Thousands attend a Quebec festival centred on a little-known tropical-tasting fruit

All over Canada on Sunday, people prepared stuffing, began thawing turkeys and rummaged for the nice tablecloth for Thanksgiving dinner. Meanwhile, in one Quebec town, thousands gathered to celebrate a peculiar fruit: the pawpaw.

Warm October rays and bright fall colours lit up the town of Farnham, about 50 kilometres southeast of Montreal, for its second annual Pawpaw Festival, part of a larger movement honouring the sweet fruit.

With sticky fingers and bright faces, people scooped up heaping spoonfuls of yellow flesh from the mango-shaped fruit, amazed to hear some of these pawpaws were picked just around the corner from where they stood.

“It tastes like mango, banana, pineapple and caramel. It has every characteristic of a tropical fruit, even if it’s a native fruit. And it grows in our backyard here in Quebec — it’s pretty incredible,” said Vincent Renaud, founder of the non-profit organization Pawpaw Québec.

If fresh pawpaw didn’t fulfil the craving for this avocado-textured fruit, visitors could also sample the wide range of pawpaw products: candles, beer, pastries, hot sauce, and many more.

Gabrielle Boucher had attended the festival last year and was back with her family on Sunday. She was snacking on a pawpaw-filled arancini — an Italian rice ball.

“Everyone should plant (pawpaw) in their yard, so that maybe, some day, we eat less fruits from abroad, like bananas. It’s fun that we’re able to grow those fruits here,” she said.

At a nearby picnic table, Nicolas Leporé was enjoying pawpaw-flavoured poutine. His wife, Sabrina Chiminazzo, had just finished eating her grilled cheese — in which the melting cheese mixed with onion and pawpaw slices.

Leporé had heard about this fruit from television reports, and it piqued his interest.

“I’ve always been curious about the idea of trying to grow a tree at home. When I saw this festival was happening, I thought, ‘This is the perfect opportunity,’” he said.

The couple is heading home to the south shore of Montreal with a handful of seeds, as well as some fresh fruits and goodies to tide them over until they can harvest pawpaw in their own yard.

Some of the pawpaws for sale at the festival were picked by Renaud. The Farnham local has enjoyed fruit trees since childhood, and when a friend introduced him to pawpaws in 2019, he fell in love.

“It’s fantastic, so delicious, so interesting — I couldn’t believe it wasn’t better known, so I dedicated myself to making it known,” he said.

In 2021, he created a Facebook group for pawpaw enthusiasts that now has close to 23,500 members. Then, last year, he decided to launch the festival.

The first edition of the Farnham Pawpaw Festival drew 10,000 visitors, said Renaud. This year, he estimates 12,000 to 14,000 people attended the event. He said the festival has seen visitors from other provinces, from the United States, and even from Europe.

Quebec’s pawpaw festival is part of a larger movement around the sweet green-skinned fruit.

Rodney Dever, a pawpaw specialist from West Virginia, was in Farnham on Sunday to tell festivalgoers about the history and potential of the fruit.

“I’ve been speaking at pawpaw festivals every weekend since the second weekend of September,” he said.

“It’s great to just spread the pawpaw gospel.”

Pawpaw is native to North America and saw an upsurge in popularity in the early 1900s, but that interest died down around World War II, said Dever.

“The pawpaw got forgotten for a little while,” he said.

Part of its loss of appeal was that the pawpaw has a short shelf life, making it hard to sell in grocery stores.

“Once it’s ripe, after a day or two, it goes from the best fruit in the world to tasting like rotten bananas,” explained Renaud.

In recent decades, pawpaws have made their way back onto plates not just in North America, but all the way to Europe and Japan, where its hardy nature helps it grow in cooler climates, said Dever.

The return of pawpaws is also a return to local foods and ingredients. Dominique Lalonde, owner of the pastry shop

Kîsisam Patisserie, discovered pawpaw through Renaud and started experimenting with it.

“Within colonization, we’ve been told for so long that everything that we have available here isn’t good, right? And it’s kind of coming back to Mother Nature, coming back to the source, coming to Earth, and really reconnecting with those Indigenous roots,” she said.

On Sunday, Lalonde was selling pawpaw desserts alongside her usual cookies and pastries.

“We’re storytelling through a reconnection with these sacred ingredients. … I think those ingredients want us to reconnect with them — they want us too to bring them back to life,” she said.

While there are other pawpaw festivals, Renaud said Farnham’s is the only one where every vendor sells pawpaw products. And with a second successful edition under his belt, he is hoping to bring the tropical-tasting North American fruit to even more people.

“I think there’s good potential for it to become the Farnham international pawpaw festival,” he said.