By Chris Doyle
I ate a lot of breadfruit when I first came to Grenada in the 1960s. I was with my partner, Nikki (later my wife), and we lived on an ancient wooden 30-foot Colin Archer in St. George’s Lagoon. Having no immediate income, we dined on the cheapest market food available and that was (and still is) breadfruit. Nikki added variety by boiling and mashing half of it and frying the rest. It didn’t have a good reputation. When a friend dropped by and we invited him to join us, he quickly declined.
I’ve eaten breadfruit cooked in embers on the beach, as dainty breadfruit balls in a hotel, in Grenada’s national dish “oil-down,” and as stark slabs of starch in a few restaurants. I have seen the descendants of the trees Bligh brought to the Caribbean in St. Vincent’s Botanical Garden.
When Compass contacted me and asked me if I would like to review a close-to- 300-page book on breadfruit, I was not sure, but reading the introduction sold me. Russell Fielding is an infectious optimist, writing with a spirit of adventure, and this proved to be an entertaining and even joyful experience.
Fielding rightly starts in the Pacific. But since this review is for a Caribbean audience and that was also my perspective, I want to dip first into the Caribbean.
He tells in detail how the breadfruit came to the Caribbean, including the infamous mutiny on the Bounty during Captain William Bligh’s first attempt. Breadfruit was bought to the Caribbean from the Pacific islands at the behest of the plantocracy, as an easy and inexpensive source of food for their slaves. Slaves generally had to produce their own food. They were given land to plant, and some time to cultivate and cook for themselves. The less time they needed to spend on their gardens, the more work they could do. The planters were delighted when Bligh brought the first breadfruit trees to the Caribbean, but it did not work out quite the way they hoped. The slaves were not impressed and tended to feed breadfruit to the pigs. This has become embedded in Caribbean culture.
For much of its history in the region, breadfruit was distrusted by many, even despised by some. V. S. Naipaul, of Trinidad, derisively called breadfruit “cheap slave food” in his classic travelogue The Middle Passage. Antigua-born author Jamaica Kincaid wrote about “the much-hated breadfruit,” and as recently as 1999 she could still say that “no West Indian that I know has ever liked it.”
Russell Fielding is too much of an optimist to dwell long on this and is more interested in its new acceptance:
Breadfruit, now an ingredient in the “national dishes” of at least three Caribbean countries (oil-down in Grenada; stewed saltfish, spicy plantains, seasoned breadfruit, and coconut dumplings in St. Kitts and Nevis; and fried jackfish with roast breadfruit in St. Vincent and the Grenadines), is being reclaimed like the islands themselves.
But this colonial cloud still casts a shadow on attitudes to breadfruit in the Caribbean, even if the clouds are lifting.
In the Pacific, breadfruit fed islanders long before Europeans arrived. Here it is often known as ulu, the name Fielding uses, and it has no colonial cloud. Traveling with the author to the Pacific was like visiting a new world and thinking about breadfruit in a fresh way.
The ulu (Artocarpus altilis) is a tall and wide tropical tree, growing up to 85 feet high. It has glossy, green, deeply indented leaves. It produces hundreds of roundish fruits often weighing five or six pounds each. Polynesians generally start new trees using suckers, root cuttings, or air layering. A new tree from a sucker starts fruiting in just three to five years (seeds take longer).
Pacific Islanders co-evolved with the ulu; they made it what it is today. It fed and blessed them. When a baby was born, the islanders would dig a hole, plant the umbilical cord, and then plant a breadfruit tree on top, so the infant would have food. They made dishes, alcoholic drinks, surfboards, parts for their canoes, and bark-cloth from the tree and its fruit. They used the white sap to make a sticky trap to catch birds, and when they caught one, they would steal some feathers for decorations and release it. They used the sap to treat ciguatera poisoning (I could find no evidence that it worked). When they went voyaging, they carried fermented or dried breadfruit to eat and saplings to plant.
For the Polynesians, pre-colonization was a time of plenty, a full, easy, pleasurable and relaxing life. Europeans, never much inclined to thoughtful praise of indigenous people, observed the inhabitants and the breadfruit without giving much thought to how they got there. For many, including the painter Paul Gauguin, and the mutinous crew of the Bounty, it was seductive. To the more puritanical who regarded their lifestyle as evil indolence, it was anathema.
