Unprocessed food stuffs: mysteries revealed!

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Something that has been an ongoing preoccupation/interest to me is the FOOD here. Or, more precisely, the UNPROCESSED food-stuffs. I mean, we never get to see what our food looks like before it arrives pre-packaged on our grocery store shelves: pre-cooked beans, corn, and peas are to us available in tins, ready-to-eat; vanilla comes in liquid-form in a pretty little bottle, ready to be used in various baking recipies; our coffee is already roasted and ground; our rice shucked and bagged-- even "instant" if we so desire. But what did these products look like BEFORE all of the processing, I have often wondered? Does anyone even KNOW how pineapples and papyas grow (hanging from trees? on a vine on the ground, like a pumpkin?); or what black pepper looks like before it is conveniently ground and sold in pepper-shakers? Well, these and many more such queries were answered for me when I visited a local farm/agro-forestry school on the outskirts of Nueav guinea, called "La Esperansita" (roughly "the little hope"). I shall let the pictures speak for themselves.

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Photos

papaya
These papaya are growing right in the middle of URACCAN´s campus. The gardener let us take 2 home: one of which I ate (delicious!) the other we made papaya and mango jam with.

vanilla
This vine is actually vanialla! Apparently inside the leaves/pods there are tiny black seeds. Pepper supposedly comes in much the same form.

Aloe Vera
Looks pretty differnt from the aloe body-lotion u can buy, eh?! We have a little one in our kitchen at home, but I had no idea they could get so BIG. And apparently this one is relatively small...

paprika
spices are particularly interesting: I never knew that paprika (always pre-ground and pacaked in the spice section) grows as a root, like a carrot!

Aphrodesiac, anyone?!
Apparently these fruit are a homeopathic aphrodesiac ("Much cheaper than Viagra!", they joked, "OUR men don´t have any problems like that here in Niacargua!"). It can be boiled to make a tea, though reportedly even TOUCHING the fruit is enough to work wonders for one´s love life-- and so they encouraged me to take a pic holding TWO, "for good luck"! Needless to say I was the butt of many rude jokes that afternoon, after taking this picture!

Raining Pears!
We found a tree so heavy with pears, that the ground underneath was LITTERED with them. So we took them and ate them just like that, off the ground! Interestingly the "pears" here are different: they are red, and much softer, without a hard peel-- more like the texture of a plum-- though they TASTE exactly the same...

coffee and cinnamon
The plant I am touching is a "robust" coffee plant, different from the "Arabian" coffee plant, which is also planted here. The larger plant on the right is a cinnamon bush: its leaves smell like cinnamon, and if yua break off a leaf you can suck on the stem and taste it! To make cinnamon as we know it, the plant is dried, and rolls into those little brown sticks.