What in the World is a Pawpaw?

Author Andrew Moore encountered his first pawpaw grove during a visit to southeast Ohio in 2010. While attending the Ohio Pawpaw Festival with a friend, Moore was fascinated to learn that the surrounding woods were filled with trees bearing the fruit.

Although he wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking for, he set out on foot, scanning the landscape for the long, symmetrical leaves that had been described to him. It wasn’t long before he encountered a thick stand of pawpaw trees and got his first taste of one.

“I had never heard of pawpaws until going to the festival,” Moore, a Florida native who moved to Pittsburgh, told us when we spoke with him in 2015. “I came away, like many people do, obsessed.”

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Editor’s Note: This story was published in 2015, but was most recently updated in September 2024 to note that interviews included in this piece occurred in 2015 and to note that Ron Powell is now the former president of the Ohio Pawpaw Growers Association.

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What’s the secret to finding a pawpaw in the wild?
They’re common along rivers and streams, and they abound in Ohio, so Ohioans are lucky. … Also, learn to identify the leaves, because there are very few trees that would look like it; very few leaves that would match it. They are very tropical — long, symmetrical leaves that are among the largest in the eastern United States.

How can people get their hands on a fresh pawpaw besides searching for one in the woods?
My advice to the average person in Ohio is to start asking at farmers markets. Some farmers are starting to grow them. Especially in Ohio, a lot more people are growing them. But also sometimes farmers will have pawpaws growing on their property, and if you ask them to bring some, they might just go into the woods and pick you some. … If they’re aware there is a demand for them, they might just start bringing them to market. … They can be found.

For more information about Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit, visit chelseagreen.com/pawpaw.

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How to Grow Pawpaws in Ohio
The Ohio Pawpaw Growers Association spreads the word about how to best cultivate our state’s native fruit. 

The pawpaw is credited for satiating a very hungry Lewis and Clark as rations ran low during the last week of the legendary explorers’ famous expedition. Our state’s earliest settlers also embraced the fruit as an important food source, just as the American Indians did before them.
   
“The pioneers found that there were relatively no native fruits in Ohio at the time of settlement, so pawpaws were an important part of their diet,” explains Ron Powell, former president of the Cincinnati-based Ohio Pawpaw Growers Association told us in 2015. “It saved a lot of them from starvation during hard times.”

Although the pawpaw’s popularity faded over the years, its resurgence since the early 2000s has boosted the popularity of Powell’s association. “We’re trying to look at production and educate people on how to work with [pawpaws] and how to process them,” he said.

Because the pawpaw has a shelf life of around four days, it’s difficult to stock in grocery stores. Powell says it is slowly making its way to mainstream markets, mostly in the form of frozen pulp, but he adds that private orchards are still the place where one is most likely to find the fruit in its natural state.

Pawpaw trees also face growing challenges. They’re shorter than other trees and are often shaded by foliage, which, in turn, produces smaller fruit. The Ohio Pawpaw Growers Association shares orchard-planting strategies with its paid members and newsletter subscribers to help them achieve better results.

Finally, Powell added, there’s the hurdle of getting consumers to try a fruit that’s billed as a mango-banana mash-up but sports an unusual green hue. “It’s an uphill battle,” he said. “I’m finding out that the people who have tried pawpaw really find it a wonderful fruit.”

For more information about the Ohio Pawpaw Growers Association, visit ohiopawpaw.com.