Nominated for a 2016 James Beard Foundation Book Award in the Writing and Literature category! This fruit has been memorialized in folk songs, poems, and with dozens of place names from Georgia to Illinois. It is the largest edible fruit native to the United States and tastes like a cross between a banana and a mango, but chances are you've never heard of it, let alone bit into one. What is it? The pawpaw. The pawpaw grows wild in twenty-six states, gracing Eastern forests each fall with sweet-smelling, tropical-flavored abundance. Historically, it fed and sustained Native Americans and European explorers, presidents, and enslaved African Americans, and its trees are an organic grower's dream, requiring no pesticides or herbicides to thrive, and containing compounds that are among the most potent anticancer agents yet discovered. So why have so few people heard of the pawpaw, much less tasted one? In Pawpaw, author Andrew Moore answers that question by taking readers on a journey through the past, present, and future of this unique fruit, traveling from the Ozarks to Monticello; canoeing the lower Mississippi in search of wild pawpaw; drinking pawpaw beer in Durham, North Carolina; tracking down lost cultivars in Appalachian hollers; and joining a harvest in a Maryland orchard. Along the way, Moore gathers pawpaw lore and knowledge not only from the plant breeders and horticulturists working to bring pawpaws into the mainstream (including a man known as "Johnny Pawpawseed"), but also regular folks who remember eating them in the woods as kids, but never since. More than a compendium of pawpaw knowledge, Pawpaw plumbs deeper questions about America's foodways--how economic, biologic, and cultural forces combine to lead us to eat what we eat, and sometimes ignore the incredible, delicious food growing within reach.

And, if you haven't yet eaten a pawpaw, after you digest Moore's infectious prose, you'll soon be seeking out the nearest pawpaw patch.