But for us sailors, a big attraction of the Polynesian story is reading about the long ocean voyages under sail on large outrigger canoes. Fielding covers this well. Polynesian sailors navigated using stars, understanding ocean swells and observing bird life. In this manner they colonized new Pacific islands and made trips back. When Westerners arrived with their compasses and celestial instruments, they began to conclude this was not possible and decided that the Polynesians colonized other islands just by chance and luck. However, one English sailor, Dr. David Lewis, studied Polynesian navigation and carried out a successful voyage using what he learned. (One crew member was taking sextant sights but hiding them.)
Lewis also spent time with anthropologist Ben Finny, who knew him and wanted to document a genuine voyage. Finny founded the Polynesian Voyaging Society, built a traditional ocean going proa, Hokule’a, and contacted Mau Piailug, one of the original navigators. In 1976, using no modern navigation methods, Mau successfully navigated from Hawaii to Tahiti, a voyage of over two thousand miles.
Coincidentally, I once stayed for a few days with David Lewis in England aboard his catamaran Rehu Moana for a few days before an early transatlantic race.
Fielding researched this book through reading and extensive travel. One of its delights is that he takes you along with him on his adventures and introduces you to many of the people he meets along the way. Another pleasure is that every time you turn a page, you seem to find some aspect of life, history, and breadfruit that is immensely pleasing. This about the Florida Keys:
Near Phil’s market, at the “Little White House,” the winter residence of President Harry Truman, a large, perfectly pruned breadfruit tree grows at the side of the yard, its branches just reaching over the fence toward the sidewalk.
I had no idea Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Truman were both interested in breadfruit. It is not surprising. The breadfruit tree is amazingly productive and its copious fruits are a good source of complex carbohydrates, with fiber, anti-oxidants, and Vitamins C and A. It would be an asset to any country. However, it is very susceptible to the cold and in the USA, Hawaii and the warmest parts of Florida are the only places it can grow.
In a world where 20 percent of the population has insufficient food, the further spread of the breadfruit tree may be part of the solution. This is a recurring theme of the story Fielding tells. He describes breadfruit’s introduction and propagation in many countries, including several in Africa. I mentioned this to Grenadian Dennis Henry who had just returned after many weeks in several African counties. “Yes,” he said, “I saw some.”
The fruit of the ulu has a short shelf life. It looks fine from the outside but the moment you stop paying attention, it suddenly turns into an overripe mess. So to feed more of the world, breadfruit products with a good shelf life, such as flour, are essential.
Fielding also introduces the reader to people working with breadfruit. Many Caribbean islands’ agricultural departments help with this. In Barbados, where he meets Sonia, who produces Carmeta’s Fine Breadfruit flour, this is the Barbados Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation (BADMC).
My first question was an obvious one: who is Carmeta? The answer was not so simple, only because Carmeta Fraser was such a complex figure in Barbadian food history. A tireless advocate for the role of self-sufficiency in food security, Fraser was known for her down-to-earth approach. She taught classes on food preservation techniques, hosted cooking programs on television, and wrote cookbooks with recipes that relied heavily upon Barbados-grown ingredients and spun simple maxims like, “Eat what you grow; grow what you eat.”
A few paragraphs later:
Sonia gave me cards with recipes for breadfruit fish cakes and breadfruit great cake, the latter of which, in addition to breadfruit flour, calls for twelve ounces of stout, two cups of rum, and a cup of brandy. Maybe that will convince a few culinary novices to give cooking a try.
Fielding casts his net wide and well, and covers many topics, from global warming and celiac disease to origin myths, gourmet chefs, economics and cultivars. I was happy I read it on my computer as I often had to look things up on the internet, the strangest being “cockroach milk.”
I enjoy reading about nature, but rarely have I read a book devoted to a single tree. This book, like the breadfruit tree itself, is rich, productive, and full of surprises and delights such as you can eat breadfruit skin.
When peeling a raw breadfruit for one of these recipes, don’t toss the skin into your compost! If the fruit was washed well first, strips of ulu skin can be pan-fried in butter or oil, then lightly seasoned with salt and pepper to make a delicious version of hashbrowns. My children say this is their favorite breadfruit recipe.
Fielding writes much about breadfruit cooks, processes and cooking ideas. But it is not a recipe book. I am going to buy Sam Choy’s Ulu Cookbook: Hawaii’s Breadfruit Recipes, which Fielding recommends, and I did find a link to Carmeta’s recipe for breadfruit great cake here: https://badmc.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/BADMC_Carmeta_s-Recipe-Advertorial_16Dec151.pdf.
Breadfruit: Three Global Journeys of a Bountiful Tree. Russell Fielding, Columbia University Press, New York, 2025.
