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Plum Pickings: Ancient Fruit Ripe for Modern Plates

posted by martyb on Monday June 01 2020, @11:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the could-use-a-little-pruning dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Plum pickings: ancient fruit ripe for modern plates:

An Indigenous fruit which is one of the earliest known plant foods eaten in Australia could be the next big thing in the bush foods industry.

The University of Queensland research team is led by bush foods researcher Associate Professor Yasmina Sultanbawa, who said the green plum not only tasted delicious but contained one of the highest known folate levels of any fruit on the commercial market.

"This is really exciting because folate is an important B-group vitamin, and what's great about the green plum is that the folate is in a natural form so the body absorbs it more easily than in a capsule," Dr Sultanbawa said.

[...] "There is recent evidence discovered in West Arnhem Land which shows the green plum was eaten by Aboriginal people as far back as 53,000 years ago."

Will mass cultivation disrupt aboriginal communities?

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @10:44AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 02 2020, @10:44AM (#1002125)

    Looking at the actual paper ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29806144/ [nih.gov] ) the numbers are based on dry weight. Fruits are normally about 75-90% water so I'm wondering how much fake news and marketing is in this story. If it has similar water content to a plum (85%) then the numbers won't be as impressive.

    The flesh is high in protein (12.8 g/100 g dry weight (DW)) and both flesh and seed are high in dietary fibre (55.1 and 87.7 g/100 g DW, respectively). The flesh is high in potassium (2274.7 mg/100 g DW), and is a good source of magnesium (570.5 mg/100 g DW), calcium (426.0 mg/100 g DW) and phosphorous (216.8 mg/100 g DW), whereas the seed is high in iron (8.15 mg/100 g DW). The flesh contains folate at 752.4 μg/100 g DW and the seed contains 109.5 μg/100 g DW as pteroylmonoglutamic acid equivalents.

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