When mango season heats up in India, the golden warmth of ripening Indian mangoes is felt 10,000 miles away here in the San Francisco Bay Area. The sweet mango—Mangifera Indica, India’s national fruit—has disembarked at San Francisco International Airport by the plane loads. As spring opens to summer here in America, the Indian mango lures shoppers in Indian-American grocery stores, its cloying sweetness wafting through its supple skin.
With some 1,500 varieties of mangoes, India is the largest mango-producing country in the world. It produces 50 percent of the world’s mangoes and is the fifth biggest exporter of the fruit. In southeast Asia, mangoes are eaten in every imaginable way possible: sautéed with rice, simmered in a stew, grated for salad, diced or pureed for dessert, or simply juiced or eaten whole—minus the seed, of course.
Priya Rajaram of San Jose is a veteran at eating it whole. Her mother would be confounded by the way she sheared the mango seed so clean with her teeth. “Please spare that seed!” she’d plead. This tactile love for the mango—some might even call it lust—manifests in many forms, and with many varieties across the length and breadth of India. Rajaram says she would eat “even those vempal mangoes.” The word “vempal” in Tamil, she explains, means “prematurely ripened.” These are mangoes that fall of their own accord onto the ground below, and lie there unloved, while turning black.
Distributors like Subramanian Krishnan of San Jose’s Shastha Foods understand locals’ longing and lust. Not only tapping into the fervor around the mango, they view India’s abundant crop also as an opportunity to introduce the unique flavors of indigenous varieties to the American tongue and palate.
This weekend the grocer is hosting Shastha Mango Fest ’24, a free event during which enthusiasts and newcomers can taste and purchase a variety of mangoes sourced straight from farmers in India.
Krishnan has begun picking up a weekly shipment of 2,500 pounds. During the 10-week period when mango orchards across India churn out their fruit, he’ll be receiving some 25 varieties. Starting mid-April, mango lovers are welcome to drive up to the San Jose warehouse to sample the variety of mangoes as well as mango products. Prices range from $45-$55 for boxes that contain between six and 11 mangoes.
An innate craze for the mango does seem to unite most people from south and southeast Asia. The searing heat of tropical countries in Asia is like a nature-made oven for both flower and fruit. On the Indian subcontinent, the monsoons, too, are ideal for blossoming flowers and, more importantly, for the ripening of the fruit. Mangoes from these parts have an intensity of taste that is unsurpassed even though climate change, more and more, has begun to affect their growth.
At Thathachariar Gardens in Srirangam, a temple town in south India, one of its co-owners, J. Raghunath, says mango farming is more challenging with changing weather patterns. In Raghunath’s words, “nature does not behave like a manufacturing line,” thus rendering it impossible to forecast how bounteous a harvest it will be.
“Climate plays a big role. The stoppage of the rain is important for the flowers,” he says. “If it gets too hot, the flowers wither away, and if it’s too rainy, there are pests.” Deluges, too, can also kill mango blossoms. Short bursts of rain—evocatively called “mango showers”—are invaluable for they wash off the pests infesting the flowers when they appear just before the monsoons. That’s why Raghunath refers to the mango as a “water-stressed” crop because water, critical as it is for the crop, must also arrive at the right time—and in the perfect amount.
Given the vagaries of climate change, it’s remarkable that India produces sufficient mangoes to feed its own population and that of the rest of the world. Deprivation drives demand, too, and Indian mangoes had been banned in the United States for 18 years due to pest concerns related to the seed weevil as well as the competition from the South American mango industry. The story, however, has been sweet since 2007 when the ban was lifted and the fruit began making its way from India. News of the arrival of the alphonso and other mangoes from India made national headlines. Indian mangoes rolled into America bearing the stamp “treated by irradiation.”
The sweetest of them all
Among the sweetest to fly into America has been the Alphonso mango, although debates over which may be the tastiest variety can get vehement. People take umbrage when a mango from their part of India is insulted. An Alphonso lover like Shirin Rizvi Hasan of Saratoga claims she could tell when a local Indian grocery store attempted to dump imposters on her. “I had to call out their bluff since I am a Bombayite (a person from Mumbai) and know my Alphonsos pretty darn well,” she says.
For those of us whose roots are in India, even the names of mangoes drip with nostalgia for they are often evocative of an aspect of Indian life. Some, like Banaganapalli, refer to the name of the town where they grow. Kilimooku, in Tamil, means “the parrot’s beak” for this mango is shaped like one. Himam Pasand means “the royal favorite,” for it was touted to be the love of Moghul emperor Humayun himself in the 16th century. The names of a handful of varieties of mangoes evoke colors, grains and flowers: Baadaami, Malgova, Neelam, Dasheri, Safeda, Kesar, Pacharisi, Kalapadi, Langra, Chaunsa, Hapus, Mallika, Baneshah, Raspuri, Totapuri, and Sendhoora.
No mango, however, seems to be more famous than the Himam Pasand even though some of us who swear by the Alphonso or have grown up by the Banaganapalli tree in our backyard choose to remain skeptical. Veteran mango farmer Raghunath points out that the Himam Pasand is indeed in a different category of sweetness altogether. A certain aftertaste to the Himam Pasand sets it apart from the other sweet Indian varieties because it has “hints of coconut and lime.”
