Some things in life you just can’t
take at face value. Take Mexican jumping beans, for instance. Someone was
talking about them just the other day and we all started wondering, A., if they
really were beans and, B., were they edible?
The kind I remember from my play-day
heydays sure weren’t either and they sure weren’t from Mexico. Also, they
didn’t really jump. It was more like they meandered a short distance.
For a while there in Edmonton,
Mexican jumping beans were quite the rage for kids. You bought an assorted
collection of them in a little plastic bag for a quarter. They were dazzlingly
coloured plastic capsules, the same size, in fact the same look as your basic
vitamin capsule, only one half was usually black and the other some wild,
ersatz cyan-blue or audacious red.
Older kids and uncles would tease
that they wouldn’t move until they warmed up, just like they had been in
Mexico. In Edmonton in the winter, as you might imagine, this could take
considerable time. But really the secret was tilting and rotating the palm of
your hand just so until they started flopping around end over end. Real masters
could walk two, three or four jumping beans at the same time.
No, they weren’t alive; in fact far
from it, as my cousin revealed when he cracked one open. Inside the shiny
plastic capsule was a little ball bearing that rolled back and forth, and in so
doing would flip the capsule end over end, making it walk across the palm of
your hand like a jitterbugging caterpillar.
In fact, a caterpillar is more in
line with what propels real Mexican jumping beans. While they aren’t beans,
they are vegetative — part of a seed capsule of an evergreen shrub known
colloquially as the jumping bean shrub (
Sebastiana pavoniana
) found in desert regions of mainland Mexico and in the
Baja. Into a section, or carpel, of the seed capsule burrows the larva of a
small gray moth called the jumping bean moth, a comparatively harmless relative
of the destructive codling moth that infests apples and the oriental fruit moth
that plagues peaches.
After it eats the seed in the
self-contained carpel the little larva has the weird habit of kind of throwing
itself against the walls of its chamber, making the so-called bean jump —
well, really, it just rolls and tumbles. Eventually, it chews open a miniature
round trap door and flies away, a tiny moth free to lay eggs on other jumping
bean shrubs that will one day turn into larvae that will feast on the seeds.
Luckily for Joaquin Hernandez, the
jumping bean moth doesn’t eat anything else except jumping bean seeds. So the
U.S. Agricultural Inspection Agency and its equivalents don’t consider it
verboten
at the border. And so it is that Señor
Hernandez has made himself a comfortable living from the avails from Mexican
jumping beans.
When he was only 12, Joaquin saw the
potential in Mexican jumping beans and parlayed it into a business that now
exports up to 20 million beans a year. He pays people for all the beans they’ll
bring him, and in his factory in Alamos, Mexico they package them as souvenir
and novelty items and send them on their way. Maybe you even bought a little
clear plastic box of them last time you were in Tijuana.
But whatever you do, it’s probably
not a good idea to eat them. At one time, indigenous people of the area used
the sap of the jumping bean shrub to poison the tips of their arrows.
Neither an apple nor from pine
trees
Much as Mexican jumping beans aren’t
beans and don’t jump, pineapples definitely don’t come from pine trees, nor, at
least to my eye and palate, do they remotely resemble an apple.
The name “pineapple” is from the
Spanish word for pineapple, “
piña
”, so
named because the fruit looks like a pinecone. One source postulates that the
Brits added “apple” to the name because the flesh was like that of an apple,
and who knows? Back in colonial times, perhaps earlier pineapples were much
smaller and the inside did look and taste more like an apple.
The
Ananas
in the Latin name for pineapple is derived from
anana
, from a language spoken by indigenous people of Brazil,
who dubbed it “excellent fruit”.
While the pineapple is associated
with the Caribbean because that’s where Columbus found them growing, the fruit
really originated in the area now occupied by Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia.
It’s actually a member of the bromeliad family, a tropical plant with dramatic
spiky leaves and beautiful pink flowers that seem to last forever, making it a
popular houseplant often sold at Save-On or Safeway.
Columbus learned from the Carib
people that the pineapple symbolized hospitality, and that he and his men would
be welcome in a village where a pineapple was placed by the entrance. In the
past, sea captains would impale a pineapple on the railing of their home to
show they’d been off on an exotic tropical voyage and were now receiving
visitors.
In the southern states, pineapples
also became a favourite table centrepiece for festive occasions and a general
symbol of hospitality. Ergo the legendary black and white pineapple motif in
the kitchen wallpaper in James Beard’s house in New York.
Almost everyone who tastes fresh
pineapple — at least when it’s ripe — agrees that it’s an excellent
fruit. Although I’m invariably disappointed in the low-acid hybridized
varieties (usually with “gold” in the name) we find in stores these days.
Picking a good one is largely out of
your hands. Pineapples do not ripen beyond the level they’re at when they’re
picked. Leaving it on your kitchen counter to “ripen” is only going to cause it
to molder, especially in our wet coast climate. Never mind plucking out leaves,
or tapping the fruit; use your nose when you’re at the store. Pick a nice heavy
one the looks “alive” and smell it for ripeness — the more pleasing
aroma, the better.
If you can, spring for an organic
one. The price might be little richer but the taste makes it more than
worthwhile. If you slice and serve it like those garnishes on your piña colada
you’ll save a lot of time and have a lot more fun, especially if you include
the drinks.
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning
freelance writer who used to grow her own pineapples in Hawaii.