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reading coconut

The coconut palm has been vital to Polynesian and Asian cultures for millennia, while in the Western world, it remains an exotic symbol. The coconut fruit has multiple layers and provides various products, including coconut water, oil, and coir, while the palm itself is a source of timber and other materials. The origins of the coconut are debated, with theories suggesting it may have originated in the Pacific and been spread by human migration and trade.

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13 views

reading coconut

The coconut palm has been vital to Polynesian and Asian cultures for millennia, while in the Western world, it remains an exotic symbol. The coconut fruit has multiple layers and provides various products, including coconut water, oil, and coir, while the palm itself is a source of timber and other materials. The origins of the coconut are debated, with theories suggesting it may have originated in the Pacific and been spread by human migration and trade.

Uploaded by

minh khương đặng
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The coconut palm

A.

For millennia, the coconut has been central to the lives of Polynesian and Asian peoples.
In the Western world, on the other hand, coconuts have always been exotic and unusual,
sometimes rare. The Italian merchant traveller Marco Polo apparently saw coconuts in
South Asia in the late 13th century, and among the mid-14th-century travel writings of
Sir John Mandeville, there is mention of ‘great Notes of Ynde’ (great Nuts of India).
Today, images of palm-fringed tropical beaches are clichés in the west to sell holidays,
chocolate bars, fizzy drinks, and even romance.

B.

Typically, we envisage coconuts as brown cannonballs that, when opened, provide


sweet white flesh. But we see only part of the fruit and none of the plant from which they
come. The coconut palm has a smooth, slender, grey trunk, up to 30 metres tall. This is an
important source of timber for building houses and is increasingly being used as a
replacement for endangered hardwoods in the furniture construction industry. The trunk
is surmounted by a rosette of leaves, each of which may be up to six metres long. The
leaves have hard veins in their centres which, in many parts of the world, are used as
brushes after the green part of the leaf has been stripped away. Immature coconut flowers
are tightly clustered together among the leaves at the top of the trunk. The flower stems
may be tapped for their sap to produce a drink, and the sap can also be reduced by
boiling to produce a type of sugar used for cooking.

C.

Coconut palms produce as many as seventy fruits per year, weighing more than a
kilogram each. The wall of the fruit has three layers: a waterproof outer layer, a fibrous
middle layer and a hard, inner layer. The thick fibrous middle layer produces coconut
fibre, ‘coir’, which has numerous uses and is particularly important in manufacturing
ropes. The woody innermost layer, the shell, with its three prominent ‘eyes’, surrounds
the seed. An important product obtained from the shell is charcoal, which is widely used
in various industries as well as in the home as a cooking fuel. When broken in half, the
shells are also used as bowls in many parts of Asia.

D.

Inside the shell are the nutrients (endosperm) needed by the developing seed. Initially,
the endosperm is a sweetish liquid, coconut water, which is enjoyed as a drink, but also
provides the hormones which encourage other plants to grow more rapidly and produce
higher yields. As the fruit matures, the coconut water gradually solidifies to form the
brilliant white, fat-rich, edible flesh or meat. Dried coconut flesh, ‘copra’, is made into
coconut oil and coconut milk, which are widely used in cooking in different parts of the
world, as well as in cosmetics. A derivative of coconut fat, glycerine, acquired strategic
importance in a quite different sphere, as Alfred Nobel introduced the world to his
nitroglycerine-based invention: dynamite.

E.

Their biology would appear to make coconuts the great maritime voyagers and coastal
colonizers of the plant world. The large, energy-rich fruits are able to float in water and
tolerate salt, but cannot remain viable indefinitely; studies suggest after about 110 days at
sea they are no longer able to germinate. Literally cast onto desert island shores, with
little more than sand to grow in and exposed to the full glare of the tropical sun, coconut
seeds are able to germinate and root. The air pocket in the seed, created as the endosperm
solidifies, protects the embryo. In addition, the fibrous fruit wall that helped it to float
during the voyage stores moisture that can be taken up by the roots of the coconut
seedling as it starts to grow.

F.
There have been centuries of academic debate over the origins of the coconut. There were
no coconut palms in West Africa, the Caribbean or the east coast of the Americans
before the voyages of the European explorers Vasco da Gama and Columbus in the late
15th and early 16th centuries. 16th century trade and human migration patterns reveal
that Arab traders and European sailors are likely to have moved coconuts from South and
Southeast Asia to Africa and then across the Atlantic to the east coast of America. But
the origin of coconuts discovered along the west coast of America by 16th century sailors
has been the subject of centuries of discussion. Two diametrically opposed origins have
been proposed: that they came from Asia, or that they were native to America. Both
suggestions have problems. In Asia, there is a large degree of coconut diversity and
evidence of millennia of human use – but there are no relatives growing in the wild. In
America, there are close coconut relatives, but no evidence that coconuts are indigenous.
These problems have led to the intriguing suggestion that coconuts originated on coral
islands in the Pacific and were dispersed from there.

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