Diane Ragone

Diane Ragone laughed at the suggestion that the legendary Johnny Appleseed might be her role model, but the parallel is hard to ignore: Nurseryman Johnny Appleseed, aka John Chapman, traveled the North America continent in the late 1700s to encourage the propagation of apple trees; Ragone was honored Tuesday by the Pacific Business Center of the University of Hawaii as one of eight 2013 "Stars of Oceania" for her work in promoting breadfruit.

Originally from Virginia, Ragone is director of the Breadfruit Institute, part of the National Tropical Botanical Garden on Kauai, and her extensive research into breadfruit — in Hawaii also known as "ulu" — has blossomed into a movement with promising commercial potential that could change modern diets and help feed the world’s poor as well.

As the UH stated: "Her work on breadfruit to feed the hungry of the world has impacted disaster-stricken areas in the Caribbean and Africa where mass plantings of trees from Hawaii have fed hundreds of thousands over the decade."

Ragone on Monday said she became interested in breadfruit through serendipity: "I was doing my master’s degree at the University of Hawaii in the Horticulture Department, and decided to write a term paper on breadfruit for a class in the Pacific Islands Study program. That term paper just got me so excited. I decided that’s what I wanted to do my Ph.D. on. I wanted to travel to the Pacific islands and collect and document breadfruit diversity and information about the varieties and their uses."

Ragone moved to Hawaii in 1979 after a cold winter in Chicago. She already had a brother and sister living here and decided she’d like to live in the tropics, too. In Chicago she had been working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which she had started with in Philadelphia. She had moved there after earning a bachelor’s decree in horticulture from Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, Va. Also a graduate of Patrick Henry High School, in Roanoke, Va., she started her career in Hawaii as a gardener at the private Ola Pua Botanical Garden on Kauai.

These days, besides directing the Breadfruit Institute, Ragone is a UH affiliate graduate faculty member and an associate researcher at Bishop Museum and the New York and Chicago botanical gardens. She has written scores of academic and popular articles about breadfruit, some for books.

Age 59, she is married to professional photographer Jim Wiseman, with whom she lives in Kilauea.

Question: The headline in Kauai’s Garden Island newspaper about the award you’re being given said "Breadfruit for all: Institute director will be honored for work to feed the world’s hungry." Does that mean you’re like the Johnny Appleseed of breadfruit?

Answer: (Laughs) I suppose you could say that. Yes, I’m spreading breadfruit around the world.

Q: Why breadfruit? And why is it so easily spread around the world, or is it?

A: I’ve been studying it for 30 years,

focusing mainly in the Pacific Islands, and breadfruit has an incredible diversity of the crop. … In the Pacific islands it’s been a staple food for centuries, if not for 2,000-3,000 years. It’s an integral part of island cultures and cropping systems, it’s very nutritional, it’s easy to grow, it’s a long-lived perennial tree.

Q: It’s seasonal thing, right? I mean, it bears fruit only once a year?

A: It is seasonal, but if you have good diversity and selection in your varieties, you can have an extended season.

Q: What’s nutritious about breadfruit?

A: Nutritionally breadfruit is an energy-rich carbohydrate … with good fiber content. It has good mineral content, with potassium, magnesium … We’ve seen in some of the varieties a very high iron content, which is especially important because iron deficiency is a real global scourge for so many people.

And then we’re also seeing some of the varieties are very high in what are called vitamin A precursors — you’ve heard of the term carotinoids? Some of them are very high in that as well.

So breadfruit has a good mix nutritionally, and what’s really exciting is we did nutritional analysis on nearly a hundred varieties … and while they don’t have a lot of protein — from 1 to 3 to 4 percent, maybe a little bit more — the quality of the protein is really good. That’s the amino acid composition.

Q: What is the extent that you can spread this crop throughout the world?

A: Breadfruit is a tree of the humid tropics, from the Pacific islands. It grows where it’s warm, so in the United States on the continental U.S., it will grow maybe as far north as Miami, in that area, but they get those winter chills that affect the trees. Hawaii’s lucky, because we can grow lots of breadfruit.

Q: To what extent have you spread the crop throughout the world?

A: One of your earlier questions was spreading breadfruit, how easy is it? And it wasn’t easy at all. It was extremely difficult, because the traditional way to propagate breadfruit is by root-cutting or root suckers, because many of the varieties, especially in eastern Polynesia, are seedless, so the only way you can propagate them is by vegetative — taking a little root cutting or little root sucker cutting, and, you know, that’s how the first settlers to Hawaii brought breadfruit with them. That’s how it was spread throughout the Pacific. That’s how Capt. Bligh got it to the Caribbean, and that’s how I did all my collecting, through vegetative propagation.

I collected nearly 400 varieties, from throughout the Pacific. I’ve been to more than 50 islands, but I was only able to propagate about less than a third of those.

So we had to look at new ways to propagate breadfruit, if we wanted to really maximize the potential of this crop.

So we’ve been working on this, a team of us, for a decade to do micropropagation — that’s how you do orchids — or in vitro. It’s been around for decades …

So we’ve been diligently working on it — the Breadfruit Institute and collaborators at the University of British Columbia in Okanagan — and it took about five or six years before we were successful with just one variety. We are very successful with that now to the point where we can literally propagate and distribute hundreds of thousands or millions of plants.

