bulk pallets (unfortunately, I couldn't find anything that would let me calculate the costs for a pallet of oranges), but I doubt you're going to find more than a 20% costs savings -- competition in this industry is stiff, and jet fuel is expensive.
In Boston, can buy navel oranges at my local grocery store for a dollar an orange, or less (I just checked Peapod!). So, yeah, it literally costs more to ship an orange across the ocean than oranges here cost, even with the relatively high cost of labor in the US. As wealthy Americans, we frequently pay for exotic foods (bananas in the middle of winter!) that cost very little to produce, and we're paying almost entirely for shipping. We don't think much about shipping costs, or think that it's unusual to get our food shipped to us, but that sort of thinking is dangerous.
It's far far cheaper to grow more food in starving countries than it is to ship them food. In Kenya, and all over Africa, food prices are much cheaper than they are here, even on open markets with relatively inefficient food delivery practices. It is cheaper (not to mention more environmentally sound!) to produce the food there, than it is to produce it here, and then transport it there. You make no sense. I mean, people in many African countries (let's be honest, Kenya is one of the wealthier ones) commonly feed their entire families on just a few dollars a day -- why not compost the fucking oranges, send them the money we would have spent on spilling fuel into the atmosphere, invigorate their economy, and let them eat like kings for the cost of flying over three oranges?
Saying "Now I understand there would be a cost in transporting these goods, as well as other factors, but still..." is just irresponsible. Yes, seeing oranges go to waste makes you feel bad. But the solution is not to ship it outside the relatively small radius where it makes environmental and economic sense to do so, when there are many other solutions for hunger that don't waste resources and kill the environment faster.
$3-$10k from just about anywhere to anywhere via sea for a 40 foot reefer. Which works out as virtually nothing per orange.
The oranges you buy in Boston could just as easily come from somewhere else and you'd probably barely notice any price difference.
"Fresh orange imports in 2012 were valued at nearly $107.4 million, an 11 percent increase from 2011. The imports originated mainly in Chile and South Africa" - http://www.agmrc.org/commodities__products/fruits/citrus/cit...
Food is the tip of the iceberg, many problems we face today actually have painfully simple solutions. Food waste for instance which is at 1.3B tons for stuff before super markets feeds all the hungry people needed.
Proper management of surplus resources (in this case food) can solve a lot of problems. But we would need a transparent, robust, and powerful system to make it profitable and beneficial for people.
My project is called Woeigo, the name is an acronym for what on earth is going on.
Shameless Plug: If you want to get involved in anyway, please let me know :) We help people make a (positive) difference, simply.
chris@woeigo.com
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimina_triloba
Apparently they have a short shelf-life - the fruit must be eaten or preserved within a couple days of being picked. But they are quite tasty.
It tastes nothing like pulled pork to me though. It's mainly sweet and very slightly tangy/sour. Fresh jackfruit has a kind of "crunch" to it. I can't really describe the flavor without being self-referential... I mean, it kinda tastes like... jackfruit. Or maybe like pineapple mixed with banana?
The smell can be overwhelming, especially when it goes bad. But it's not that bad when it's fresh.
Oh and that sticky stuff is really sticky - hard to get off your clothes or your hands.
Yeah, you could find them everywhere in Karnataka and most of the states I went to in the South.
The regions of the US are surprisingly different in many ways, but may not even line up with the various state boundaries so most of the time it's just "America" too. Probably not as diverse as India (I've never been, so it's just a guess) but still nowhere near as homogeneous as some European countries are.
Going from one state to another is like going from one EU country to another; each of the 29 states has a different language, different writing-system, different culture, different cuisine, different traditions, different everything. Of course, there are similarities and towards the borders between states you get a kind of continuum of language and culture.
I don't think the EU has quite as many languages (and dialects) as that, though there are more than many people think. Have a quick look at the list here, for example:
http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/saoghal/mion-chanain/en/
Many that previously existed have died out, of course. And as TV and radio became more prevelant, it did kill off a large number of dialects. I've noticed in the UK that in certain regions, it's the older folk who have the broadest accents and use the most dialect words, compared with younger people.
Do you see the same thing happening in India, or are they managing to preserve local tradition alongside the mainstream?
However, there is also a lot of intermingling...but I don't see it becoming one homogeneous race (like the Han Chinese) anytime soon.
