The Amazing Coconut Palm

The leafy coconut palm is not only symbolic of the sunny and warm tropics, but an incredibly versatile source of helpful products.

Not only does it provide the coconut, a basic food staple throughout the tropics of the world, the tree itself is further invaluable. It was quite useful for President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy kept a coconut shell half on his desk in the Oval Office. As a Navy lieutenant during World War Two, shipwrecked in the Solomon Islands with the crew of his sunken PT boat, Kennedy carved a message requesting rescue on the coconut with a knife. He and his crew were rescued by another PT boat shortly after.

Origin

Coconut palms need lots of sun and water and are found throughout the world's tropics, although thought to have originated in Malaysia. Not have they been spread by man, but the coconuts themselves are perfectly capable of floating in the ocean currents from island to island. Most trees tend to grow near the ocean where they are somewhat tolerant of seawater, although able to grow far from water and attaining a height of 50-80 feet. In the United States, coconut palms can only flourish naturally without irrigation in two states, Hawaii and Florida.

Coconut

Coconut palm trees are naturally noted above all for their coconuts. Trees generally produce fruit or nuts once a year, but not so the coconut palm which can produce nuts regularly as well as a variety of other products at any given time during the year. Several clusters of 10-15 coconuts ripen each year on a given tree.

Nuts may begin forming on a seven or eight year old tree, but peak production is closer to the 12 or 13 year mark. The tree continues to bear until it's about 60. after which it goes into about 20 years of decline before dying.

The coconut is the world's largest seed. Even when not cultivated, coconut palms produce from 10 to 40 nuts a year, compared to 70 to 120 nuts on a tended tree.

There's an art to opening the coconut as Tom Hanks discovered in Cast Away (2000). But once you get inside the husk and penetrate the coconut itself, you find an invaluable source of coconut water (as it is most accurately called) and rich nutmeat.

The coconut has some weight to it and can be quite hard, although the husk is softer than the shell. It is claimed that falling coconuts kill 150 people every year, 10 times more than are killed by sharks.

At about five months, a coconut can yield a significant amount of crystal clear, tasty vitamin-and mineral-packed "coconut water."

Coconut water is also sterile. In fact, during World War II, Japanese and American surgeons used a coconut water drip whenr glucose solution was unavailable.

By the way, although we commonly refer to it as "coconut milk" that is wholly inaccurate. Coconut milk is something else, produced by squeezing nutmeat of its oils and sugar content for use in cooking. Still green coconuts produce the most coconut water.

When about 12 months old, a jelly-like substance that forms inside the nut's shell begins to harden into the familiar white nutmeat. It can be eaten raw though too rich for a steady diet. Commercially, the nutmeat is dried and shreded for use in countless products, not the least of which is candy like Mounds candy bars.

Other Edible Products

Elsewhere on the coconut palm, one prized gustatory product is found at the top of the tree, a bundle of tightly-packed leaves referred to as the heart, prized as a "millionaire's salad." Unfortuanetly, gathering millionsaire's salad is a death sentence for the coconut palm. Should the heart be cut or even damaged the tree dies.

The unopened clumped coconut flowers, when bound in whole and bent over and the tip bruised, soon begins dripping a sweet brown liquid at the rate of up to a gallon daily. It has no coconut taste and can be boiled down into a syrup and converted, like maple, into sugar, or it can be allowed to ferment into a popular beer which, in the Philippines is called tuba, in Indonesia, tuwak, and in India and Sri Lanka, toddy.

Non Edible Products

The food and beer products from a coconut palm are only part of the story.

The unopened flowers just mentioned are protected by a tough burlap-like sheath which can itself be used to produce certain types of products like shoes or caps.

In actual fact, most of the meat of the coconut itself, called copra, is not consumed but sun-dried and processed for its oil content. The coconut oil is used to make soap, shampoo, shaving cream, and other products, and, in India, is even used to make a vegetarian butter called ghee. The copra pulp that remains after processing, becomes livestock feed. Coconut oil was actually the leading choice for cooking oil until soybean oil topped it in the 1950's.

The husk of the nut is made up of fibers called coir, which can be soaked in salt water and woven into rope and to make floor mats. It is also used for aquarium filters and in some other manufactured products. Coir waste also is used as garden mulch. The coconut shell can also be made into charcoal for fires and can be used in filters, as in gas masks.

The leafy tree fronds can be woven into furniture or clothing, and it is often used in the tropics for thatching on huts. The stiff midribs make kindling, arrows, brooms, and other items, the trunk provides timber, and the root yields due, mouthwash, and a medicine for dentistry. Filipino firms are experimenting with turning coconut oil into a fuel-efficient biodiesil.

So few cultivated crops such as the coconut palm are so incredibly valuable.

Coconut, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut

Coconut, Coconuets, FoodReference.com-Trivia http://www.foodreference.com/html/fcoconut.html