The WonderNut

As a little kid, I hated coconuts. To me, coconut was just a crappy flavor that would get artificially added to candy or deserts to make them have a nasty after taste. The dried flakes of old coconuts and the chemically altered flavor additives that characterized coconuts in my experience were overrated and overused. Every few years, my dad would pick up a coconut shell from the grocery store as a novelty and we would stab its hole with a screwdriver and drink the few drops of sweet liquidy milk inside. Then we would crack it with a hammer and unsuccessfully struggle to pry out little bits of the hardened white meat to snack on. It was better than the dried flavoring stuff, but it still didn’t knock my socks off.

My hate of coconuts was further entrenched when I took my first trip to Hawaii. I stumbled upon a large brown oval in the bushes while playing with my cousins and someone told us that it was a coconut. I was confused because I thought coconuts were small round shells, I didn’t know that they had these thick husks surrounded them. We desperately wanted to see the white goodness inside, so we tried to crack it open. I had no idea how hard this would be. I smacked in on the ground with all my might and was disappointed to see that it was totally intact. We then spent the next hour doing everything that our little hands and minds could come up with to break open the husk of the coconut. We threw it off a 3-story building, we crunched it on the corner of sidewalks, we pounded it against walls and slammed it into the ground repeatedly. The coconut was unfazed. It stayed inside its hardy covering and only had some slight dents to show for the brutal abuse that it had just taken. We eventually gave up and let the mysterious center stay a mystery.

My opinion of coconuts took a 360 degree turn when I came to live in the islands. I now have the utmost respect and love for the coconut. I consider it one of the most resourceful things on the planet and put it near the top of the greatest creations in the history of the universe. The coconut is amazing in so many ways and it deserves a little praise from a former hater.

Before I get into the laundry list of useful things you can do with a coconut, let me first explain the life cycle of a coconut. It’s a versatile nut, buts its life story is the only thing that is more amazing that its uses. It changes form many times and has some sneaky tricks up its sleeve that allow it thrive all over the tropical world. Its durability and flexibility have given it the chance to spread to all over the planet and serve as the basis for live in many of those areas. Without the coconut paving the way on oceanic exploration, people would never have had a chance to survive on most of the islands in the world. The coconut has usually been the first colonizer and the hardiest survivor on most islands. It settles in its little niche and sets the stage for live to flourish.

One of the reasons that coconuts are such famous explorers is that they have a special talent that makes them especially good at ocean travel. They can float. Their thick fibrous husk is impermeable to water and acts a life raft for its precious cargo inside. A single coconut can travel across a vast ocean and endure typhoons and tsunamis without drowning in the depths or spilling its guts. They have used this skill to float around the globe and wash up on any chunk of dry land that they come across. Once they find a spot of sand or coral to call home, then they can begin the next step in their life.

A coconut is self-contained reproductive unit. It doesn’t need to be fertilized. No need for the birds and the bees to spread its pollen. It doesn’t need to match egg and sperm to create offspring. It just needs some sunlight and a little bit of water. Once the coconut finds a nice resting spot on a sandy beach, or rocky hillside, or pretty much anywhere then it can begin growing. Now the milk and the meat inside the nut can begin a magical transformation. They change themselves into a foamy core that will act as the nutrient base for outward growth. The milk soaks into the foam ball and the meat lends itself to the expansion of the nutrient rich core. (The foam ball is also delicious, and some people joke that it is Chuukese ice cream)

Small squiggly roots spurt from the bottom of the husk and dig into the ground. From the wide end of the coconut, a green stem will sprout from right above the knobby point. Feeding off the ball of yummy foam and the things its can gather from its tiny root base, the stem will begin to expand. Its long stalk will split after about a foot of growth and leaves will start to take form. The baby palm fronds splinter exponentially and soak up the sun. It’s at the point of a recognizable plant now and can build off the photosynthesis. Eventually, the thin green stem will harden into a tree trunk and the roots will overwhelm the nut. The tree will consume its mother nut and lengthen its trunk. By the time that the tree is 5 or 10 feet tall, it will have a bushy top with wide palm fronds flailing out on all sides. The top of the tree will almost reach full size and maturity when the tree is still short, but the coconut palm still has plenty of growing to do. The trunk of the tree will stretch and stretch until it’s a towering twig in the sky. The gigantic skinny trunk wont grow in girth, only in length. It shoots upwards for years until it finally reaches its stereotypical shape of a toothpick with a spiky broccoli on top.

