By Gabriela Albuja and Jacob Olander Jabuticaba, camu-camu, and mangaba are native Brazilian fruits with at least three times the Vitamin C found in exotic species like oranges, bananas and papayas. And yet Brazilians consume much, much more of the latter. While Brazil is home to more than 2,500 native fruit species, only açai […]
Read More… from Eating Brazilian Biodiversity – The Right Way
Iván Ulchur-Rota Açai (Euterpe oleracea) is a small black fruit that hangs from tall palms of the lowland regions in the Amazon. In the archipelago of Bailique, in the northeastern part of the Brazilian Amazon, farmers harvest the fruit by binding their feet together to form a stirrup that grips against the trunk of […]
This Article was originally published on news.mongabay.com. Sofía Rubio was eight years old when she decided she wanted to be a biologist. “I would skip school to go to the woods with my father or mother,” who did research in what is now the Tambopata National Reserve in the southeastern Peruvian Amazon, she says. Today, dressed in a white lab coat, her ponytail caught up under a green hair net, Rubio hovers over a table, weighing Brazil nuts. But she’s not cloning them […]
Read More… from Innovating Brazil nuts: a business with roots in the rainforest
I was in the Amazon rainforest of Peru to see how Brazil nuts make the long journey from forest to nut mix. I wasn’t expecting a gourmet treat, but they tend to show up in unexpected places. Harvesting Brazil nuts is hard manual work, in remote areas, deep in the jungle. Harvesters spend long weeks in the forest gathering the cannonball-like fruit from the forest floor, shelling them on site and then hauling them in heavy loads miles through the forest. The harvest is intimately […]
Read More… from Feast in the Forest: Shiwi and its Brazil Nuts
