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Food and Drink

Not what they seem

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.