Pawpaw, can you hear me?

One of the things I'm really into is wild food - that is, food that's just out there naturally, without having to go a store or a restaurant or whatever. Why I'm into this is something I'll discuss later, but for now just know that, for some time now, my Holy Grail of foraging has been the pawpaw.

Depending on where (and when) you’re from, the name may be foreign to you. The pawpaw is North America’s largest tree fruit, growing in woods throughout the eastern half of the continent. Pawpaws have never really caught on as supermarket produce in the way that other fruits have – even the more exotic ones. (You can find cherimoya, a tropical relative of the pawpaw, in grocery stores from time to time, though.) Apparently once picked it ripens too quickly to be worthwhile for marketing.

Where it’s abundant, though, it’s a beloved part of the local seasonal cuisine; it’s also given its name to various places and even a dinosaur.

My job requires me to spend a fair amount of time in relative wilderness, which is great for my interest in wild food, among other propensities (like hiking and wildlife viewing.) While I can’t validate spending work time to just go off on a bush shopping trip, wild foods are abundant enough that I just come across them in the normal course of a field day.  I found my first wild blueberries in the woods down here, as well as the odd edible fungus. Now, southeast Georgia is outside what most references call the range of greatest abundance for the pawpaw, but anecdotal reports indicated to me I might just come across it in my fieldwork, and the wetlands seemed the ideal place for something that my Peterson Field Guide tells me inhabits “rich soil; streambanks, woods”.

The pawpaw eluded me for five seasons, however, until I had an encounter this past summer in a completely unexpected place.

I had to check out a large drainage ditch, and parked the truck in a small copse of shrubs and weeds on the side of an unpaved road some distance uphill from the ditch. And there, at the side of the truck, was a scraggly waist-high bush bearing small fruits that pretty well matched the description of pawpaw.

I collected several of the fruits and brought them back. They were green and pretty hard, so I set them on the windowsill, hoping they would ripen up.

After a few days in the sun, they were starting to turn brown, so I cut a couple open to see if they were any good to eat. Disappointment! Inside they were mostly pits, and the small amount of yellowish-white flesh surrounding those was pretty flavorless, like the inside of a banana peel.

Nevertheless, it was a ray of hope, indicating that I may yet find the real thing somewhere in the wilds of the Low Country. The pawpaw remains an elusive but tantalizing wild snack find. (I’ve also since added to the list the potato-like tubers of Sagittaria latifolia. (Among its many names, it’s also known as “katniss”, which you fans of “The Hunger Games” will recognize.)

Why is this such a big deal to me? Well, in college I majored in anthropology, inspired among other things by Daniel Quinn’s novel “Ishmael” and related works. One of the many things I learned – something, in fact, that most of us know intellectually but forget – is that, for most of our history, humans didn’t get our food from farms and the local grocery stores, but straight from the world around us. We evolved into a world that provides everything we need, if we just let it and if we have the knowledge to get it. Our ancestors weren’t ignorant brutes, scrabbling to survive. Instead, they maintained and shared a storehouse of knowledge of how to survive and thrive. This is not to dismiss all the gifts that the modern world gives us, but does provide a valuable counterpoint to the usual rhetoric that life was simply UNBEARABLE until we got CIVILIZED.

This is going to be important to remember in the near future. We hear a lot about how we have to stay ahead of our growing population by learning how to produce more food. What’s rarely pointed out is that our growing population is a direct result of an OVERabundance of food, caused at least in part by the widespread adoption of agriculture. That development has brought many benefits, but a host of problems as well. Modern foraging isn’t just a rewarding activity, but a valuable reminder that there are other ways to live than the way we do now.