Taste the Fruit of Our Understory

The pawpaw is the largest edible fruit native to North America, yet few Americans have tasted one. It grows plentifully in the understory of eastern river bottoms, ripens from late August into October, and keeps only a few days once picked, unless chilled. As a society, we have not yet managed to tame pawpaw to fit our industrial food system, so the fruit has stayed closely linked with the people who know how to forage and where to find it. Its pulp keeps for up to a year frozen, making it a natural fit for an edible installation telling its story through ice cream and data art.

This artwork 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 carried it along the rivers, enslaved people, beside whose quarters it grew and who ate it on the trails north to freedom, 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 feed on it, 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: the story of people leaving the forest over time and the story of forests 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 forecasts for this century; purple arrows show where people carried it along rivers and trade routes; 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 a crop that pays on paper but rarely gets planted.

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.