The Fruit That Could Change Everything... But Won't

One breadfruit tree could feed a family for generations.

A single tree produces a about 250 fruits a year. So one acre of breadfruit could give you enough calories to feed almost ten people for an entire year. Each tree lives about 80 to 100 years, needs less labor than rice or wheat, and outperforms maize in flour yield per acre. It grows mostly in the tropics, where most of the world’s hungry people live, without fertilizer, without irrigation, without much of anything. With all the modern advancements of man, you’d think it’d be a priority to make it a major crop worldwide.

Today though, researchers call it a neglected crop and the reason it’s neglected is not as complicated as you may think.

Breadfruit has been a staple crop for more than 3,000 years, it was spread by Polynesian navigators across every settled island group in the Pacific. Pacific Islanders domesticated hundreds of distinct cultivars, selecting across generations for size, flavor, seedlessness, and staggered harvest seasons so the fruit would be available most of the year. The most well-known Hawaiian origin story teaches that breadfruit is a gift from the god Kū, who turned himself into a tree during a famine to feed his family. So this wasn’t just a wild plant that people stumbled across. It was a civilizational crop, tended and shaped over millennia.

Then Europe arrived.

Joseph Banks first encountered breadfruit in 1769 when he sailed to Tahiti with Captain Cook. Banks saw a way to feed the enslaved workers on Britain’s Caribbean sugar plantations as cheaply as possible. “If you can get breadfruit from the Pacific to the Caribbean,” he later explained, “you can make those slaves work harder and produce more sugar.” The crop that Pacific Islanders had spent three thousand years developing was looked at by the British Empire and seen as a solution to a labor cost problem.

Banks organized the expedition… The main cabin of HMS Bounty was turned into a greenhouse to hold more than a thousand different plants. But the ship never made it back. Fletcher Christian’s mutiny in 1789 ended with the breadfruit plants thrown overboard. I guess the ship crew didn’t want to leave the beautiful sights of Tahiti… Bligh would eventually return on a second ship, HMS Providence, and successfully delivered 682 breadfruit plants to the Caribbean in 1793.

…The enslaved workers then refused to eat it.