More and more, the mangoes that fly in from India are varied in name and origin. The choicest lot still may not deliver on their promise. In a box of a dozen mangoes, a quarter sometimes tend to be subpar or inedible. Padma Sastri in Toronto, Canada, says she’s now used to both the terrific excitement and the mild disappointment held inside a box of Indian mangoes. She admits she will still pay a premium price for a dozen Alphonsos. Rajiv Nema of Fremont goes a step further, saying we should pay just about anything—even company stock—for a great box of Indian mangoes. “Why not $75? Why not $85? Why not $95? 1 TSLA? 1 MSFT? 1 NVDA stock?” he asks.
It’s this unbounded craving that a gentleman named Prasanna Venkatarathnam tapped into —he was pursuing a tech career in Chattanooga, Tennessee—when he launched a company that packages mangoes for export from India. From a farming family in south India, Venkatarathnam launched his business called MangoPoint in 2018. The company exports carbide-free, chemical-free fresh mangoes from 25,000 acres of farmland in Tiruvallur district to Europe and North America.
Vetted, packed and shipped
MangoPoint is one among only 10 licensed packers and exporters of mangoes in India. Packaging fresh produce for the Western market requires compliance with a formidable set of rules and regulations, and those in the U.S. are also among the most stringent of all, says Venkatarathnam. A fruit is considered “a live plant with a seed inside.” Hence exporters and importers must ensure that there are no bugs, sediments or any infestations that can be transmitted into the country. The fruit orchards have to be certified by a horticultural expert in India; the residue limits of identified chemicals may not cross a certain threshold for approved chemicals, and banned chemicals cannot be used at all. For certified farms, the inspectors also need to see a record of what was sprayed on the trees. Not only must packing and exporting units be registered with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and comply with their regulations, importers seeking to bring in produce must have permits from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
For two months during India’s mango season, inspectors from the USDA sit in four Indian cities—Bangalore, Nasik, Mumbai and Ahmedabad—sampling and certifying mangoes just so that the rest of us may enjoy edible delicious fruit. For every hundred boxes of mangoes, a random five may be checked by cutting up the mangoes to identify possible infestations and chemical residues. The inspectors also validate all the documentation from certified farms.
For years, we’ve been aware of the formidable laws around bringing food from India and other countries into the U.S. It explains why Indian Americans tend not to fuss when a crate of about nine mangoes is priced exorbitantly. Ironically, however, for every person who is willing to pay top dollar, there’s always another who flinches at the very idea of it all. Raji Ravichandran of Sunnyvale is perfectly happy with the reasonably priced Kent mangoes grown in Florida. The dramatic irony here is that those who will not pay top dollar may not balk at paying $6 for a latte or $15 for a margarita. The reality is that food often drills down to the personal. For some of us, any price tag at all is justifiable for a delicacy that satisfies the soul.
For immigrant Indians in America, nothing brings back India on the tongue faster than the sweetest summer mango. A video by Fremont actor and standup comedian Rajiv Nema shows him making an Alphonso mango into his own personal juice bottle. We watch as Nema patiently pampers, presses and teases the juice out of the mango. When it’s ready, he siphons the juice and pulp off the nub of the fruit in one deft move into his mouth. Nema’s method of juicing—at the source—is apparently not uncommon. Praba Iyer of Los Altos Hills recalls how the Banaganapalli mango in her family yard in India’s Chennai was bursting with so much juice when fully ripe that she would just make a small hole on the fruit and massage the mango to let the liquid flow.
Presumably, this spring and summer, the undying passion for the mango among Indian Americans will percolate to the rest of California and the country when the Bay Area begins to enjoy the bounties from India’s mango orchards. Iyer’s words summon the intensity of the flavor of this king of fruits: “Mango is an emotion to me.”
Shastha Mango Fest ’24 is at 2 p.m. April 14 at Shastha Foods, 2205 Ringwood Ave., San Jose. Admission is free. To register, visit eventbrite.com. For more information about mango season there, www.shasthafresh.com.
For more about the varieties of seasonal Indian mangoes available in the Bay Area, visit theindianmangoes.com.
Mango & Strawberry Lassi Parfait
Recipe courtesy chef Keith Sarasin of Manchester, New Hampshire
Ingredients:
1 pack of Parle-G biscuits
12 ounces hung curd or Greek yogurt
8 ounces cream cheese
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup Alphonso mango puree
1 cup strawberries, sliced
Mango leather
Instructions:
Blend Parle-G biscuits until they become a fine dust.
Whip curd with cream cheese and sugar until smooth.
Assemble:
Add one layer of Parle-G crumbs to a glass.
Add one layer of yogurt/cream cheese mixture.
Add one layer of mango puree and strawberries.
Repeat the layers until you reach the top of the glass.
Finish with Parle-G crumbs and mango fruit leather.
Kalpana Mohan writes from Saratoga. Read her work at kalpanamohan.substack.com/.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated India’s status exporting mangoes and the type of farmland associated with MangoPoint. We regret the errors.