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Papaya Pete

Papaya Pete

Welcome to our first unit of Food For thought! A class where we talk about the Anthropological and historical ideas that food takes us including where it came from and how that in turn informs us about ourselves. Did you know that corn has domesticated us? It turns out that what was once a grain has evolved and grown along side us to be more useful to us, because it turns out that being useful to humans has become the greatest evolutionary advantage ever! To add insult to injury corn is in just about any food you could think of now. Don't believe me? check the ingredients on the back of your Cheetos. Its in just one form or another.  During this class we traced back our roots as far as we could go to see what the different foods could teach us about where and who we came from.  We put all this info together in a colorful family tree. We also put together a map with the center of origin for almost every food crop with trade routes and the ancient civilizations that existed then.  Finally for our AP we began work with putting it all together.  We chose one dish from our families and singled out one ingredient to trace its roots all the way back and figure out how it got to us. We did this so we can better understand how it became a part of our family and its traditions.  Please dig in and enjoy my project: Papaya Pete!



Hi! My name is Papaya Pete. People sometimes call me Pawpaw. For context I, myself, am 6 inches tall, but I can be as tall as 20  inches. My juicy skin is a deep yellow or orange to salmon color. I have a slightly sweet yet musky tang, and botanically I am technically a berry yet my ‘tree’ is technically a large herb. It is believed that I represent the fusion of two or more species of the Carica family native to Mexico and Central America. 


As you might have already guessed I am native to the Meso-American region. I don’t really remember my humble beginnings and neither do others since there are no direct archaeological records. I am said to have been born as a hybrid domesticated by the Mayans or some other ancient Meso-American civilization. I believe this to be true because my hermaphroditic genes are a result of human selection dating to some 4,000 years ago


The only other place you can find my roots (joke) is Florida. This is the only place I am native to outside of Meso-America since the climate is perfect for me there. Today there are the only two states in the US that still grow papaya; those are Florida and Hawaii, which is why the most of me that is sold in the US is from Mexico.


After this I ended up moving down into Panama and the Dominican Republic some time in the early 1500’s I can’t quite recall the exact date though. My most fond memory of this time was when I met the Spanish chronicler Oviedo. The same Oviedo who also chronicled the voyages of Christopher Columbus’ first voyage to the America’s.  He wrote about me in 1525. 


Next, I hitched a ride with Spanish conquistadors to the Philippines around 1550 during the colonization.  I took well to the Philippines. I grew well on the island and I became an important crop to the people there; the 6th most important fruit crop in fact. 


This stop is important since from here I was able to move into the rest of Europe, but first took a stop in India.  Here I was found to be useful in folk medicine, in fact I was used as an irritant that when applied to the uterus could serve as an abortant. 


Throughout my global spread there is one place where I truly felt I belonged. The cheery island of the Philippines that is. It was there the Almario and Rigor families opted to use me over the mild-flavored squash chayote to add a sweeter pop in their chicken tinola, a ginger broth recipe with chicken, garlic, boiled leafy greens, and your choice of chayote or green papaya.  I If your thinking those ingredients seem hard to put together then Mrs. Rigor has this to say about it. “Papaya in the Philippines was always a very common commodity. We grew it in our own backyards, and if you had none you could easily just walk to a neighbor and they would have it.” Historically she mentions about Filipino cuisine: “food here is highly indicative about our history.  Many of our dishes are greatly influenced by the Spanish colonization and the food of nearby countries. We have taken many of their dishes and made them our own. The tinola is different; it's more authentic to the Philippines” Their family takes pride in having used me in their family's tinola recipe for every occasion from the block sized fiesta to the small dinner occasions for generations.  Thank you all for listening to my life story!



In conclusion to this project there are a few things to say about this project. It was not my favorite project, and not even my favorite unit given that there weren't any field experiences to see this applied to the real world, but I will say this about it. The project pushed me to explore not only myself but to dig deeper and explore my family's historical connections to food. I learned that food in the Philippines is very influenced by other cultures including that of the Spaniards who colonized us. I also learned about the different ways that we took from those cultures and made them our own. Altogether even though it was not my favorite project I learned a lot from it.'


works cited:

“Papayas.” FoodPrint, GRACE Communications Foundations, 7 Jan. 2019, https://foodprint.org/real-food/papayas/.

“Papaya .” Papaya, Purdue, https://hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/morton/papaya_ars.html#Origin%20and%20Distribution.

“Mexican Papaya.” Information, Recipes and Facts, https://specialtyproduce.com/produce/Mexican_Papaya_947.php.

“Foods Indigenous to the Western Hemisphere.” Papaya, https://aihd.ku.edu/foods/Papaya.html.

Chávez-Pesqueira, Mariana, and Juan Núñez-Farfán. “Domestication and Genetics of Papaya: A Review.” Frontiers, Frontiers, 1 Jan. 1AD, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2017.00155/full#:~:text=Given%20that%20hermaphrodite%20individuals%20are,cultures%20thousands%20of%20years%20ago.


Image citations:

“File:Location Mesoamerica-FR-2.SVG.” Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Location_Mesoamerica-fr-2.svg.

Alaniz, Kim. “Aztec/Mayan Calendar.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 21 Nov. 2011, https://www.flickr.com/photos/kimberlyeternal/6377784239.

File:Florida Political Map Kwh.png - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Florida_Political_Map_Kwh.png.

“Papaya Cartoon Images – Browse 5,389 Stock Photos, Vectors, and Video.” Adobe Stock, https://stock.adobe.com/search/images?k=papaya+cartoon.



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