A PEEP AT THE TROPICS 249
SOME OTHER TROPIC TREE CROPS
Save for sugar most of the other standard tropic exports are tree crops—cacao, coffee, and tea, cinchona, spices, and Brazil nuts.°
I must mention two important tropical tree-foods that have not yet entered commerce. One is the papaya, a fruit resembling a cantaloupe but which grows in huge clusters from the upper part of the trunk. The other is the avocado or alligator pear, and this tropic delicacy offers an interesting dare to the commercial genius of man. The fruit is as large as a Bartlett pear, sometimes even twice or three times as large, and has a thick buttery meat which analyzes from fifteen to thirty per cent, fat. Porto Ricans sometimes chop it into little cubes and mix it with their rice as we might mix butter with our rice. This makes the rice (dietetically) into bread and butter. As a constituent for salad avocado furnishes the oil.
The avocado tree thrives from sea level to six thousand feet in Guatemala. A few are growing in California and Florida. But the real problem is to extract the oil so that it will keep—dry it or can it—or find some means of handling it fresh.
In giving brief mention to this long list I make no attempt to be complete. I wish merely to try to suggest the riches of the tropics in tree-crop possibilities.
Messrs. Dorsett. Shamel, and Popenoe® list twenty fruits in Brazil which they describe as little known. They have little doubt but that there are several hundred trees native to the tropical world and producing an important fruit not now of
5 The Brazil nut of our market grows in a wild tree that towers above the Amazon forest, as the pecan towers over the oak tree of Indiana. These nuts go to waste by the millions of bushels. Only a small fraction of the crop is gathered and sent to the market. There are many other trees in these forests producing edible or oil-giving nuts.
®In Bulletin 445. Bureau of Plant Industry. U. S. Department of Agriculture.
