The delicate flowers may be white with red spots or stripes (8 mm long). The plant, cashew tree, Anacardium occidentale

The chemicals surrounding the nut are evidently not a problem in the soft fruit above the hard nut chamber.

But if you are allergic to peanuts, stay away from cashew nuts (especially for children). I have been eating cashew nuts for decades and am very healthy. But don't worry, the cashew is treated (with heat) before being served to you. The cashew nut is not only poisonous, the tree is related to poison sumac, poison oak, and poison ivy. The cashew nut is a growth outside, at the end of a soft fruit. But by the time you get the cashew nuts they have been treated: even the ones you can buy on the streets of Mexico and Guatemala. I do know that the cashew nut is slightly toxic until heated. I will admit I have no idea why I like them, or whether they are more healthy than the other nuts in the mixed-nut tray. Yes, I like other nuts, but cashew are by far my favorites. Introduction to cashew nuts, marañon, Anacardium occidentaleĪt any cocktail party I can find the bowl of mixed nuts and pull out all the cashew nuts pretty quickly, and gobble them down. Ancient Mesoamerica 8:63-74 Cambridge University Press Formative-Period Subsistence and Forest-Product Extraction at the Yarumela Site, Honduras.occidentale) was found in Middle Formative contexts at the Yarumela Site, Honduras. In an unusual discovery, the wood of cashew ( Anacardium cf. Most of the cashew nuts you get in cocktail parties around the world come from plantations in Asia, but the origin of this tree is tropical America, specifically Brazil.īut… what if cashew tree wood was found in pre-Columbian Honduras? So I would need to ask a botanist when the cashew tree arrived in Mesoamerica. I am not familiar with the cashew being prominently mentioned in ethno-historical sources (Landa, etc). So the cashew nut is not of iconographic or religious interest, but is a food plant for centuries. I am not familiar with any painting or 3-dimensional representation of cashew fruits or nut in pre-Columbian art, but nothing would surprise me (and perhaps such pre-Columbian representation exists and I missed it).

Cashew (marañon), Anacardium occidentale L.Ĭashew nuts, marañon, may have been introduced from Brazil

Cashew plant maranon