What they are
Two large tropical trees of the genus Artocarpus, in the fig and mulberry family, Moraceae — kin to the fig and the mulberry, and sharing their milky latex and their curious "multiple fruit" structure, in which many individual flowers fuse into a single fleshy mass.
Breadfruit, Artocarpus altilis, of Pacific and Southeast Asian origin: a handsome tree with large glossy deeply-lobed leaves and round green starchy fruit.
Jackfruit, Artocarpus heterophyllus, of South Asian origin: a relative bearing the largest fruit of any tree in the world — jackfruit routinely reach 10 to 25 kg and the largest exceed 50 kg, borne directly on the trunk and main branches (cauliflory).
Both are staple starch trees, feeding people across the humid tropics, and both are among the more productive food plants known — a single tree yields an enormous mass of food for very little labour.
Breadfruit and the Bounty
Breadfruit carries one of the most famous stories in the history of plants. Its starchy fruit, roasted or baked, has the texture and role of bread or potato, and it was a staple across the Pacific islands, spread by the great Polynesian voyages.
In the eighteenth century, British planters in the Caribbean wanted breadfruit as a cheap, high-yielding food for enslaved people on the sugar plantations, and in 1787 the Royal Navy dispatched HMS Bounty, under Captain William Bligh, to collect breadfruit plants in Tahiti and carry them to the West Indies. The long stay in Tahiti, the harsh return discipline, and other tensions culminated in the mutiny on the Bounty — the plants were thrown overboard by the mutineers. Bligh survived an extraordinary open-boat voyage, returned on a second expedition, and successfully delivered breadfruit to the Caribbean, where it remains a staple. It is a rare case of a food plant sitting at the centre of a world-famous historical drama.
Breadfruit today is valued as a highly productive, low-input, gluten-free staple with real promise for tropical food security, and there are renewed efforts to plant it widely for that reason.
Jackfruit: the largest tree fruit
Jackfruit is a South and Southeast Asian staple and increasingly a global one. The huge fruit is really many fruits fused: inside the knobbly green rind are dozens of sweet, aromatic yellow "bulbs" (each a separate flower's fruit) around large edible seeds, all embedded in a fibrous core.
Ripe, the bulbs are sweet and eaten as fruit, tasting of a mix of banana, mango, and pineapple. Unripe (green), the whole starchy fruit is cooked as a vegetable, and its meat-like fibrous texture when cooked has made green jackfruit a popular meat substitute worldwide in recent years — "pulled" jackfruit. The seeds are boiled or roasted like chestnuts. Little of the fruit is wasted.
Like breadfruit it is enormously productive — one mature tree can yield tonnes of fruit a year — and it is drought-hardier and tougher than breadfruit, tolerating a wider range of conditions, which is helping drive its spread as a resilient tropical food tree.
Growing them
Both are hot, humid, lowland tropical trees, frost-tender, wanting deep, well-drained soil and good moisture, though jackfruit is notably more drought- and cold-tolerant than breadfruit and will grow into the warm subtropics.
Breadfruit is usually seedless in its main cultivated forms and so is propagated vegetatively — from root suckers and cuttings — an ancient clonal crop like the banana. This clonal narrowness is a vulnerability, and seeded breadnut forms preserve more diversity.
Jackfruit grows readily from its large seeds, though seedlings vary, so superior types are grafted. Both are large trees needing space, and both fruit within a few years and go on for decades. See tropical fruit trees, propagation, and grafting.
As productive, low-labour, high-calorie tree crops, breadfruit and jackfruit are exactly the kind of staple-bearing trees that tropical food forests and agroforestry are built around.
See also
- Fig Species the family relatives with the same multiple-fruit structure
- Mulberry another Moraceae fruit tree
- Tropical Fruit Trees breadfruit and jackfruit in the wider orchard
- Banana and Plantain the other great clonal tropical staple
- Food Forest Design staple tree crops for the tropics
- Durian and Mangosteen the region's celebrated dessert fruits