These spectacular swaying trees are the quintessential image of paradise. The picture of a lonely white sand beach with overhanging coconut trees can be seen on calendars, postcards, book covers, desktop backgrounds and a thousand other things depicting the elusive beauty of an exotic vacation. Their odd looking shape and outstretching leaves are famous around the world for showcasing the wonders of tropical paradise. A full grown coconut tree is undoubtedly wonderful to look at, but it serves many other purposes beyond providing aesthetic pleasure.

The trees roots hold sand in place and prevent erosion on the seashore. They also do the same job on steep hillsides and prevent landslides. On nascent atoll sand spits, they provide a base for sand and rocks to gather and eventually build into a real island. They act as breeding grounds for numerous birds and provide nourishment to lizards, bugs and other animals.  And they also act as great umbrellas to protect from the scorching sun or pouring rain.

The island natives around the Pacific have built their livelihoods around this fantastic tree and have come up with an endless number of uses for its nuts, leaves and wood. The trunk wobbles in the wind, but is sturdy and strong when fashioned into timber poles. Its wood is used to make frames for houses and all kinds of furniture. The huge fronds are great at keeping the rain out and have been used for thousands of years as rooftops for houses. A simple weaving and overlapping maneuver can tighten them together and a sturdy mat to deflect water. They can also been fastened together to make the walls of a house. Their leaves can be used to make skirts and other clothing accessories as well. There are many other novel uses for the leaf and trunk, but the nut is the real star of the show.

The nuts begin as strawberry sized clumps hanging from the underneath the base of the palm fronds. There is no shell inside, just a soft husk of pliable tissue. These soft balls are often chewed for pleasure in place of betelnut or tobacco. The nut will grow along with its brothers and pass through many stages that can all be utilized in different ways. When they are the size of grapefruits, a shell will begin to materialize inside the green husk. This soft shell builds up water inside and turns it sweet. This is the first stage that they are good to drink. They must be picked and then chopped open with a machete or large knife. The milk is tasty, but it hasn’t yet reached its prime.

Depending on the species of tree, the nut will change from a green to an orangish color as it matures. It will go through a gradual process of turning its sweet milk into a solid meat on the inside of the shell. The nutshell will begin to harden and turn dark and thick. The coconut is good to drink from all points between the grapefruit size and when its shell becomes brown and rock solid. To get a good drinking coconut, you must climb the tree and pluck it from the branches. If the coconut falls to the ground, it is too old and no longer full of sweet juice.

Climbing a coconut is an amazing feat of human achievement. No other tree, with the exception of maybe a redwood, provides such a challenge. They can be a hundred feet tall and no wider than your thigh. There are no branches or notches or knots to use as footholds. Its like climbing up a flagpole. To climb one of these towering sticks, you must straddle it with your legs and hop up like a frog. It’s a different type of climbing from anything that I have ever attempted. All my childhood training of scampering up trees and up cliff sides gave me absolutely no preparation for trying to go up a coconut tree. But island boys can do it with surprising ease. They will slide up and down these things at a blistering pace and come down with a feast of tasty coconuts.

The milk of a coconut is nutritious and hydrating. It is full of chemical goodies for our bodies that outdo most fruit juices. I figure that its milk is so healthy because its made to nourish a newborn tree and has all the fixin’s to make sure it grows up strong. Its also surprising how much liquid can be contained in a single nut. Some nuts can hold around a liter of water inside them. After drinking a coconut, you can slice it in half with a machete and scrape the thin layer of gooey meat that is starting to develop on the inside surface of the shell. It is soft, delicious and is the perfect desert after a bellyful of coconut milk. Slurping down some juice from a coconut is refreshing and wonderful, but it still isnt the best part of a coconut.

