Guavas are tropical, little and round. In the Dominican Republic they are larger and didn’t look very tasteful. In my region of Mexico the most coveted are pink- they are the sweetest. I assume there are pink guavas in Hawai, as I saw a movie in which a pink-guava mimosa was served, it looked delicious. Very high in vitamin C, you can find them in candy, with cheese as a desert, as juice, or even as my favorite flavor electrolyte.
The town I live in proudly declares itself World Capital of the Guava. I have not found the official number, but every night trucks drive their loads to the highway where the boxes, or guacales are loaded on to semis to make their way to the central market in Mexico City. It’s a perilous affair. Risks include dirty traffic police and distributors’ arbitrary prices. I try not to bite the seeds because they’ll get stuck in my teeth for hours. Guavas don’t stay fresh for very long, so every day hundreds of tons get thrown out from la Central de Abastos. Juice manufacturers offer measly prices for third rate product – barely worth the gasoline to drive them the fruit.
We make jams, and while they’re successful amongst our guests we have a whole storage closet full of them. Some friends for a while made a craft-beer out of guava, but out here in rural Mexico there was not enough of a market to sustain their business. There are larger guacales to collect soursop, mangos, mamey, zapote and ciruela when they’re in season but 90% of the farmers have guava trees. They say the first ones came from Peru. One of the evidences used to theorize that the Purépechas from Central Michoacan are actually descendants of the Quechuas from South America. A south-north migration. Others say these theories are nonsense. And yet others have told me the elders say so themselves.
I work in tourism and take city-dwellers out into guava fields and talk about the life-cycle of the tree and colloquial beliefs about the harvesting even though I’m new to the scene. Hijo de la guayaba (son of a guava) is a national saying, and it refers to the harvesters being exposed to a certain pheromone when picking the fruit that incites baby-making mood when back home. I’ve fallen in love with the scenery – perhaps due to the hormones – perhaps due to the lively green scenery of this fertile land. Water springs and mild weather allow for growing just about anything.