It took us a while to find Invernada dos Negros in Brazil. The gravel roads wound among the rolling hills, and the place we were going wasn’t marked on Google Maps. We asked for directions three times, and got contradictory answers. A guy cranking upbeat music from his truck stereo pointed the way with the leafy homemade broom he was using to sweep the tray. A farmer in a straw hat chewed on a piece of grass as he pointed us in the opposite direction.
Eventually, we pulled up outside a modest weatherboard house, painted a pale turquoise. Three men, two women, and a couple of boys with a soccer ball had been waiting for us for some time. We sat down together on a collection of wooden chairs, tree stumps and benches, arranged in a circle in the shade near the house. An aluminium kettle hung from one of the trees. Across the yard, I could see a couple of feijoa bushes along the edge of a fenced paddock.
One of the women, in her late thirties, poured the first chimarrao into a gourd encrusted with fake pearls. Her name was Elizabete Aparecida de Lima, and she was wearing a leopard-print top and sleeveless denim jacket with ‘Girl Power’ scrawled on the back. An African-print headband held her long brown hair off her face. Lido introduced Nodari, Juan and me, then opened a small laptop and began to share the results of the feijoa research he had conducted here and in other communities across the region.
“Traditional communities like yourselves have been using the fruit for a long time,” he began. Elizabete nodded, and started taking notes in a little diary.
Invernada dos Negros is a quilombo, a semi-autonomous settlement of Afro-Brazilians founded by escaped or freed slaves.
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Around the back of the house, in a wooden pen, a fat sow and her piglets were rooting around in the soil beneath a pair of large feijoa trees. As the fruits fall, they eat them up. This is a common management technique across various communities, Lido said.
His research found that those who used it had a much lower occurrence of a common pest, the Anastrepha fruit fly. With no fruits rotting on the ground, its life cycle is disrupted – and his informants reckoned the practice produced tastier pork, too.
Other Invernada residents told Lido they had used young feijoa leaves as a deodorant or perfume. They crushed them repeatedly with a hammer and rubbed the mixture on their bodies.
Elizabete’s mother and father grew up in Invernada. “My father never took medicine from the pharmacy, he used medicinal plants,” she told the group. “His kettle was always full of herbs and leaves.” Quite often, it held feijoa leaves. (Like other Brazilians, the quilombolas call the plant goiabeira, but I’ve translated it here as feijoa.)
“When we were little and had a sore tummy, my father would make a tea from feijoa leaves for us,” Elizabete said. “It has a lot of significance medicinally for us.” Lido said later that he thinks the commonalities between Indigenous and quilombola feijoa use suggest the two peoples exchanged knowledge about medicinal uses of plants in the past, even if memories of those interactions haven’t been passed down.
An older man, Afonso Pedroso, pointed to his ankle. I couldn’t fully understand his rapid Portuguese, so Nodari explained: “He says he used to pour feijoa tea over cuts and wounds to help them heal. What he says actually has scientific backing: it’s been proven that feijoa has antibacterial properties.”
Elizabete’s mother used feijoa medicine as well. She had diabetes, and used a feijoa-leaf tea to control her blood sugar, Elizabete said. “She made a tea and put it in the fridge, and drank it like water – eventually she stopped getting diabetes, and her vision improved as well.”
Nodari was unsurprised. “In the United States there’s a company that has taken out a patent for the use of feijoa against type 2 diabetes,” he said.
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Later, I looked into this patent, and discovered that it was part-owned by a New Zealand research institute, Callaghan Innovation.
They had patented the use of feijoa fruit extract to treat and prevent rheumatoid arthritis and type 2 diabetes. The Kiwi researchers had chemically analysed feijoa skins (a waste product from the juice industry) and discovered they had high concentrations of two kinds of polyphenols: micronutrients that can act as antioxidants and are thought to reduce inflammation.
The patent has now been licensed to a New Zealand nutraceutical company, which is selling feijoa extract as a powdered health supplement called Feiolix, and is marketing the product to diabetics and pre-diabetics as a way to improve blood-glucose management. As of 2023, clinical trials of the feijoa powder’s ability to boost the benefits of weight loss and reverse pre-diabetes were underway at the University of Auckland.
Worldwide, as researchers and companies race to commercialise genetic resources, the patent system has at times been used to appropriate traditional forms of plant knowledge. While the patent-holders reap the profits, Indigenous peoples and rural communities – who in many cases have safeguarded these healing plants and their habitats – are rarely compensated.
In the 1990s, the use of turmeric for treating wounds and ulcers was patented by two US-based researchers, although this was later overturned on the grounds that this knowledge was hardly new: Indians had been applying turmeric to their wounds for thousands of years. Part of the problem is that intellectual property regimes weren’t designed to give benefits to communities, just individuals. Indigenous peoples around the world are now demanding equivalent protection for traditional knowledge systems, where ideas often belong to the collective.
In 2020, Queensland revised its laws on ‘biodiscovery’ to require researchers and product developers working with native plants, animals, fungi and micro-organisms to gain prior informed consent from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and equitably share any commercial benefit with them.
In feijoas’ case, I’m not convinced the New Zealand researchers were cutlass-waving bio-pirates. The feijoa had already been in New Zealand a century. Yeap Foo, the retired New Zealand chemist who first identified the polyphenol compounds in the feijoa skin, told me he had no idea the quilombolas used feijoa tea to treat diabetes. He was just looking for something useful in a waste product that would otherwise be thrown away.
A mildly abbreviated chapter taken with kind permission from the bestselling and exceptionally, constantly interesting book about our national fruit, Feijoa: A story of obsession and belonging (Hachette, $38) by Kate Evans, available in bookstores nationwide.
