Let me warn you, the very suggestion of this is controversial

December 14, 2024 11:28 PM

...there is a possibility that some mangos are not mangos at all.

India loves mangos. It produces roughly half the world's mangos--and eats them all, exporting almost none. The story has long been that mangos evolved and were domesticated in South Asia, and were exported to Southeast Asia, where new varieties were developed. But as with so much in taxonomy, genetic analysis has complicated the story [PDF of research paper summarized in the first link].

posted by agentofselection (25 comments total)

This is the controversy I needed in my life.

There's a remarkable trade in good unusual fruit in a Facebook group titled "fruit 4 sale". Not so much in this season sadly.
posted by constraint at 12:12 AM on December 15 [3 favorites]

This is so much fun! Not going to comment on the contents other than that I now know 100 percent more about mangoes than I did 15 minutes ago.
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 1:25 AM on December 15 [4 favorites]

Andrew Weil wrote a series of essays collected as The Marriage of Sun and Moon in which he often wrote about consciousness altering experiences not involving entheogens which included watching solar eclipses ( hence the book's title), eating hot peppers, dancing, drugs, sweating in sweatboxes and -- *drumroll* -- eating mangoes fresh from the tree.

My friend Howard, who now owns the Eastlake Zoo Tavern where we once had a meetup, once hitchhiked with his friend Bud to Panama in the 1970s and can testify to this. They spent one afternoon on a beach in Nicaragua buying and eating mangoes cut from trees by a couple of little boys there. They both found it quite the transcendental experience.
posted by y2karl at 4:12 AM on December 15 [4 favorites]

Thanks for this! Such great use of modern genetic techniques to (start to) figure out a puzzle. I have a lot of South Asian students, and I bet they will get a kick out of me sharing the mango phylogenetic tree.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:22 AM on December 15 [2 favorites]

Some of them are womangos
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:43 AM on December 15 [6 favorites]

True thing: Wayyyyyy back when I was a tiny tot here in the suburban wilds of 1960s central Indiana, green bell peppers were labeled as “mangoes” in the supermarkets. Back then, mango (the fruit) was utterly unknown to midwest humanity. Why, though, they opted to label green bell peppers as mangoes remains a deep mystery.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:27 AM on December 15 [12 favorites]

You think you know someone and then
posted by goatdog at 6:36 AM on December 15 [1 favorite]

"If you don't want to find the nuts in your family, don't shake the tree."
posted by Hardcore Poser at 8:17 AM on December 15

Oh not another yam/sweet potato confusion....(I'm sure the USDA can clear it up with some labeling requirements...)
posted by Tandem Affinity at 8:36 AM on December 15

Didn't there used to be an Indian eccentric in the White House press pool who would constantly bring up the subject of permitting the import of Indian mangoes to the US? I'm thinking like 1990's or early 2000's. I think I heard about him on NPR, being a bit of a favorite among the press corps.
posted by groda at 8:42 AM on December 15 [1 favorite]

I get mangoes and papaya mixed up. But one of them leaves a turpentine aftertaste.
posted by Czjewel at 9:41 AM on December 15

"If you don't want to find the nuts in your family, don't shake the tree."

See also

“Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.”
Frank Lloyd Wright
posted by y2karl at 11:04 AM on December 15 [3 favorites]

I get mangoes and papaya mixed up.

Mango has one big seed, sometimes some fibres in the pulp, and tastes like heaven; papaya has lots of tiny little seeds, no real texture, and tastes like a Sirius Cybernetics generic fruit-flavoured food. But I am biased.

I love mangoes so much and they're so hard to get (that's on me for persistently living too far from the tropics) so it's delightful to know that there are ao many different kinds and so many possibilities for crossbreeding them. I will pin my hopes on a cold-weather cultivar. Or buy a very tall greenhouse.
posted by ngaiotonga at 11:23 AM on December 15 [7 favorites]

For example, since many species in the genus are cultivated for their fruit, you might assume that these species are closely related to one another, while species that produce unpalatable fruits are more distantly related. However, my analysis shows that this is not the case; species that are cultivated for fruit are scattered throughout the genus.

The author of this article mentions that mangoes are part of the poison ivy family, which many discussions of mangoes I’ve read previously have left out, but does not note that cashews and pistachios are also members of that family.

What I would dearly like to know is whether the absolute and even abject craving some people have for mangoes and the toxicity of related species, not to mention the toxicity of mango tree sap itself, is not simply a coincidence, but is somehow an effect of that toxicity.

