Food 9 -- Pejibayes

Yesterday, our neighbors gave Carlos and me a bowl of recently-boiled pejibayes. These are fruits of the palm Bactris gasipaes (agoutis and peccaries love them!) and are only edible (for humans) after boiling. People here eat them with mayonnaise.


I've had a couple of pejibayes, but I really don't like them. They are really nutty and very very dry and fibrous. Carlos likes them, but attributes this to the fact that they were a special, rare treat when he worked in a remote forest in Colombia. I guess if I only ate rice for days and days, I would get to like pejibayes too!

The B. gasipaes are tall palms with spiny trunks. I've recently seen a lot of birds feeding on the unripe fruits up in the trees and sometimes they knock fruits on the ground where the peccaries come to gobble them up.