Pequi

Pequi (Caryocar brasiliense) is the iconic fruit of the Cerrado — an oily, intensely aromatic stone fruit whose flesh flavours rice and chicken across central Brazil.

What’s distinctive

The fruit guards itself: a layer of fine, hard spines sits just under the edible yellow mesocarp, so it is never bitten but always scraped with the teeth or cooked whole. The flesh and the kernel are both rich in oil and carotenoids. Pequi is the single most culturally central food of the Cerrado interior — arroz com pequi is a regional identity dish — and the harvest of fallen fruit from unfelled trees is a mainstay of the native-fruit cooperative economy.

Why this entry

The [[cerrado|Cerrado]] is being converted to soy and pasture faster than the Amazon is being cleared. The native-fruit cooperatives — [[central-do-cerrado|Central do Cerrado]] and others — are the economic argument that an unfelled savanna can pay. Pequi is one of the species that argument runs on; it ties the [[extractivism|extractive economy]] to the [[geraizeiro|geraizeiro]], [[quilombola|quilombola]] and Indigenous communities who gather it.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Substrate of: [[extractivism]]
• Shares approach with: [[baru]]
• Member of: [[plants]]
• Contained by: [[cerrado]]
• Stewarded by: [[quilombola]]