Breadfruit: how a climate-change superfood popular from Jamaica to London is linked to Captain Bligh
Breadfruit is a future superfood – a nutrient-rich Caribbean crop resistant to climate change and widely sold in Britain. Now scientists have proved a direct link between the staple and the UK’s grim colonial past.
Breadfruit has thrived on the islands of the Caribbean, despite the failure of its original purpose of perpetuating Britain’s use of slavery on sugar plantations by providing a source nutrition for the slaves (Photo: Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images)
By Cahal Milmo
January 14, 2023 6:00 am
Some four years after Captain William Bligh survived the infamous mutiny on HMS Bounty, he once more set sail from the Pacific bound for the Caribbean. His vessel carried 2,000 or so breadfruit saplings – a plant which cared so little for its seaborne surroundings that the on-board gardener complained bitterly of his battle to keep them alive amid “exceedingly troublesome flies, unwholesomeness of sea… and rationed water”.
By the time Bligh’s vessel, HMS Providence, had reached its first Caribbean port of call on St Vincent in the late summer of 1793, just 678 of the Artocarpus altilis plants survived. This was nonetheless still sufficient to serve the ruthless purpose for which the trees had been transported across the oceans – to provide a carbohydrate-rich food source to sustain the slaves used to turn Britain’s Caribbean colonies into cruel and vastly profitable hubs of the sugar trade.
Some 230 years later, scientists have for the first time traced a direct lineage from the Caribbean’s now thriving breadfruit crop back to the saplings from Bligh’s grim transplantation, just as the plant gains increasing attention as a stable source of nutrition in the world’s tropical zones against another man-made scourge, namely climate change. The staple may also be about to make inroads into UK homes with one Midlands wholesaler selling nearly a ton of breadfruit a week.
Researchers have unveiled the results of a study proving for a DNA link between varieties of breadfruit grown on former UK colonies such as Jamaica and St Vincent and the Grenadines with the saplings taken on board by Bligh from Tahiti at the request of the Admiralty as Britain claimed, disingenuously, to be harnessing a golden age of botanical acquisition to improving the welfare of the enslaved.
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https://inews.co.uk/news/breadfruit-climate-change-superfood-jamaica-london-captain-bligh-2082810