An Urban's Rural View

We can only speculate, because written records don't exist and fossils don't explain, how our earliest human ancestors went about deciding which plants to eat. It's a safe guess they used some form of trial and error to determine which tubers and grains and fruits weren't poisonous, which were nutritious, which tasted good.

Homo sapiens sapiens is still trying out new plants, though thankfully in a more sophisticated fashion. Quinoa, for example, was unknown to most Americans before it was first planted in California in 1982. In certain foodie circles today it's all the rage.

And then there are cashew apples. Traditionally cashew growers in India left the stem, or apple, to rot on the ground when they harvested the nuts. There was no market for the apples, which ferment quickly and thus have a short shelf life. Now thanks to PepsiCo Inc, and the Clinton Foundation, the growers have a new cash crop (http://tiny.cc/…).

Because the cashew fruit is high in vitamin C, Pepsi will use cashew-fruit juice in blended fruit-juice drinks for the Indian market. The Clinton foundation, which strives to help small stakeholder farmers around the world, is training the Indian growers and setting up a new middleman infrastructure that will give them both better prices for their nuts and pay them for the apples.

According to the New York Times (http://tiny.cc/…), some of the first 500 growers to participate in the program are puzzled but grateful. "I thought it was a little strange that they wanted to buy cashew apples," one told the Times, "but I didn't like to question a new source of money."

The Times reports that Pepsi and other food companies are being driven "to experiment on a grand scale with flavors and ingredients whose appeal until recently were largely local." The driver, the newspaper says, is the "restless appetite" of "the demanding demographic group known as millennials, as well as new consumers among the world's emerging middle class."

For Pepsi, the cashew apple is an exotic "premium product" the company can "build a story around," one of its executives says. Another Pepsi exec stresses the growing "affordability" issue with coconut, lime and pomegranate juices. "So we are always looking for new juices sources that are locally produced to help bring prices down for us and for consumers."

Brazil is a big user of cashew apples, though only 12% of Brazil's apples get used because of the shelf-life issue. It was in Brazil that a Pepsi executive spotted the opportunity.

"Pepsi stumbled across the fruit in Brazil a few years ago, when Mehmood Khan, its global head of research and development, was working there to get the company's coconut water business up and running," the Times says. "A local supplier took him to a cashew orchard, where he saw the colorful apples and wondered how they could be used."

Transplanting crops from one continent to the next has a long tradition, to be sure. Not a few of the crops American farmers grow originated elsewhere, potatoes and tomatoes among them. Quinoa was an important part of the diet in the Andes in South America long before it came to the U.S.

Is there a new crop coming soon to the American Midwest? Given the endless curiosity and innovativeness of our species, it wouldn't be a shock if one materialized.

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanity@hotmail.com

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