Mango Season: Jamaica's Most Delicious Waste Problem

For about eight weeks every year, Jamaica has more mangoes than it can possibly eat. They are on the trees, under the trees, in buckets by the roadside, given away by the bagful by people who have run out of relatives to give them to, and finally rotting into the ground in quantities that would be a scandal in any other food category.

It is the most pleasant food waste problem imaginable and it is still a food waste problem. This is a guide to the varieties, the glut, and what to do with forty mangoes when you have already eaten six today.

The varieties, and the arguments about them

The East Indian versus Julie question is not settleable and it is not worth trying. What is worth knowing is that the cheap stringy common mango, which nobody argues about, is the best one for cooking. Its fibre is a problem when you are eating it and irrelevant once it is jam.

Why the waste happens

Four reasons, all structural rather than careless.

• Everything ripens at once. A tree does not stagger its output for your convenience. A mature tree can produce several hundred fruit in a few weeks, far beyond what one household consumes.
• Ripe mango has a very short window. Days, not weeks. A fruit that was perfect on Tuesday is fermenting by Friday in this heat.
• The price collapses exactly when supply peaks. There is no commercial incentive to collect and transport common mangoes when everyone already has them, so they stay under the tree.
• Processing capacity is limited. Countries that solve fruit gluts do it with pulping, drying and freezing at scale. Jamaica does some of this and not nearly enough, which is a genuine agro-processing gap rather than a household failing.

What to do with forty mangoes

1. Freeze the flesh. Do this first. Peel, cube, spread on a tray, freeze until solid, then bag. Keeps a year, takes twenty minutes, and gives you mango smoothies in February when the trees are bare. This is the highest-return action on the list by a wide margin.
2. Make chutney from the green ones. Green mango, ginger, scotch bonnet, vinegar, sugar. Keeps for months sealed, and it uses the fruit that fell before ripening rather than competing with what you want to eat fresh.
3. Pepper sauce. Green mango and scotch bonnet is an underrated combination and it keeps almost indefinitely in the fridge.
4. Jam. Best use for the stringy common mangoes nobody wants to eat over a sink.
5. Dry slices. A dehydrator if you have one, a low oven if not, or the sun with a cover. Dried mango is a good school snack and stores for months.
6. Mango chow. Green mango, salt, pepper, garlic, lime and culantro. A Trinidadian idea that has thoroughly crossed the water and eats a lot of fruit fast.
7. Juice and freeze it in blocks. Pulp, strain, freeze in ice trays. Drops into water for the rest of the year.
8. Give them away properly. Not at the point where they are already going. Give them away when they are still two days from perfect, so the person receiving them has time to use them.

The nutrition, briefly

A medium mango is roughly 130 to 200 calories, essentially all from natural sugars, with substantial vitamin C, good vitamin A, and useful fibre. In a country with high rates of diabetes it is worth being clear about two things.

First, whole mango is fine for most people, including most people with type 2 diabetes, because the fibre in the intact fruit slows the sugar release. Second, mango juice is not the same food. Removing the fibre turns it into something that behaves much more like a soft drink. Eat the fruit; be careful with the juice.

Green mango, incidentally, is higher in vitamin C and considerably lower in sugar than ripe - which makes the mango chow tradition a better nutritional deal than it gets credit for.

Buying and picking

• Judge by smell, not colour. A ripe mango smells sweet at the stem end. Colour varies enormously by variety and tells you very little.
• Gentle give, not soft. A mango that yields to light pressure is ready. One that dents is past it.
• Buy green to stagger the ripening. The way to avoid a glut in your own kitchen is to buy a mix of ripe and green so they do not all arrive at once.
• Room temperature to ripen, fridge to hold. Once ripe, the fridge buys you three or four extra days.
• Buy from the roadside during the glut. This is when the fruit is cheapest and when buying it does the most good, because it is fruit that would otherwise not be collected at all.

Frequently asked questions