By Lee Koelzer | Director
Cashew nuts are both delicious and fascinating. The fruit of the cashew nut tree is actually not a fruit in itself- it is a sweet swollen stem and the cashew nut is safe inside a shell surrounded by a caustic liquid ready to give a chemical burn to anything naive enough to try and open it without precautions.
The ‘fruit’ is known as a cashew apple and its entire purpose is to attract fruit bats. The bats latch onto the fruit and fly away with it as they drink the sweet nectar. When satiated, the bats drop the apple with the seed on the bottom and whallah, seeds are spread and cashew trees pop up in new territory.
When you taste the fruit it is very sweet, and it also makes your mouth furry- like your tongue and throat are covered in velvet. It is an awkward feeling, but it did not stop me from eating more. Fortunately, the feeling goes away in a few minutes.
The cashew nuts are encased in a shell with a nasty liquid inside that can cause chemical burns, so the two easiest ways to retrieve the nut is to either freeze it, then whack it with a hammer and pick out the seed, or if you’re in the village with no refrigeration- throw them into a fire, wait for the nuts to pop and retrieve the ‘roasted’ seed with a wire mesh scooper.
Harvesting cashews is a bit labor intensive, and their price point reflects that. One kilo of cashew nuts fetches about 23,000ush ($7.50) on a local market, as opposed to other nuts such as peanuts, which fetch about 5,000ush ($1.56) per kilo.
The cashew nut trees are one of the many trees that we are promoting, and distributing to our communities.
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