When I look out my window in early fall, in the few feet between our house and a major traffic thoroughfare, I see a scrim of tropical forest. Foot-long bright-green leaves flop like basset hound ears from gently arching branches. If I look carefully I can find hanging clusters of fist-sized green fruits that bring to mind mangos or papayas. What is this exotic grove doing in Northeast Pennsylvania? 

You might be as surprised as I was to learn that the quintessentially American fruit is one most people have never heard of. Not the apple, which came over from Kazakhstan in the 1600s; or the pear, which was brought from China in the 1700s. The paw paw tree, botanical name Asimina triloba, is the only large pre-colonial fruit native to North America. 

It naturally resists insect pests and disease, is spurned by deer, is fire resistant, tolerant of heat and cold, and can grow in both sun and shade. It produces the largest native edible fruit on the continent. 

This fruit, the size and shape of a good-sized potato, has the consistency of custard and tastes like a blend of mango, banana and pineapple with hints of vanilla. Some people love it, others find it disgusting. 

For many reasons, including its short season, tricky fruiting and harvesting, brief shelf life and unusual taste, the paw paw will never replace the European and tropical fruits we love. 

However paw paws, coined “America’s forgotten fruit,” are having their day, and boy do they deserve it! 

The prehistoric paw paw

The story of the paw paw goes back 56 million years: in the Eocene period, after the massive asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and when the earth was hot everywhere, the paw paw emerged. It survived the cooling during the Pleistocene, when the most recent ice ages began, when sabertooth tigers, mastodons and giant sloths roamed. Some of these giant mammals ate paw paw fruit and distributed the seed across North America in their wake. 

Native Americans planted, cultivated and ate paw paw (called ha’simikisifina, or nasitush) up and down the riparian corridors of the East Coast for thousands of years. 

European explorers and colonizers were fond of the fruit, which they confused with papaya and named “pawpaw” in the late 18th century. 

Pawpaws kept Lewis and Clark from starving to death; George Washington ate it chilled for dessert and lauded its flavor; and it was cultivated by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. Paw paws were grown by enslaved people outside their quarters for nourishment and medicine, and poor whites in rural areas foraged paw paws. The fruit was celebrated in the folk tune “Way down yonder in the paw paw patch, pickin’ up paw paws, put-’em in your pocket…”

Hillbilly mango

Over time paw paw, aka “poor man’s banana” or “hillbilly mango,” became a low-status fruit associated with race and poverty. Paw paws disappeared from the diets of Americans with the advent of industrialization and the global transport of produce. But these resilient natives have never left us, and continue to grow wild along riverbanks and hillsides over 26 states in the eastern and midwestern United States. 

There has been a groundswell of enthusiasm for the paw paw in the past 20 years from farmers, ecologists, researchers and botanists. University breeding programs are developing new varieties that are more consistently tasty, less perishable and hold promise for commercial farming. Insecticidal and anticancer properties are being explored. 

The locavore, foraging, slow food and food sovereignty movements are touting the paw paw’s culinary merits and honoring its cultural significance. Paw paw festivals, which started in the late 1990s in Ohio with a few hundred people, are now drawing large international crowds in many states. Frozen paw paw pulp is sold by specialty mail-order houses for high prices. Paw paw panna cotta, anyone? 

Apparently paw paw beer is a thing now. Hoosier Banana has turned into Hipster Banana. You could spend days on the internet reading about its many attributes and products (guilty!).

Paw paws and butterflies

Going down the internet rabbit hole, I learned that paw paws have a very special ecological attribute. The paw paw tree is the only host plant for the zebra swallowtail (Protographium marcellus). This beautiful butterfly with dramatic black-and-white stripes lays its eggs on the paw paw, and the caterpillar that emerges feeds on its leaves. The leaves contain compounds (acetogenins) which make the plant repellent to birds and insects and thus eating them confers protection to the butterfly from most predators. 

When the stands of paw paws that lined the riverbanks in the 19th century were destroyed by the steel and coal industry, the butterflies disappeared from Pittsburgh. Gabrielle Marsden, a field archeologist and amateur naturalist, is fervently working to restore paw paws along Pittsburgh’s waterways to help create a more diverse ecosystem and bring about the return of the zebra swallowtail. She has searched miles of waterways in her canoe, building a database and mapping the surviving paw paw stands. She collects and plants seeds in nurseries and in the wild; grafts more productive scions onto wild plants to enhance fruiting; and hosts paw-paw tasting parties to increase local knowledge and interest in the paw paw. 

She firmly believes that creating corridors of restored paw paws can bring back the butterfly to Pittsburgh, and hopes it will be in her lifetime. 

Paw paws deserve our nurturing and attention. If all we do is watch the news, we would believe that the world is going to hell, yet there is a lot that we can still do to beautify and restore the habitats in which we live. I think that one reason the paw paw is so captivating is that it has lived through tens of millions of years of extreme changes and is still around. If we pay attention and are patient, it can still provide nourishment, pleasure, protection—and help us imagine a future.