It is complex! Some dialects are dying out, but the regions seem to be clustering around the 22 'scheduled languages'. In Karnataka (population ~ 60 million) for example, there are at least 4 dialects of Kannada. With the proliferation of social media, TV, and cinema, two things are happening: (1) the non-majority dialects are losing out to a 'standardized' mean similar to the Wisconsin-mean in the US, (2) paradoxically, non-standard dialects are gaining popularity because of their quirks. This is similar to how Irish dialects are highlighted in movies like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, In Bruges, etc. giving them more visibility than it would otherwise get. Another analogy is how we all know about Minnesotan 'dialects' and Californian dude-isms from Coen brothers' explorations of these themes.
The primary bulwark against the disappearance of dialects and languages in India is just the largeness of the masses of people who speak these languages. For example, Bhojpuri, a dialect that is different from standardized movie/TV 'Hindi' has tens of millions of speakers.
Somehow standardized languages seem to co-exist with dialects in much of India.
It is nearly impossible that any of the 22 languages will die out in the next few centuries. Even most dialects will survive because of the strength in numbers. (Note, the 22 languages includes Sanskrit, which like Latin and classical Greek has in some sense 'died out'. But the masses never 'spoke' Sanskrit, it was more of a formalized language for literature and administration.)
Edit: By Wisconsin-mean, I mean General American https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American
That's a strange thing to say. Panini formalized it, but the language was in widespread use for a long time before that, quite like Latin and classical Greek were. Why else would people start using it for literature and administration? Of course, using it for these two purposes gave it a certain degree of prestige and made the language live on long after it was spoken by the masses.
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=QYxpvZLg4hAC&pg=PA19&dq=sa...
"But there are evidences to show that to all intents and purposes, Sanskrit was a living language and view that it was spoken by at least a large section of the people."
The author then writes a more nuanced answer.
> This exclusivity of Sanskrit learning is also one of the likely reasons why Buddhist teachings are in Prakrits (dharma = dhamma, etc.).
This, while possibly true, is misleading in this context. All it means is that Sanskrit was on its way out by that time period, and in that region. It does not square with your previous claim that Sanskrit was never spoken by the masses.
As another factor of note, we are talking about a large geographic region and a large time period. I am not even sure what qualifies as "Prakrit". If it just means "vernacular", it would still qualify as Sanskrit. As you mentioned previously, Kannada has at least four dialects. Raichur Kannada sounds quite different from the Kannada of textbooks or news reports. But it's still considered Kannada. Can we use a similar approach to consider Prakrit as just a dialect of Sanskrit? I don't know. I am neither a linguist, nor a Sanskrit historian.
Sanskrit and Prakrits are different enough to not be dialects. It is perhaps a relationship more like literary Kannada and Tulu, which are wholly different languages with many similarities. (A relationship also shared by (Kannada, Tamil, Tulu, Telugu, Malayalam) and (Oriya, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi) which are all wholly different languages belonging to two families (Dravidian former, Indo-Aryan latter), with similar roots, but do not share a 'dialect' relationship between each other or with any other extant languages)
Buddhism definitely had egalitarian pan-caste aspirations compared to Vedic doctrine. It is only natural that Buddha and others preached in colloquial languages, rather than literary. It is true at the same time, that later Buddhist scholars wrote many works in literary Sanskrit.
Edit: Also, I did not claim that Brahmins were not numerous. They were probably the same percentage of the population as today, which is about 5-10%, which is still a 'large section', but far from the majority.
Panini, and to some extent, his near-contemporaries formalized Sanskrit. It wasn't formalized before that. Vedic Sanskrit was never formalized. Moreover, the book you cited says, "there are many sutras in the Astadhyayi of Panini which are meaningless unless they have any reference to a living speech".
> Sanskrit and Prakrits are different enough to not be dialects.
From the book, "It has been said in Bharata's Natyashastra that Prakrit and Sanskrit are different branches of one and the same language. In the earliest known forms of Prakrit, there are passages which can easily be translated into Sanskrit by the application of simple phonetic rules."
I agree with what you wrote about Buddha's choice of language.
But my point throughout is that there has to have been a time and a place where what was then considered Sanskrit was spoken by the masses. I'd find it hard to conceive of a situation where the educated classes created a dialect/language for themselves, and only this dialect could carry the name "Sanskrit".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girmityas
http://www.therandyradish.com/menu
No kidding. Jackfruit is everywhere in Bengali cuisine[0]! It's really popular with vegetarians and people on vrat, because it has a tougher texture (like meat) with certain preparations.
