Jackfruit: "vegan sensation" saves Sri Lanka

Zinara Rathnayake, BBC Travel, Asia, 9/17/20; Dhr. Seven, CC Liu (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Green jackfruit has a shredded meat texture that resembles pulled pork (Nathan Mahendra).

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Ripe is too sweet. Eat it green (Sahid Laskar).

Sri Lanka began planting jackfruit trees to gain food self-sufficiency under British rule.

The fruit has since helped the once mostly vegetarian islanders of this majority Buddhist land avoid starvation.

My mother grew up in a house of eight in Kurunegala, Sri Lanka, 100 km northeast of the capital, Colombo.

Jackfruit is the world's largest tree-borne fruit (BBC Travel/Utopia_88/Getty Images).

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Mature the fruit can weigh 55kg (Getty).

During the island’s severe droughts in the 1970s, most of her family’s humble, home cooked meals consisted of green jackfruit served in a clay pot with freshly grated coconut [over rice].

This simple, carb-rich meal infused with healthy, natural lipids fueled them with enough energy for the farmer-family to toil day and night on the dry plains.

Today, Starbucks serves vegan jackfruit wraps, while Pizza Hut now offers it as a topping. The London Evening Standard called jackfruit “the new kimchi, kale, and cauliflower all rolled into one.”

Jackfruit in a variety of dishes (N. Mahendra)

PHOTOS: Pinterest named it “the hottest food trend of 2017” and, more recently, The Guardian declared the unripe or green version of it “a vegan sensation” thanks to its shredded meat texture.

[It becomes soft, yellow, cloyingly sweet, and unrecognizable as it ripens. In other words, it goes from vegetable to fruit as it matures, so get it green. Now available canned at Trader Joe's and most Asian markets.]

But for my mother, her memories of growing up are studded with her eldest sister’s myriad jackfruit dishes. She’s particularly fond of kiri kos, a creamy jackfruit curry cooked in coconut milk. For kiri kos, my aunt plucked unripe jackfruit. More