Quintessential Resilience: The Breadfruit in the Caribbean

This is a moment when people have to face the climate crisis, one of the signs of a developing loss of balance in our planet’s support systems for life. This past year’s violent storms, severe droughts, and catastrophic rainfall tell us climate change isn’t in the future: it’s here. The Caribbean endured severe storms in the 2024 hurricane season, including Hurricane Beryl, which occurred far too early because the oceans were overheated by June.

Humans have largely lost their ancestral memory of the vital interconnectedness of all life on Earth. Now we have to learn, as fast as we can, how to manage threats resulting from our consumption of Earth’s resources. That some plants, such as the breadfruit, appear to be managing climate change better than expected shouldn’t make us less urgent about changing our ways. Breadfruit’s resilience and adaptability should be particularly instructive and inspiring to us in this moment.

The breadfruit tree has coexisted with humans in the Pacific region for more than three thousand years. Breadfruit is nutritious, possessing proteins, vitamins, and essential amino acids, and its fruiting season provided reliable food security. Pacific island peoples modified the breadfruit as they cultivated and eventually embraced it as a key part of their cultures. As a starchy vegetable, it lends itself to boiling, mashing, and roasting, even turning into flour. Early colonial observers even witnessed roasted breadfruit left as an offering to accompany the dead across the threshold at the end of life.

As the author writes in “‘A Good Thing Spring Up’: The Breadfruit Story in the Caribbean,” published in Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics, the breadfruit’s history in the Caribbean takes it, over several centuries, from being disliked to being embraced. Its journey across the ocean began with the British government’s colonial response to Caribbean planter complaints in the late eighteenth century. The American Revolution of 1776 eventually disrupted trade routes, so island planters looked for alternative sources of cheap food for enslaved workers. The British moved a great many plants across the world to their colonies in addition to establishing a research center at Kew (London) where highly trained botanists grew plants brought from the British empire. This work was inspired by the architect of imperial plant projects, Joseph Banks (1743–1820), who accompanied Captain James Cook to the Pacific, where he became aware of the breadfruit.

Banks and others reported that breadfruit required no work to grow or nurture. So, the British came up with the idea of shipping breadfruit shoots from the Pacific to the Caribbean. After a dramatic delay, when his first breadfruit voyage was ended by the famous mutiny in 1789 on his ship HMS Bounty, Captain William Bligh (1754–1817) successfully transported viable saplings to their botanical gardens in St. Vincent and other Caribbean locations in the early 1790s.

Imperial botanical gardens—at Kew and across the empire—were led by colonial botanists, but it was enslaved laborers who were charged with the painstaking work of cultivating and protecting the plants. Yet, because breadfruit didn’t have historic cultural associations for enslaved people of African descent on Caribbean plantations, and because they knew it was being offered as food by slave owners who had no interest in their welfare, they rejected it.

Still, the tree took root, literally and figuratively, in this new tropical region despite the different soils, rainfall patterns, and water resources. Caribbean islands are both volcanic with rich soil (e.g., Dominica and St. Vincent) and coral, with poor soil ( e.g., Barbados and Antigua). The breadfruit tree proved its adaptability, thriving on both. Its fruit-bearing process seemed to respond to local conditions. Even now there’s a shorter development cycle in Martinique than in Barbados. This all points to a remarkable adaptability in the plant which makes botanists and scientists hopeful it will be able to better cope with climate change than many other trees, once more providing food for humans facing daunting conditions.

Humans have interfered with the tree’s life in some significant ways. It once had a symbiotic relationship with a fungus that benefitted both organisms, but the breeding for bigger fruit by humans eventually denied the breadfruit this assistance. It can propagate through male and female flowers on the same tree but has mostly lost this capacity and instead self-propagates through root-sucker. Breadfruit has been bred for the seedless variety most humans prefer, but both seeded and seedless exist in the Caribbean. The seeded, called the breadnut (Brosimum alicastrum), is less common and less important for food. As in the Pacific, breadfruit is best prepared at home and has suffered from competition from imported processed food, much of it of dubious nutritional value.

Breadfruit has been proven to have medicinal qualities (possibly addressing aspects of colon cancer and treating blood pressure), and a tea made with its leaves is said to induce sleep. These qualities were long known to folk medicine, an essential resource for people denied Western medical care by racism and colonialism. Botanists and agricultural scientists at local institutions have worked to protect it for food security purposes, making sure there is a healthy stock of trees for the region. Moreover, scientists at the Department of Agriculture at The University of the West Indies have conducted surveys among breadfruit farmers in Trinidad and Tobago to assess changes in perception about the fruit, crop utilization, and its consumption patterns.

Despite its food value, however, its consumption has been associated with the lower classes; once someone had a little more money, they desired rice or potatoes, which are less nutritious. Elderly Barbadians today might look back on breadfruit as connected with poverty, but rice and potatoes wouldn’t have offered the same quality of nutrition. Even so, some resisted the fruit because of its capacity to provoke gas during the digestive process. Banks reported this, and this effect is wittily included in Barbadian writer Austin Clarke’s representation of it in his 1999 food memoir, Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit, where he writes of “the fragrance of expectoration.” Clarke also includes celebration of breadfruit as a beloved part of Barbadian traditional cooking.

In addition to Barbados, a number of Caribbean countries, including in St. Vincent, Grenada, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Martinique, have beloved recipes which importantly feature the breadfruit. Antiguan American writer Jamaica Kincaid, in her 1991 collection of essays, My Garden (Book), asserted that the fruit is disliked in her homeland of Antigua, perhaps because children believe it has played a part in an unjust history. However, she hasn’t lived in Antigua for some time, and Antiguans cook and enjoy breadfruit today.

Beyond the table, breadfruit has an important place in Caribbean folklore and culture. It appears in songs (including calypso), stories, and pithy sayings. Many contemporary writers feature it in their work, such as Merle Collins, Derek Walcott, Edouard Glissant. In 2021, Jamaican authors Michael Morrissey and Velma Pollard published a collection of tales about the tree, Breadfruit Stories. It’s also beloved across the region for its steady presence, the handsome tree towering over a village post office or standing in a small house yard, where its shade and beauty are valued alongside its faithful bearing of sustaining food.

Clearly, breadfruit has won its place in Caribbean culture, feeding people in difficult times as well as good ones. Rising seas and land erosion are another threat to the breadfruit’s future. Hopefully, with careful assistance from human partners, the breadfruit tree will long continue as a great ally of human health and welfare. Work to sustain this remarkable plant has and will immensely repay humans. This is an important and long-established case of human and plant cooperation—a model for us if we are to endure on this Earth that we have long thoughtlessly exploited. The Dumbarton Oaks Plant Humanities Initiative is working toward this goal by exploring plant-human relationships through the methods of both humanities and science scholarship.

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