What if potatoes grew on trees? An interview with the Breadfruit Institute’s Diane Ragone

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The International Potato Center was founded in Lima, Peru, in 1971 as an R&D organization with a focus on potatoes, sweet potatoes, and other Andean roots and tubers. https://cipotato.org/about/.

2. The geographical region known as Micronesia lies in the western part of the Pacific, about 5,945 kilometers (3,223 miles) from the islands of Hawaiʻi. Micronesia contains about 2,100 islands—part of which includes the Marshall Island chain, where many atomic bomb tests were conducted on atolls such as Bikini and Enewetak. There are efforts by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to repopulate at least one of the islands, Rongelap, adjacent to the bomb test sites. But first, the organizers wanted to re-forest Rongelap using small breadfruit plants propagated and shipped from the Breadfruit Institute, under LLNL’s “Marshall Islands Program” (https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/affected-areas/rongelap-atoll). “Last I heard, as of 2019—in other words, immediately pre-COVID—the plants were in the ground, and they were starting to fruit,” said Ragone.

3. Across much of the Pacific, people now consume as much soft drinks and junk food, if not more, as locally caught fish and vegetables—a phenomenon noted by commentators from sociologists and historians to travel writers, including Paul Theroux in his travelogue The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific. Some observers have traced the rise of this profound change in diet to the abundance of canned meat products that accompanied the American Army and Navy as they island-hopped their way across the Pacific; others think there may be a connection to the so-called “Cargo Cults” that sprang up at war’s end (https://www.sapiens.org/culture/cargo-cult-rituals/). This preference for junk food is not restricted to remote islands; to this day, in heavily populated Honolulu, the local McDonalds chain serves Spam on the menu. More information can be found in articles such as Vice magazine’s “The History Behind Why Hawaiians Are Obsessed With Spam” (https://www.vice.com/en/article/mgx7yx/why-Hawaiʻians-are-utterly-obsessed-with-spam/.

4. Some of the Breadfruit Institute’s many printable resources and videos, in English and Hawaiian, can be found at https://ntbg.org/breadfruit/resources/.

5. For more, see Smithsonian Magazine article “Captain Bligh’s Cursed Breadfruit” at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/captain-blighs-cursed-breadfruit-41433018/ and Cell Biology’s “Linking breadfruit cultivar names across the globe connects histories after 230 years of separation” DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.12.00.

6. See “The Plight of the African Violets: https://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2018/8/20/the-plight-of-the-african-violets.

7. See Increased Food Security and Food Self-Sufficience Strategy https://files.Hawaiʻi.gov/dbedt/op/spb/INCREASED_FOOD_SECURITY_AND_FOOD_SELF_SUFFICIENCY_STRATEGY.pdf.

8. For more, see “Breadfruit Agroforestry” at https://ntbg.org/breadfruit/agroforest/.

9. See https://ntbg.org/breadfruit/staff/.

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Notes on contributors

Dan Drollette

Dan Drollette Jr. is the executive editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He is a science writer/editor and foreign correspondent who has filed stories from every continent except Antarctica. His stories have appeared in Scientific American, International Wildlife, MIT’s Technology Review, Natural History, Cosmos, Science, New Scientist, and the BBC Online, among others. He was a TEDx speaker to Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and held a Fulbright Postgraduate Traveling Fellowship to Australia—where he lived for a total of four years. For three years, he edited CERN’s on-line weekly magazine about high-energy subparticle physics, in Geneva, Switzerland, where his office was 100 yards from the injection point of the Large Hadron Collider.