When cooked, breadfruit often has a texture similar to potatoes, but when the mature fruit ripens completely, it becomes softer, sweeter, and more custard-like.

Although you may have never tried it, it has been a significant crop in the Caribbean for more than 200 years and thousands of years in its native Oceania.

A new study published in Current Biology on January 5th has shed light on the Caribbean history of breadfruit, a potentially nutritious and valuable staple food that has gained increasing interest worldwide. The research may have implications for the future of the crop.

According to Nyree Zerega of Northwestern University, breadfruit trees can produce fruit for many years while requiring less energy and resources than annual staple crops that must be replanted annually and often rely on high inputs of petrochemicals. Additionally, these trees sequester carbon over their long lifespan, and they can be grown in tropical regions that often rely on imported food, making breadfruit a potential solution for improving “food security and sovereignty”.

Breadfruit also seems to be quite climate-resistant. It may be used in a number of ways and should “do better than some major crops under climate change scenarios,” Zerega said.

Most of the breadfruit in the Caribbean came from one plant that was brought from Oceania to St. Vincent in 1793. The British introduced breadfruit to the Caribbean on the HMS Providence as a cheap source of food for slaves working on British plantations.

In Oceania, where breadfruit is a native crop, hundreds of varieties have been identified. But it has always been a mystery as to which ones were brought to the Caribbean all those years ago.

Five types were reportedly introduced, according to the Providence’s logs, but currently, more than two dozen names are known alone in St. Vincent.

Zerega and his colleagues used local names, historical records, and specimens in their most recent investigation, which also included genetic and other types of data. In all, they discovered eight important breadfruit genetic lineages, with five of those lineages coming from the Caribbean.

They were able to find several likely matches between Caribbean cultivars and their related cultivars in Oceania.

However, many cultivars are too identical to distinguish and trace their history.

According to Zerega, the number of different kinds of breadfruit originally introduced to the Caribbean was consistent with the number of broad genetic lineages identified through DNA sequencing 230 years later, but the diversity of names was much greater. This discovery highlights the challenges and intrigue of reconstructing the genetic history of crop species that have evolved alongside humans, and there are still many interesting details to uncover.

“It begs the question of how many new types may have been selected for over the last 230 years [breadfruit] has been in the Caribbean,” she added. “It is biologically plausible that new variation could have occurred, even in a clonally propagated tree. However, genetic differences may be so small that even if they are there, they have been difficult to detect.”

Her team is going to keep looking into it to try to figure it all out. They say that the variety of names has cultural value even if there isn’t a lot of diversity behind them that can be measured.

The results have important implications for the interesting past and bright future of breadfruit.

The authors note that wherever breadfruit is found today in the Caribbean, it “serves as a living reminder to the Pacific Islanders who domesticated and perpetuated this crop, and who shared their knowledge and expertise to facilitate its travel across the world, and to the Caribbean Islanders who have worked to make it thrive there for 230 years.” 

The study found direct connections between cultivars that had the same history but were separated by hundreds of years and thousands of miles. These links help people share information that can be used to make decisions about how to use and care for breadfruit.

Source: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.12.001

Image Credit: Nyree Zerega/Northwestern University/Chicago Botanic Garden