Q: Where do you grow all these?

A: This is all done through our collection … based in Kahana Garden in Hana, Maui, and a subset is at the McBryde Garden on Kauai. We send bud materials from those trees to our collaborator in Canada, and she (Susan Murch) and her team do the initial shoot initiation, where they get that bud to grow into a little plant.

Q: In Canada?

A: In the lab in Canada. They’re growing them in greenhouses, and we’re hoping next year the first trees will be fruiting in greenhouses. … We partnered with a private horticultural company, and they then do the next step, which is the actual commercial propagation and production of plants. They have facilities all over the world.

Q: Can you give me their name?

A: Yes, their name is Cultivarus LLC, They’re based in San Diego and Germany. Globalbreadfruit.com is their website. … They actually have an agreement with us to produce and market the breadfruit varieties. They then ship the plants. So we have truly revolutionized breadfruit propagation for the first time in its many thousand-year history, in that we can — and I say "we," it’s the whole team — we can ship a flat of breadfruit plants. Like if you go to the garden center and you buy a flat of potatoes or petunias, we can do that with breadfruit now. …

Q: Where does the National Tropical Botanical Garden get its money?

A: Well, the Garden is a private 503(c) organization. We’re not associated with the U.S. federal government at all. NTBG gets its funding through private donations, grants, contributions, some endowments, and we have a visitor program, so, you know, through visitor revenues. It’s a mix, and same for the Breadfruit Institute; it’s funded by private donors, competitive research grants …

So I spend a lot of my time writing grant proposals, and then if I get the grants, implementing the projects.

Q: NTBG is a national organization?

A: We have a national charter from Congress but we’re headquartered on Kauai. We have four gardens on Kauai and one in Florida. And the institute’s a program at the Garden.

Q: How long have you been associated with Garden?

A: I became associated with them in 1985, when I first started doing my Ph.D., because the Garden’s logo is breadfruit and they had a small collection and I got a small grant from the Garden to do my first field collecting. But I was hired and have been employed full-time at the Garden since 1989.

Q: You’re affiliated professionally with a lot of groups; for example, as a director of the New York and Chicago botanical gardens. How much time does that take away from you’re work on Kauai, or is it all related?

A: It’s all related. So even though I’m based on Kauai, I stay active in professional societies, especially the Society for Economic Botany, because that gives me a chance once a year to go to a professional society meeting where I can meet and interact with my colleagues.

Q: There are so many foods still being sort of discovered, aren’t there? I mean, there are foods people maybe eat regularly elsewhere but in America they’re just kind of new to the diet.

A: That’s right. There is an interest in Hawaii and in the continental U.S. and other places in breadfruit from the perspective of it being a gluten-free food. But my work is … really premised on the work I did in the Pacific, that this is an important, traditional, staple food in long-term, sustainable agricultural systems that has a real potential for families, small holder farmers and people in the developing world and in the tropics who need an easy-to-grow staple food, one that has potential for providing economic opportunity and income-generation.

Q: This is more practical, let’s say, than taro as a traditional food that has commercial potential?

A: Well, taro is widely grown, but, yes, … breadfruit is much more versatile than taro as a food. Breadfruit is already grown in nearly 90 countries around the world — throughout the Pacific, throughout the Caribbean, because of the introductions 200 years ago by Capt. Bligh and some by the French, and then from there to Africa. So the work we’re doing is we’re not introducing breadfruit as a new crop anywhere. What we’re doing is making new varieties — very nutritious, high-quality, high-production varieties — available for the first time ever.

Q: On the mainland, if you couldn’t grow it and you wanted to eat it, what would be the best way to get it there?

A: Well, see, that is the big challenge right now … Until a few years ago, breadfruit trees were a backyard tree. But in the past three years we’ve seen in Hawaii probably about 5,000 trees distributed and planted, and just in the past year the institute through a grant-funded project personally distributed nearly 5,000 trees statewide in partnership with 160 organizations free of charge. … So here in Hawaii we’ve seen probably more breadfruit trees planted ever in centuries, and in … three to four years, we’ll start seeing the fruits of all those trees. Globally we’ve distributed through our projects probably about 25,000 trees, and we’re up to 25 countries since we started in 2009.

Q: Do you have a favorite variety?

A: Oh, I have lots of favorites. It’s like have you asked a mother which is her favorite child? But the Ma’afala variety that we’re distributing I really like. It’s a smaller fruit and it’s really tasty. It’s a great backyard tree. And that’s the variety we distributed through our Plant a Tree of Life project (through which about 5,000 trees were distributed).

Q: What’s your favorite way to eat breadfruit?

A: I’d have to say one of my favorite ways — though I don’t prepare it that way myself — is the Pacific way, where you cook it in the imu and have it with fresh-grated coconut cream. I love it that way. But when I prepare breadfruit myself, I use it as a potato substitute for my ulu salad. …

Q: Are there any wines that go well with breadfruit?

A: (Laughs) I’m not the person to ask, but it’s funny you say that because last year … the Garden had an annual fundraiser called "Moonlight and Music," and one of our sponsors donated a dinner for eight, and the dinner was all breadfruit — each dish with breadfruit. It was from various recipes that the institute has compiled, and the woman who did this is a CEO of a wine company, and so she paired every course with a wine. … It was incredible. (Laughs)