Maiore - part 1, the breadfruit

We live in a district of Rurutu called Vitaria, unlike the rest of the island, which depends on taro as its staple, the inhabitants of Vitaria were known as breadfruit-eaters. This is because we have no reliable fresh water-source on this side of this island, so we couldn't have grown our own taro, even if we wanted to.

Our poor breadfruit tree growing in the shade of our coconuts,
but still determinedly giving fruit

Now is the start of the breadfruit season and our tree has a good load of fruit. A breadfruit tree can grow to a height of 20 meters and is one of the highest-yielding food plants, a single tree can produce over 200 fruits per season. The fruits are very rich in starch, they are also a source of vitamin C, potassium, zinc and thiamin. We normally eat our breadfruit cooked in its skin over a fire or directly on the stove burner, but it can also be boiled, baked in the oven, deep-fried or cooked slowly in the Tahitian oven. When cooked the taste is potato-like, or similar to fresh baked bread (hence the name).

The Rurutu name for the tree is maiore, but is better known as 'uru in Tahitian. The plant originates from the Malay Peninsula and western Pacific, where it is pollinated by fruit bats. There are no fruit-bats here in the eastern Pacific and it is thought that the plant was transported throughout the Polynesian triangle on voyaging canoes. The fruit remains a very important food source in the Marquesas and also Tahiti. The Marquesans developed a method for storing the ripe fruit for up to a year, trampling and fermenting the fruit in large holes in ground, providing a reliable food supply, even in times of scarcity.

breadfruit (unripe), showing leaf bud and leaves

The breadfruit tree has many uses other than food. There are well over thirty distinct varieties documented from French Polynesia alone, each favored for different qualities. Breadfruit produces a pale lightweight timber that was widely used across the Pacific for building structures, furniture, outrigger canoes and even surfboards, a sport which first originated in Tahiti. The bark of the breadfruit tree is used to make a fine cream-coloured bark-cloth or tapa. All parts of the plant yield latex, a sticky milky sap. This sap can be applied to the skin as a moisturizer, or to heal cuts, scratches and various skin diseases, it was also mixed with monoi (perfumed coconut oil) to make a kind of Polynesian hair gel. The sap was used as glue and caulking material for canoes. The thick and abrasive leaves are used to wrap food and can also be topically applied to soothe muscle aches. The leaf buds are prepared in diverse ways as a cure for a wide variety of ailments ranging from angina, to bronchitis, asthma and internal haemorrhaging. Burning the fallen, sun-dried male flowers is also an effective nontoxic mosquito repellent.

A contemporary use for breadfruit - leaf-print blocks, I love printing with
these leaves,which have also inspired traditional Hawaiian quilting patterns

Forster, the botanist on Captain Cook’s second voyage to Tahiti in 1776, was the first European to describe the plant in any detail. The high productivity and nutritional value of the plant made it a candidate as a cheap food source for slaves in the West Indies. Lieutenant William Bligh was assigned by the British Admiralty to captain the HMS Bounty on a voyage to Tahiti to collect breadfruit saplings and take them to the British Antilles. The famous voyage never completed its objective, as a result of the now fabled mutiny, though Captain Bligh’s second expedition did successfully deliver over 2,000 young trees to Jamaica in 1793. Breadfruit grows in the Caribbean still, though the species never thrived to the same extent as it does in the Pacific and it never really became a favored food-source.

According to Tahitian legend, the breadfruit originated from the ultimate sacrifice of a chief from Rai’atea, Ruata’ata. The island was seized by famine, Ruata’ata and his wife Rumauari’i had nothing to feed their four children but the bare red soil beneath their feet, in desperation they went off into the forest to search for something to eat, all they could find were some ferns in a cave. Ruata’ata despaired, he could no longer bear to watch his children suffer. He told his wife to go to sleep there in the cave and that tomorrow he could deliver them all from starvation, but that he would have to leave them, to do so. In the morning Ruamauari’i woke in the dappled shade of a great tree that had grown at the entrance of the cave during the night, the tree was laden with heavy breadfruits that the family gratefully ate, saved from starvation. Ruata’ata never returned and his wife understood that he had transformed himself into the lofty breadfruit tree, the leaves and branches represent his arms, the trunk his body and the fruit his head.