I don't know what pulled pork tastes like, but I dislike even the smell of pork, whereas jackfruit is delicious. So I'm skeptical of that comparison as well.
[0] West Bengal, too, not just East Bengali
Ripe jackfruit tastes a bit like a mix between cantaloupe, pineapple and mango, plus some floral notes. I absolutely love it and wish I could find it in my neighborhood more often.
It is extremely sticky, so the trick to cut it is to apply cooking oil in your hands and then cut it. :)
Interestingly I have never had ripe jackfruit.
My cousin's father-in-law served jackfruit biryani at his wedding banquet.
Pretty expensive, though, per pound or per calorie.
Though a google image search for "jackfruit tree" seems to show the trees I'm familiar with. Not very tall with a good portion of fruit within arm's reach.
This is useful especially when the fruit is very ripe as it likely to smash into pieces on impact. The rope trick is employed widely in Kerala to harvest this gigantic fruit from the jackfruit tree.
Heck, a good number of years ago, this is what a wild banana looked like: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/In...
If some enterprising farmers can figure out how to minimize the seeds and other less useful qualities, then there's a good chance this will be a new staple.
http://ntbg.org/breadfruit/breadfruit/
But if the article writer was looking for Tandoori Jackfruit, then yes, that is true -- there is not tandoori jackfruit!
About the pulled pork reference , I have had pulled pork in Arizona Phoenix where I work now. The unripe jackfruit do not taste like that. Just an "unripe" taste that's all. Unripe fruit has lot of milky sticky liquid oozing from the hives inside the fruit.
In its unripe form , its used for frying , something like potato sticks lookalike. In its ripe form its mixed with beef and made into squishy form. Keralites eat a lot of beef,unlike other states in India. (where beef is banned)
The seeds of the jackfruit , ( a single fruit has hundreds of seeds ) is used to make curry mixed with sour mango and sun dried shrimp. The outer casing of the jackfruit is re purposed as food to the cows. The jackfruit wood is good for carpentry and is used to make door , almirahs , windows in Kerala homes.
Probably the author is just an author. Might not have experience with the real fruit and do not know much about India as is with many western countries.
[Legislation on cattle slaughter by state](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_slaughter_in_India#Legi...)
That sounds like most states ban it. Also the grandparent comment just said "other states" without stating the number.
Another important fact is, we don't use any fertilizer to grow Jackfruits. It's totally healthy and chemical free.
[1] http://www.globalvillagefruit.com/
Source: frequent eater of Cambodian jackfruit :)
- Durian (looks similar to Jackfruit, a little rounder, and spikier), which is very popular in Malaysia and Singapore, and has a very strong smell. It has a more creamy consistency, and tastes quite different from jackfruit. People say, it's an acquired taste. Some love it, some hate it with passion.
- Jackfruit, I got to know this first in Viet Nam, but it can also found it in other places in Asia, smells and tastes sweeter. Also the reaction to it is less extreme than to Durian; I've seen it on the Seychelles as well.
- Breadfruit, I saw and eat it first on the Seychelles. It looks more similar to Durian, in shape, but less spiky. Apparently it has a very short shelf life, but you can make great fries from it.
It's very hard to describe taste. But I encourage to try it for yourself. (Or for Durian, maybe start with chocolate coated Durian candy, or Durian ice cream, and then go for the real thing; word of advice, if you buy it at the market in pre cut pieces to eat right away, and you do not intend to make it into cake or some derived dish, go for the more expensive packs, they are usually better, less mushy. You will likely have to get over the smell already, so taking the very mushy consistency out of the equation, may make for a slightly more pleasant introduction to Durian. Jackfruit on the other hand is pretty easy, I would say. Just pay attention to get fresh, not squishy (e.g. they are too ripe, or old) pieces.
For the record, it doesn't take like pulled pork... in any respect whatsoever...
Durian - good luck getting anyone to eat the bloody thing. I love it, but it's an acquired taste.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gudeg
I live in Bloomington, Indiana, USA. And our local grocer (Kroger) has Jackfruit. It's $5/lb and the pod is around 6-10 lbs.
They had one on sale, and I bought it, only knowing the name. The thing was pretty good, given I knew very little about preparation.
One thing though, is use olive oil liberally. The latex it gives off is sticky as hell. Not even soap will get it to release.
I actually prefer it slightly unripe, since it can quickly become exceedingly gooey and sweet.