The most resourceful stage of a coconut is after it has fallen down from the tree. Hundreds of coconuts can fall from a single tree and create large piles around the base. The nut will be covered in a tough exterior and colored a dark brown. It will now follow one of four different paths: float out to sea, start a new tree, deteriorate into mush, or be picked up by a human. Lets now quickly run through the list of things that humans can do with a fully matured coconut, or taka.

The husk must first be pried off before the coconut has any real purpose beyond being used as a projectile weapon or rounded chair (In Chuuk, I actually sit on coconuts more often than real chairs). As I described before, it is not easy task to get the husk off a coconut. Its powerful suit of armor is its best form of protection and allows it to be so successful, but it also presents a challenge to a hungry islander. Luckily, we have machetes. Repeated hacks with a giant machete blade can puncture through the husk and split the nut in two. Or if you want to get the hard round shell out intact, then you have to use the machete in a different manner. You can carefully slice around the edges of the nuts and eventually carve enough of the husk away to be able to peel it off, or you can use the machete to shave a sharp stick. Jam that stick deep into the dirt so that its point end is firmly pointing up into the air. Now you can smash the coconut down onto the sharp spike and twist the nut backwards to pull of a small portion of the husk. With a few repetitions of this delicate and dangerous process, you will be left with a softball sized brown nut.

The leftover husk is often thrown away, but it can also be used for many purposes. Its fibrous interior can be weaved together to make sturdy ropes. It can also be used as a rough sponge to scrape and clean. But one of its best uses is in the fire. If you tear away thin layers of the inside fiber, it works as great fire starter kindling because it is thin and dry. If you toss the whole husk onto a fire, it will smolder for hours and create a searing bed of hot coals. The inner nutshell of the coconut is even better for burning. When it ignites it lets loose a poof of flame and flares up in a hot ball of fury. Wood can be scarce on some small islands, but the husk of a coconut provides all that you need to make a flaming inferno.

The true prize of the coconut is still encased within the hard brown shell that we have just pried from its protective covering. This rounded orb has three dots on its top that give it the eerie look of a human face. Two eyes and a mouth. The best way to pop it open is not with a screwdriver and hammer, but rather a well placed smack with the backside of a machete. You don’t need to cut the nut open, its only necessary to put pressure in the right spot to send a crack circling around the equator and splitting it into two perfect halves. A little bit of milk will be left and you can lick it up, but the goal of all this work is to get at the meat. The centimeter thick white meat that covers the inside walls of the coconut is often called copra. It is securely attached to the inside of the shell and can be taken out in two ways. You can cut it out with a knife, but this is much more difficult than you might imagine because of the curviness. The best way to extract the white gold is to grate it out. The contraption that we use is called a poiker and has a serrated piece of metal sticking out from a small stool. You sit on the stool and scrape the copra out into a bowl below the stool. It can be a tiresome process, but the end product is often worth the work.

Copra was the driving force behind the European colonization of the Pacific islands. The shaved bits of coconut meat were a valuable luxury that could be turned into many different products. Soaps, scents, cooking oils, body oils, hair oils, flavors and many other things could be created from a bag full of copra. The international trade of copra brought western civilization flocking to the Pacific, but the importance of copra for the islanders goes far beyond the material wealth that is supposedly brought them. Copra or taka can be used for all those products that I just mentioned as well as for food and medicine. They pour water into the bowl of grated coconut shavings and then squeeze out the liquid into a separate bowl. Now it actually looks like milk. This milk can be used as the base for pretty much any food made on the islands. And it doesn’t taste anything at all like the disgusting coconut flavored crap that I hated as a kid. This fresh coconut milk is rich with flavor and adds a tasty kick to all our dishes.

Food is the foundation of Chuukese life, and coconut is the foundation of Chuukese food. Therefore, coconut is the foundation of Chuukese life.