The Pawpaw is the largest fruit native to North America, weighing up to two pounds.

Look at these beauties.

You can just scoop it right out.

Pawpaws taste like a mixture of bananas, mangoes, and pineapples.

They're like a tropical banana-mango custard, but found in temperate forests across the

eastern United States, nourishing humankind for thousands of years, and now complete with

their own pawpaw festivals.

Papayas are sometimes called papas, but they're completely different fruits.

The real papas, also known as the dog banana, false banana, Indian banana, prairie banana,

poor man's banana, Ozark banana, Banango, I like that one, Indiana

Indiana banana has a nice ring to it too, and the Kentucky

banana.

Pawpaws are my favorite fruit, or should I say were my favorite fruit?

One of the reasons I moved to rural Virginia was because the property had a whole grove of

pawpaw trees.

I was going to be set for life.

That is, until I ate a few too many on the first harvest, became quite ill, and actually

looked them up. Pro tip, in the future, looked to see if a food is toxic before you eat lots of it.

Little did I know the papa belonged to an infamous family of fruits that contain three different

types of neurotoxins.

I'd actually done a video years ago warning people not to eat soursop, also known as

Graviola, but didn't realize papas were related. The family includes soursop, guanabana, sweet sap, sugar apple, cheramoya, and custard apple,

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