CLEAR PLASTIC BAGS OF CACATÉOn buses carrying you upslope from Villahermosa to here you pass through many colorful little villages as the road zigzags up and up. When I arrived here in October, at about mid slope, vendors started appearing hawking small, clear-plastic bags of blackish, more or less spherical, mothball-size things. Everyone was calling out, almost like roosters crowing, "Cacatés... Cacatés... " When the bus driver stopped for a rest he and several passengers bought some bags, then stood around cracking the black things between their teeth and agreeing how good their cacatés tasted. At the next stop I bought a bag myself, found the cacatés' shells harder than I wanted to subject my molars to, and the white, oily flesh inside somewhat bitter and salty. You can see several cacatés in the palm of my hand below:
Since local people seemed to love cacatés I brought Inés a bag as a little gift. Turns out she keeps a large, plastic garbage bag of them for serving to guests. Also, in Pueblo Nuevo's open-air market there's always one to several people selling clear-plastic bags filled with cacatés. They're almost like bags of popcorn at the movies: People act surprised if you don't buy one from them. At first I didn't have the slightest idea what cacatés were. Eventually I realized that they were a fruit I knew very well, but in the raw state. Back in the 70s when I served as the naturalist for Maya-ruin tours in Guatemala's lowland Petén region I ate great numbers of them collected from the forest floor. In lowland Guatemala and in the Yucatán the tree they're from is called Ramón. It's BROSIMUM ALICASTRUM, a member of the Fig Family. Inés tells me that the black, hard-shelled fruits sold here are brought up from the lowlands and prepared in three ways. First, the fruits can be dried in the sun, then stored for a long time and eaten with no further preparation. Second, the black fruits being sold have been boiled in salt water, then dried. Third, the boiled, dried fruits can be opened, then the white flesh canned in water. In Guatemala and the Yucatan the Ramón tree is famous not only for its fine fruit but also because livestock relish its tender branches. In fact, the branches are so digestible that I've read that during times of famine the Maya would eat them themselves. Talking with archeologists in Guatemala back in the 70s I developed the notion that one reason ancient Maya civilization endured for so long was that their lowland forests were thick with Ramón trees providing fruits that could be stored for months in dry places, providing emergency food whenever everything else failed. I couldn't understand why I'd never seen Ramón fruits sold the way they are here until I found the website at http://www.teeccino.com/ramonnut1.aspx. It's a new industry, one of those things NGOs are pushing to help isolated, native people make livings. At the above site the whole thing is explained and well illustrated. This is exciting stuff, the kind of project I'd like to see a lot more of! |
