Sometimes it is interesting to see some of our most common foods in their pre-processed earth-growing forms. Here is a fun look at a few of the food delights I have seen while birding in tropical countries.
The food plant I have seen the most in my tropical birding travels: bananas.
Genus Musa. Bananas grow in a wide variety of soils and are harvested in 135 countries.
The largest herbaceous plant, a banana plant is typically about 16 feet (5m) tall. There is a large pink flower or inflorescence that emerges from the plant where the bananas grow.
Although I would never venture into plantations on my own, local bird guides, familiar with surroundings and people, often take Athena and I into the fields.
In the Amazon, our guide led us through this banana plantation, below, as we headed for a bird blind. We were on a mission to spot macaws at the river bank. We took a shortcut through rows of these bananas. They are the most common cultivar, the Cavendish, the species most of us buy from the grocery store.
Lucky for us, we found the macaws too.
Interestingly, a few days after our macaw experience, our motorized canoe passed by these bananas being transported on their way to market.
This euphonia bird, in Belize, is eating the banana seeds he successfully wrangled out of the banana.
While the banana is one of the most recognizable food items in the world, there are few people who would ever know that these red pods are what chocolate is made from.
Years earlier, while birding in Belize, we first saw yellow pods hanging in the trees. In a flash, our guide Glen had kicked off his shoes, climbed a tree, and brought down a yellow pod. None of us knew what it was.
It is a cocoa pod. They come in various colors, depending on the species and maturity.
As Glen opened the pod, he enthusiastically explained he had done this frequently as a kid. It was impressive how quickly and deftly he climbed up that tree.
Making chocolate starts with the pod. They are cut from the tree with a machete, and the beans are extracted from the pod. There are 30-50 beans in each pod. The beans go through an elaborate process of fermentation, drying, roasting and more.
We tasted the beans, but it was nothing like chocolate. In fact, for one like me who is a chocolate lover, I chose to forget the taste.
Coffee, like chocolate, also goes through a lot of processing.
It starts in the field with a worker, like this Mexican man with his basket and machete. We were in this plantation marveling at parrotlets, soon after dawn, when he came through to start his work day.
Shade-grown crops, like this coffee plantation (below) in Belize, are an environmentally sound way to grow crops. You can see there are tall trees in the same land parcel as the short coffee plants. This way the coffee can grow without obliterating the surrounding forest.
These toucans, in this field, were happy about that.
This is one of the coffee plants up close. You can see the coffee berries in clumps in the center.
Between exporting and explorers, there have been many centuries of trading and transporting exotic foods. In tropical islands like Hawaii, we see many unique foods that originated in Southeast Asia like star fruit and rambutan.
While birding in a historic churchyard on the Big Island of Hawaii, we came across these star fruit.
When you cut a cross section of the fruit, the pieces are star-shaped.
Rambutans, too, are a plant that originated in Southeast Asia but also grows well in Hawaii.
Friendly surfers on a Kauai roadside sold us tasty rambutans.
It is a red tropical fruit with soft, hair-like spikes, seen in the center of the plate below. Easy to find all over Hawaii.
Pineapples and papayas are also easy to find all over Hawaii, both originally from the Americas.
This gecko is waiting for the day when the papayas will be ripe.
We are lucky in my home state of California where conditions provide a rich variety of crops. But I will have to cover that another time.
Whether you’re traveling or birding or simply cruising your own back roads, there are often crops or plants around us providing food to humans or other earth-dwelling inhabitants.
Cheers to a marvelous planet on which we live, providing sunshine, soil, rain and oxygen.
Written by Jet Eliot.
Photos by Athena Alexander unless otherwise specified.