The seed is enclosed in a brown to gray fruit, often called the cashew nutshell, which contains a dermatitis-causing poisonous resin. The majority of people who live in the tropics use the cashew tree primarily for its cashew apple rather than for the seed (which you know as the cashew nut). Today cashew is cultivated throughout the lowland tropics of the world. Portuguese colonists introduced the cashew from Brazil to their colonies in India and Africa in the late 1500s. Wild cashew trees occur in the savannas and some coastal forests in northern South America, Brazil, and adjacent Bolivia and Paraguay. The cashew tree ( Anacardium occidentale), a native of Brazil, is the source of cashew nuts and the cashew apple. He studies the cashew family (Anacardiaceae ) worldwide. John Mitchell is a Research Fellow with the Institute of Systematic Botany at The New York Botanical Garden, where he also chairs the Library Committee.
Posted in Exhibitions, Science, The Edible Garden on August 25 2009, by Plant Talk
Cashew Tree: Source for Nuts, “Apples,” Even Brake Linings
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