Brazil Nut

    The Para nut tree has the most interesting biological patterns that correlate with mother nature's creatures and the tree's location. Brazil nuts are a product of tropical forests in the Amazon and its tributaries in northern Guyana, Brazil, and Venezuela. They are also found in the rain forests of Peru and Bolivia. These factors produce a nut, known as the brazil nut. It is found in bins at grocery stores, usually during the holiday seasons. Its brown seed shell is sort of slippery feeling and contains a white irregular shaped oblong nut rich in oil. The key to finding the nut is to harvest the coconut fruits known as seed pods. Those that harvest seed pods have to walk deep into the Amazon forests to find them.

    Contrary to picking by hand or machine, the ripened seed pod at the top of a brazil trees canopy, releases its grip on its stem and falls to the ground (sometimes they hang on for more than a year). Developed seed pods fall from a height of 100 feet or more to the ground where the harvester collects the pods. Falling pods have caused serious injury to many of the harvesters. Each woody pod houses approximately 20 brazil nut seeds. The pods are opened with a machete and the hard shelled seeds are collected. With enough to fill 100 pound sacks–the sacks are then carried on the backs of the nut harvesters to their base camps. Families of the harvesters sort and dry the hard shelled seeds in the warm sun. After drying, the seeds are bundled into sacks and floated on rafts or paddled by canoe to the market place.

    Pods left by the harvesters are found by the only animal capable of cracking pods shells—the agouti, a rodent type animal. The agouti scrapes the brazil nuts out of the pod, eats a few, and scatters the rest in different areas similar to a squirrel's method of hiding acorns. This may sound a little nutty, but the agouti is a dumbbell and does not remember where he buried some of the nuts.

    The tree, its bloom, and pods have a unique history of symbiotical relationships with living creatures. Life reveals the start to the finish. Ecology is the key word in the making of a nut. The tree's canopy houses, orchids, vines, ferns, and their own buds, and flowers. Coexistence of humans, animals, insects, and climate will produce the nut if there is no interruption from any of them. All of them interact naturally during the course of development. Fruiting starts within the flowers, pollinated by orchid bees with a specialized long tongue. This produces a coconut size pithy pod with a 1/4 inch thick hard shell. Within the pod develop the seeds. Before the pods fall to the ground the blue and gold macaw parrots crack open immature pods and have a crunchy, munchy feast of their own.

    Empty pod shells fill with water and provide living quarter for tadpoles, mosquito larvae, and a special species of frog that breeds only in the empty shell of the pod. Wild pigs root for the nuts buried by the agouti helping to cultivate the soil. Animals die, leaves fall, wood rots and assimilates into the soil. They become part of the cycle to provide food, nutrients, and shelter for living organisms in a rain forest. The Brazil nut has a hard nut shell to crack and some times the user of the nut has a temperamental eruption and would like to use a sledge hammer instead of a nut cracker. There is a responsibility for the person doing the final cracking during the arrival of the nuts. In order to eat the delicious morsel within the shell, do it with reverence and understand the severe problems that are connected with harvesting of the nut.

    The best part of the story is that Brazil nuts contain over 2000 times as much selenium as any known nut. Selenium is a strong antioxidant—proven to protect from heart disease and some cancers. It also slows the aging process and increases mental performances.