Move Over, Açai—It’s the Pawpaw’s Time on a rooftop in Brooklyn
Michael Judd visits a rooftop garden in Brooklyn to evangelize about the pawpaw, which, if he has anything to say about it, is set to become the next hot fruit.
By Yasmine AlSayyad
New Yorker
September 12, 2022
Excerpt:
From mid-August to early October, Michael Judd, an edible-landscape designer from Maryland, eats almost nothing but pawpaw, a creamy mango-shaped fruit that tastes like candied banana. He loves pawpaw crème brûlée, pawpaw panna cotta, lasagna with black beans and pawpaw. When pawpaw season is at its height, as it is now, he spends so much time harvesting that he barely has any time for meals. “I’m so busy—I go out and I just keep going, but I eat pawpaw,” Judd said one warm evening not long ago. “I’ll eat two or three pawpaws, and I can completely run and fully function and work. I’m very sensitive to what I eat and my energy, so from that alone I can tell you it’s a really strong, complete food.”
Judd, who lives with his family on a twenty-five-acre permaculture homestead in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, was arranging some chairs on a rooftop garden in Red Hook. He was in town to host a group of about twenty horticulturists, urban farmers, agricultural scientists, and pawpaw devotees, who’d come for a “pawpaw-ice-cream party” and to hear some evangelizing about pawpaws. Six of the guests had never tried the fruit before. The berry, America’s largest native edible tree fruit, grows wild and plenty in twenty-six states, but it’s almost never in grocery stores.