I’d guess that it is, and that if you tested people who report near uncontrollable cravings for mangoes for sensitivity to poison ivy as well, you’d find much higher than average incidence.

People who grew up around mangoes really seem to miss them when they move to mango free parts of the world, and I think that might be a effect not only of eating mangoes as a child, but also of being exposed to wild and domesticated fires which included mango trees and wood.

One of my partners was crazy for mangoes and mango products such as chutney, and she was almost catastrophically senstitive to poison ivy and sumac to the point that she couldn’t visit her childhood stomping grounds in Southern California during wildfire season without coming back covered in hives that took at least a month to recede.
posted by jamjam at 1:12 PM on December 15 [2 favorites]

My mango comment is proven true.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 3:12 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]

one of them leaves a turpentine aftertaste

That's the mango. I would say you're eating the wrong variety, but it seems you might just be picking them too
early.
posted by GeckoDundee at 5:15 PM on December 15

Can confirm that Hari Kondabolu is 100% accurate about the Indian love for mangoes.
posted by Runes at 6:03 PM on December 15

The terpenes in a really ripe Ataulfo (or "Champagne"; other marketing names doubtlessly exist) are part of the delight!
posted by Earthtopus at 6:32 PM on December 15

Thank you for triggering the memory of the party I once went to in a Berkeley co-op that had a sex room containing a kiddie pool full of fruit (I did not go into the room), but which gave everyone that used it urushiol rashes because they'd used mangoes with the skin still on in the mix.
posted by Earthtopus at 6:34 PM on December 15 [3 favorites]

I love mangos
posted by rebent at 8:14 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]

Very interesting. I never ate a mango until I started going to Jamaica in the 80s. Every time I went I ate plenty of them, nearly every day. They were extremely juicy, sweet, and staggeringly delicious. After one of my trips, when I got home to Austin I ate a mango that I bought at the co-op, most likely grown in Mexico. I had a violent reaction, sores ringed the insides of my lips, while my lips swole up to three times their normal size. The pain and swelling lasted about 10 days.

Doctor confirmed that I have a mango allergy. Since then, not wanting to go through that much pain again, I have religiously avoided mangos. One time, a friend served me with a dish that one would not expect mangos to be in and yes, the pain and swelling hit me. Now I am super careful to read labels and cross examine anyone who tries to feed me anything with mixed ingredients.

The article makes me wonder if there was a genetic difference in the Jamaica vs the US/Mexico mangos. At this point, I would be scared to try the Jamaica ones anyway. And yes, I am extremely allergic to Poison Ivy, nearly ended up in the hospital once.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 9:10 PM on December 15

I feel compelled to post a link to Earl Okin performing Mango, which I think gets to the heart of the matter.
posted by Hogshead at 7:52 AM on December 16 [1 favorite]

Someone turned me on to Indian mangoes a lot of years ago, and each May, I call around to find kesars or alphonsos. I have the intense craving for them that jamjam muses about, and it's not transferable to other mangoes (e.g. ataulfos, which non-Indian people always think I mean when I say alphonsos). It's not the same feeling as the desire for any other fruit, even though there are fruits I'd say I sometimes enjoy as much. It does feel like a categorically different type of craving. I hadn't heard about mango craving before, the thought that it might be a product of its toxicity is intriguing, and I'd be interested to learn more. I used to have fierce sensitivity to poison ivy, but I think now I have normal sensitivity to it. I have to resist gnawing the flesh off the pits of the Indian mangos or my lips will get raw and irritated.

I've only ever found kesars and alphonsos at Indian groceries, I assume because of import restrictions, and only by the $35-50+ case (with 8-14 mangoes). Where I live now, it's quite a drive to the nearest place that stocks them, so I tend to let people know I'm making the trip, and I've turned enough of them on to Indian mangoes that I end up getting several cases to share around, with everyone chipping in.

The place where I've bought them the last couple of years carries another 2-3 varieties, too, but also only by the case. I always wonder if I'm missing anything as good as the kesars and alphonsos, but googling hasn't helped, and I'm wary of buying a whole case only to learn that I wasn't.
posted by daisyace at 8:42 AM on December 16

green bell peppers were labeled as “mangoes” in the supermarkets

This shows up in parts of the South too, I've never heard a good explanation.
posted by aspersioncast at 3:14 PM on December 16

Mod note: We've added this post to the sidebar and Best Of blog, in between bites of this delicious fruit, whatever it is! Thank you for sharing these links with us!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 5:44 AM on December 20