Taste the Fruit of Our Understory

The pawpaw is the largest fruit native to North America, yet most Americans have never heard of it. It grows plentifully in the understory of eastern river bottoms, ripens for a few weeks in early autumn, and will not keep three days. We never managed to tame it to fit the industrial food system, so it stayed with the people who knew where to find it. The most effective way to preserve it at near full flavor is to freeze its pulp, making it a natural fit for an edible installation telling its story through ice cream and data art.

The print weaves the story of the fruit and the populations that eat it over time. Each column is a community that has lived with the pawpaw: Indigenous nations who planted it and carried it along the rivers, enslaved people who ate it outside their quarters and on the trail north, settlers and Appalachian families, the market, the Kentucky State University growers who now keep its gene bank, the opossum, fox and birds that eat it, the zebra swallowtail whose caterpillars eat nothing else, and the deer that refuse it and so let it spread. The fruit’s own column, edged in blue, is the Mississippi. Rows rise from the ice age to now, and above the dish into three forecasts. Each strap lights from the centre by the strength of that relationship in that era; the weave darkens at its edges for two stories, people leaving the forest and the forest in trouble.

Stitched markings illustrate its geographic movement. Red chain-stitch arrows show where climate moved the fruit, north out of its ice-age refuges and north again in two of three forecasts; purple arrows show where people carried it upstream; red spirals mark where it is gathered today, the gene bank in Frankfort and the festivals. Short grey chain stitches mark dated turns, longer where the relationship changed more. At the heart of the dish is the arithmetic of why it stays wild: an acre of pawpaw costs about four times more to grow than it earns, drawn as a figure eight across the break-even line.

Edible installation: pawpaw ice cream (foraged pawpaw pulp folded in cold). Presented at the Society of Sensory Professionals 2026 conference, the Seelbach Hotel, Louisville, Kentucky.