Strange fruit

1. A song performed most famously by Billie Holiday. A strangely morbid blues standard condemning the lynching of African Americans, and other racism. It has a huge history of references and covers. In 1999, Time called it the song of the century. It's also been #1 on the list of "songs of the South" and on of the "top 20 political songs"

2. Literally uncommon fruits.

In Ghana, I've had the opportunity to partake of a variety of different fruits I'd never tasted before.

We in the west most commonly eat the nut (seed) of the cashew. However, little known to most of us, the cashew tree also produces a large fruit (biologically not a true fruit -- the true fruit contains the cashew nut) along with each cashew nut. Here's what it looks like (the cashew nut is the little bean shaped thing hanging below the large cashew "apple")

The fruit is very sweet and juicy, with a rich and complex taste. I like it a lot.

The next I tasted was the fruit of the baobab tree. Baobabs are the famously long-lived and iconically strangely shaped trees of Africa. Their fruit is large, and covered in a short, soft fur, almost velvet-like. The shell is brittle, and cracks open to reveal rows and rows of seeds surrounded by a dry, powdery fibre.

This fibre is edible, and tastes sweet but is otherwise uninteresting. I hear people mix it with milk to make a drink.

The most recent one I've got to eat is the fruit of the shea tree. The most well known product of the shea tree is the refined oil obtained from the seed of its fruit. Refining shea butter is a very common practice throughout the dry Sahel region of West Africa, where shea is from. The oil is edible, although we in the west are most well acquainted with its smoothness and moisturising properties (we rub it on ourselves, it's also in a lot of cosmetic products).

The shea fruit (pictured here with its nut) is kind of an intense experience. Imagine an avocado with a thin, edible skin, and that is sweet and (tastes) twice as fatty as the average avocado, and then shrink it down to the size of an apricot. That's a shea fruit. Pretty wild.

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That's all the strange fruit we have time for today, and all I've eaten in Africa so far (though cashews are actually native to Brazil). I did eat a ton of wild blueberries in Maine when I was visiting my little sister, but that's another story for another time.