Breadfruit’s Three Global Journeys

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This is an online event; the Zoom link will be sent out two hours before the event.

This lecture details the botanical, cultural, and political history of breadfruit’s world travels. Breadfruit’s first journey saw this crop dispersed by ancient Polynesians throughout Oceania, where it is now cultivated on nearly every inhabited island of the Pacific. The second journey resulted in breadfruit’s transplantation to the Caribbean by British colonialists to support their slavery-dependent plantations. Today, breadfruit’s third major journey is taking it worldwide as it is being simultaneously ‘discovered’ both as ‘superfood’ by people focused on plant-based nutrition and as a tool for sustainable development by organizations fighting climate change and world hunger.

Based upon five years of historical and field-based research, the lecture ties together themes of tropical horticulture, Indigenous knowledge, colonial food and economic systems, and contemporary efforts toward nutrition and sustainability.

Russell Fielding is an environmental geographer whose research focuses on sustainable food systems in the coastal and island settings of our changing world. A former Fulbright scholar at the University of Prince Edward Island’s Institute of Island Studies, Fielding is the author of two books: The Wake of the Whale (Harvard University Press, 2018) and Breadfruit (Columbia University Press, 2025), as well as numerous academic and popular articles. He is currently an Associate Professor at Coastal Carolina University with a joint appointment in the Department of Cultures, Communities & Environments and the HTC Honors College.

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