Zurayk is a professor of Agriculture at American University Beirut. If Mouzawak is the poet of Lebanese produce, Zurayk is its academic dean. He’s a founding member of Slow Food Beirut, the author of a book on local food culture, and an avid produce blogger. He told me that as far as he knew, “Nobody has studied this aspect of eating.”
“This aspect” being the eating of unripe fruit, which is apparently a common feature of Lebanese gastronomy. Of the various reasons advanced by the professor for this predilection, the one I like best is this:
One of the origins of the taste for unripe fruits may be that poor country kids used to steal fruit from farmers. As the fruit ripened, the farmers were on alert, so the kids had to make their moves as early as possible, long before the fruit was ready to eat.
But in fact this — and indeed the other reasons proffered too — do not seem particularly peculiar to Lebanon. So is scoffing unripe fruits common elsewhere around the world? For example, my wife, from Kenya, likes to munch hard, unripe mangoes, skin and all. And are some varieties preferred for this early plucking over others?
Unripe fruits as food are common in many cultures, including South and Southeast Asia, the Pacific, the Americas and the Caribbean. For their refreshing tartness or light sweetness, or unusual flavor. Mangoes absolutely – dipped in a mix of sugar, salt and chili peppers! Green bananas, green breadfruit, green guavas, Spondias dulcis, Phyllanthus acidus…. As a kid, the ‘challenge’ of getting the fruit adds to how good they taste! Green fruits are also an important alternative ‘vegetable’ or starch source in many dishes. The list is long and delicious.
I always got a stomach ache from unripe fruit; not surprising as many are loaded with protective compounds — tannins and the like — that prevent them being eaten before the seeds are ready for dispersal. Withdrawal of the protective compounds and a change in colour say “Come and get it”.
And lets not get our realms of discourse mixed up here. I eat unripe fruits daily: cucumbers.
Sorry, your stomach can’t handle green mangoes. There is a trick to when you pick them – too young and they taste like straw; just underripe and they are grand! I hope that farmers in India are being encouraged to recover and preserve those disappearing mango varieties (Luigi). With the many lessons of lost food cultivars around the world during the last century, it would be refreshing to know we’ve learned something and that the next generation of agrobiodiversity farmers will, once again, be able to savor each one of those fragrant queens (ripe or underipe), know their names and wax eloquent about their character.