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Feijoa: A Story of Obsession and Belonging

Part science writing, part personal memoir, this book traces New Zealand’s favourite fruit, the feijoa, back to its Uruguayan, Argentinian and Brazilian beginnings.

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Argentina & Brazil & Colombia & Peru & Uruguay & Aotearoa New Zealand

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Feijoas. Photo credit Lottie Hedley 2020.

Author Kate Evans is a Spanish speaker who has travelled extensively in South America, starting with an unpaid internship at English-language newspaper The Argentimes in 2007.

Her 10-year journey to discover the origins of the feijoa began when she returned to New Zealand after 12 years away. Reunited with her beloved feijoa, Kate began to wonder how a fruit from South America had come to represent the taste of home for so many devoted Kiwis.

Talking to scientists, historians and horticulturalists, Kate's journey began in Uruguay in 2014 where she met Laura Rosano at her chacra Ibira Pitá, a small farm where she grows many native fruits, including feijoas—part of her one-woman mission to revive and promote a national cuisine for Uruguay.

In 2019, she travelled to Florianópolis in the south of Brazil to meet geneticist and feijoa scientist Rubens Nodari. He and his students took Kate to a 1000-year-old archaeological site in the highlands of Santa Catarina, which they believe is the evolutionary centre of origin for the feijoa.

The Southern Jê first arrived there over 4000 years ago, and evidence suggests the feijoa formed part of their diet. Their indigenous descendants still eat and use feijoas medicinally today. So do Afro-Brazilian communities like the Santa Catarina quilombo Invernada dos Negros, which Kate visited, learning about the traditional uses and meanings the feijoa has there.

Next, she attended the annual Festival de la Feijoa hosted by Tibasosa, a small town in the Colombian Andes, where she served as the celebrity judge of the feijoa desserts competition. She also toured feijoa farms around Bogotá with a Colombia’s ‘Mr Feijoa’, and learned about the plant’s fascinating response to the tropical climate: it fruits and flowers all year round. To complete the story, she continued to Berlin, the French Riviera, California and of course, New Zealand.

Feijoa includes six of the many recipes shared with Kate during her travels - including corn tamales with caramelized feijoas sold at the feijoa festival in Colombia, Laura Rosano’s feijoa mousse, and an Afro Brazilian feijoa jam shared by Elizabete Aparecida de Lima from the quilombo.

Kate is an award-winning journalist and regular contributor to New Zealand Geographic. She received research funding from Creative New Zealand, and the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust for her research of this book about the connection between people and plants, between cultures and across disciplines.

She hopes to one day lead a tour to Colombia’s Festival de la Feijoa to strengthen and maintain those links.

Published 16 May 2024