2002.06.20

First Day Cover:

4 stamps

Printing: Offset Lithography
Paper: Special stamp paper with OBA free coating110 gsm
Stamp Size: 48 mm x 31.9 mm
Perforation: 13 per 2 cm
Designs:
25c: Breadfruit
34c: Wi (Spondias dulcis)
$1: Jakfruit
$3: Avocado (Persea Americana)
Format: vertical
Sheet: 50(2x25)
Designer: Nick Cartmell / Umesh Sharma
Artist: George Bennett
Text: Kim Gravelle
Printers: Joh. Enschedé Stamps Security Printers

In Guatemala, locals apparently say a good meal is "an avacado, four or five tortillas and a cup of coffee". The avacado is popular in Central America, since it's the most nutritious of all fruits, rich in Vitamins A and B, and has three times the protein of apples and pears.

In fact, the avacado is popular everywhere, now grown in most tropical and sub-tropical countries and sold worldwide. And like the other three fruits in this Fiji Philatelic issue, all of which are green and less colourful than bananas or mangos, some people would hardly consider them fruit.
But botanically, fruit they are. The avacado - Persea Americana - was carried from Central America by the Spanish conquerors of Mexico; its name a corruption of the Aztec word ahuacatl or testicle. The pear-shaped fruit has a buttery, yellow flesh. So buttery, in fact, that in Fiji during February and March, locals use it as a butter-substitute on their bread. It has been a dietary staple of Central and South America for centuries, but is extensively cultivated in Polynesia, North America and the warmer regions of Europe as a salad fruit, with the oil used as a base in cosmetics. Persea drymifolia, native to Mexico, has a smooth and thin green skin and is one of three subspecies.

Fiji children would disagree, but the Otaheiti apple, called Wi in Fijian, Amra in Fiji Hindi and Spondias cytherea or Spondias dulcis by its botanical name, is probably the least-written-about fruit of the series. And yet it is a member of a huge family, with some 500 species that include mangos, cashew and pistachio nuts, even the less-desirable poison ivy. The oval-shaped, green-skinned fruit has a tangy taste, and is popular with the country's Indian community as a pickled condiment, when, still green, tart and sour, it is cut into slices, sun dried, added to mustard seeds and oil, chillies and garlic and made into 'archar', a tasty accent to curry dishes. It has been likened to an 'inferior mango'. Be that as it may, a market 'heap' lasts in any house with children for only a few minutes. It is a native fruit of Polynesia (Tahiti was first known as 'Otaheiti') and is a common Polynesian and South Pacific market commodity.

Breadfruit must be cooked; more like a vegetable than a fruit, and has a dark, smooth skin. Often confused with breadnut, which has a spikey skin, their difference to the connoisseur is that one has seeds (the breadnut) and the other doesn't. Breadfruit - Artocarpus altilis - is an important food crop of the South Pacific and is grown throughout the humid tropics. Sir Joseph Banks, Capt. Cook and other travellers in Polynesia brought back descriptions of locals "gathering bread as a fruit" and West Indian planters, seeking a staple diet for their labourers, petitioned King George III to mount an expedition for its collection. The rest is history: Lieutenant William Bligh was sent to Tahiti to collect the plants; sailed on the Bounty in 1789 from Tahiti with more than one thousand trees, and survived the mutiny which brought not only his name to the public eye, but breadfruit. Bligh returned to Tahiti in 1792 and, this time, carried plants to Jamaica and St. Vincent. Called uto in Fijian, the fruit is boiled, roasted, or cut into chips and fried, and the tree, which may reach 18 metres in height, was in past years valued as a good wood for building canoes.

Jakfruit - Artocarpus heterophyllus or Artocarpus integra - was imported from India, where it was said to be the "food of sages and philosophers". The largest of all cultivated fruits (a Jakfruit can sometimes weigh 35kg), the fibrous core is not eaten, but the egg-shaped seeds, covered with a juicy flesh with an almost-pineapple-like odour and sweet flesh, is a favourite in many Indo-Fijian curries and other culinary preparations. The fruit comes from such a substantial shade tree that one botanist declared the tree "deserves to be a garden ornamental" and the thick latex from the fruit was, in times past, used commonly as caulking material for canoes. In addition to curries, the seeds are sometimes roasted and eaten like chestnuts.

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