The Story of Brazil Nuts is Kind of Nuts
Brazil nuts, my friend, have quite a tale to tell.
The Brazil nut come from the Bertholletia excelsa tree, which is found throughout the Amazon rain forest – an area covering about 2.7 million-square miles in South America, stretching across northwest Brazil and into Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador. The trees grow in lowland rain forests where flooding isn’t prevalent and can live for 500 years or more.
A nut, by definition, is a hard-shelled fruit with a single seed. But Brazil nuts don’t fit that at all; they’re actually considered seeds since they come in large pods about the size of a baseball in groups of 10 to 24. In fact, they’re more closely related to blueberries and persimmons than they are to walnuts or pecans. The pods are extremely tough – so much so, there are only two animals that can open them: us, though we need the help of an ax or machete; and a small rodent called an agouti, who gnaw the pods with their chisel-like teeth. Check it out:
In Brazil, these seeds are called “castanhas-do-ParÁ¡” or “chestnuts from ParÁ¡,” after a state in Northern Brazil where the trees grow abundantly. While there are some plantations, most of the production comes from harvesting the pods in the wild, which takes place from December to March. It’s a dangerous profession since each pod weigh up to five-and-a-half pounds and drop without warning from trees the height of an 18-story high-rise building. The pods hurtle toward the earth at 50 miles per hour with such force they can drive themselves deep into the ground. (We hope the harvesters wear helmets.)
Even the way in which the trees are pollinated is a bit odd. There’s only one insect for job, the orchid bee, which is big enough, strong enough, and has a long-enough tongue to pry the flower’s hood open and lap up the nectar within.
Brazil nuts have been eaten by the native people of the region at least since the Upper Paleolithic era, some 11,000 years ago. But the first mention of the Brazil nuts from Western sources goes back to 1569 during a time when Spanish and Portuguese explorers were tramping through South America, fighting, killing, and subjugating native peoples. One of these explorers, a Spanish conquistador named Juan Álvarez Maldonado, was introduced to Brazil nuts while exploring the Madre de Dios river region of Peru and promptly ordered that thousands be gathered for his hungry troops. That was pretty much the best thing that happened to Maldonado and his troops on that trip: their boats overturned navigating a swollen river, a bloody battle ensued with rival Spaniards who were also exploring the area, followed by another battle with natives that wiped out most of the rest of the crew. Maldonado barely made it back to civilization alive.
Not surprisingly, Brazil nuts didn’t really take off until the Spanish and Portuguese made better inroads into the jungles. But, strangely, it was Dutch traders who first introduced the food to Europe in the early 1600s, although it would take another hundred years or so before they became popular there. Brazil nuts first arrived in America in the early 1800s, and as in Europe, it took some time before they reached the kind of popularity that would land them in those ubiquitous tins of mixed nuts you find on your grocery store shelf. Today, nearly half the Brazil nuts imported to the United States come from Bolivia.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].The Story of Brazil Nuts is Kind of Nuts
by Andrew Amelinckx, Modern Farmer
August 12, 2016
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreExplore other topics
Share With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
Can you buy brasil nuts still in the pods?
Cool and very interesting post though. I love those nuts!
Always wondered where brazil nuts originated from and how it grows.
How long does it take for a pecan nut to develope
Please, brazilian nuts have been in America for thousands of years not introduced in 1800. Brazil is in America too, and also Peru, and Bolivia, etc… Let’s not fall for America=USA please!