Where cashews come from
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It’s cashew season! The cashew is a tree in the Anacardiaceae family. The pulp is sweet but very acidic. We drink a lot of cashew juice this time of year, but it’s available year-round in frozen packets in the grocery store. The cashew nut is actually a seed. It’s surrounded by a shell lined with a highly toxic anacardic acid, so you can’t eat the nuts right off the tree. The acid must be burned off first. Some people use the seed’s acid to create home-made tatoos on their skin, but I don’t recommend this. (I have yet to see a really pretty caju-tatoo; they all look like burns.)
We feed the pulpy parts to our pigs and goats, and then collect the seeds. In the past we’ve sold the seeds, but this year we hope to roast them and feed the finished nuts to our pigs. This will, hopefully, give their meat a nice flavor.
