You won’t find breadfruit in the produce aisle at your local grocery store. But Patagonia Provisions, the food-focused offshoot of the outdoor apparel company, wants to help make the tropical fruit a mainstream ingredient.
It’s one of a handful of foods that the company has identified as tools to make the food system more sustainable and capture carbon in the soil. (Kernza, a climate-friendly grain that the brand turned into beer, is another.) “How do we look at our food chain and do things differently so that we can have an abundance of nutritious food in the future without harming the planet in the way that chemical agriculture is today?” says Patagonia Provisions head Birgit Cameron, who launched the division in 2012 after Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard said that he wanted to take on the unsustainability of the current food system.
The green, bumpy, large fruit—called breadfruit in English because of its starchy consistency and how it smells like baked bread—was once a staple food in places like Hawaii, where it is called ‘ulu. Imported foods like rice largely replaced it over time, and because the fruit doesn’t keep long, it hasn’t been exported out of the tropics. Some chefs recently rediscovered it and have used it locally, though it hadn’t been used in mass-market products. But the Patagonia team saw the potential: because the trees are grown in agroforests, farms that have a diverse mix of trees, they help build healthy soil. A single tree can also suck up 1.5 tons of CO2 as it grows.The company’s sourcing team also continues to explore other little-used ingredients. “I think that’s the issue with our food system—we just default to like 10 things, you know?” she says. “There’s so much diversity out there. There are so many really interesting ingredients that we could be incorporating.”
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