(no paywall)
https://journal.americanpomological.org/index.php/jofaps/article/view/5
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The real question is, did any of the authors invest in companies trying to commercialize pawpaw?
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Their bios at Cornell are easily found online. Which companies do you have in mind?
Pawpaw [Asimina triloba (L.) Dunal] is an endemic North American tree that is gaining commercial interest
Presumably they’ve already identified some companies, otherwise they’d just be making this part up.
Publishing a glowing review of a fruit’s promise and potential is nice and all, but it doesn’t directly increase the number of pawpaws being grown. Eventually, the rubber has to hit the road you know. Good ideas are just ideas until someone starts a successful company.
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Here’s my perception of your conspiracy theory: Cornell professors M. Pritts and G. Peck are providing start up funding for graduate student G. Erich’s new pawpaw development company. 
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I wish the new group well. I think bush paw paws would make an interesting snack food. Sometimes you can find bushes that are more prolific as well.
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Oh, it took me a moment to understand what you meant. You’ve got it almost right, the only thing is it’s completely backwards haha
Richard, I don’t think the authors have a sinister plot to grain riches from a company they’re funding and pumping up. It’s not at all my criticism at all that they did that.
My criticism is that they didn’t do that.
They just published a paper on how great pawpaw is and called it a day. My point is that the world would be a better place if they put their money where their words are and actually found or founded a pawpaw company instead of just publishing yet another paper on the potentials. All talk, no action. This is the perennial problem of academia, they never actually go out until the world and do stuff, because that’s hard and it means business and commercialization, which means uncertainty and hard practical decisions and realities. It’s easy, it’s safe, to write papers about how great pawpaws are. The hard thing is growing and selling pawpaws.
But until someone does, no one will be able to just buy pawpaws at all the grocery store. They’ll remain the luxury of people with land, time, and a suitable climate, the fruit version of the 1%. To my mind, a world with grocery store pawpaws is better than one without.
I appreciate that you put in the effort to cook up a conspiracy theory on my behalf though, albeit one from an odd political framework where commerce and doing business is suspect.
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This statement:
contradicts this statement:
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…was meant to be ironic, biting even.
I’ll go back to my original post and explain a little: in online culture especially, it’s become a common refrain, when someone makes strong claims about the adoption of or obsolescence of a technology or product, to ask if they’re long/short the market. For example, below a post about how Boeing will soon collapse, one might comment “so you’re shorting Boeing stock then?” or in reply to someone claiming AI will replace most jobs, you ask, “so you’ve put your retirement money entirely on OpenAI and NVIDIA yes?”
It’s a subtle to not subtle way of calling someone’s bluff or bluster. If they actually were so convinced, they’d put their money into it.
I’ll admit not everyone would have caught that reference in my original post, which might have made the later posts less clear.
But, well, you don’t explain the joke while you’re telling it, that’s the trick with humor.
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This line from the article is a double edged sword:
The acetogenins synthesized by the tree can be used as natural pesticides or in cancer therapy treatment.
Those compounds are also neurotoxic. Probably not a concern for light consumption, but could present a marketing issue. At a minimum, I think it would be a good idea to get some better studies on annonacin by variety. The only study Ive seen used mortality of some kind of shrimp to gauge the content. Id like to see concentrations measured directly with a gas chromatgraph-mass spectromter or something like that. Samples of the same variety from different areas to help gauge variability. If we have a better understanding of the annonacin concentrations by variety, we can start breeding with the goal of achieving lower concentrations.
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@a_Vivaldi
I believe you’ve mischaracterized the publication. It provides practical information to everyone interested in PawPaw from amateurs through professionals. It is a classic Marvin Pritts paper.
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Richard, it was a joke. I was giving them a bit of a hard time. It’s hardly that serious of a paper anyway, given how blithely they gloss over the whole issue of neurotoxins.
For sure.
There’s also definitely something going on chemically when pawpaws gets processed that increases the toxic effects. Just what is happening is poorly characterized but needs to be understood if we want pawpaw to become a common place, everyday fruit.
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Pawpaw’s are unlikely to ever be commercialized to a significant degree without some serious breeding for firmer fruit and storage potential. If that’s done, then sure, there would be potential there. Otherwise, not much chance. If that’s done, it will significantly change the eating experience of the fruit however, in the same way a wild strawberry is a very different eating experience than the strawberry that’s on the shelf in your grocery store.
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I wonder if there any varieties which have significantly better shipping qualities. Seems like the breeding that’s been done is mostly for flesh ratio, fruit size, and flavor, correct?
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I too have heard fruit firmness and shelf life to be the reason why pawpaw hasn’t caught on commercially. But I’m not sure if this is the whole story.
More people eat bananas than coconuts (as a fresh fruit), but coconut is a popular ingredient and flavor too!
I think maybe it could have a life in processed foods, maybe as something like apple sauce or a filling for pies. But I also heard eating cooked pawpaw (or dehydrated pawpaw) can cause stomach issues.
Similarly, maybe it’s just me, but I can’t recall a time where I could buy fresh mulberries in a store, or gooseberries, or currants in the USA. There’s a lot of fruits in the USA that have a lot of potentially!
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But both can be picked and shipped thousands of miles and spend long periods of time in storage.
Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of reports to that effect. There’s something going on when it’s processed that’s very bad, and that severely limits its potential, especially commercially since not every fruit is going to be high enough quality to ship so ideally you have secondary markets for the things like dehydrating them. But you can’t do that with pawpaw.
For mulberries it’s because they bruise extremely easily and are very poor shipping fruits.
For ribes, it’s because they are illegal.
The laws are gradually changing, but for most of the country, currants and gooseberries have long been illegal to grow. That, and they aren’t especially sweet usually, and American tastes are like Japanese tastes, we like fruit and berries to be very sweet.
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Ribes are an alternate host for white pine blister rust. During the age of sail white pine was of strategic importance for ship masts. Not sure if thats the reason for the bans though.
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It was, yes. White pine was considered (probably rightly at the time) to be the more important commercial crop, so Ribes were banned, including several wild species. IIRC there was a pretty extensive eradication campaign as well.
With the shift of commercial lumber operations to the PNW and the South, the emergence of more resistant varieties, and a better understanding of the disease’s practical spread, some states have started loosening up the laws. I believe there’s also been the discovery of more resistant white pines as well, but I’m less sure I remember that bit correctly.
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I have noticed with Bush PawPaws they can be picked early and left to ripen. It is practically the only way you get to eat them. Can it be done with tree PawPaws?
Is that a trait that can be bred for?
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