from the February 25, 2008 Newsletter written in the community of 28 de Junio, in the Central Valley 8 kms west of Pujiltic, elev. ~700m (2300ft), ~N16.331°, ~W92.472°; southeastern Chiapas state, MÉXICO
EATING CLIMBING MILKWEED
Especially now during the dry season when many trees are leafless often you see asymmetrically ovate fruits the size of grapefruits dangling from slender, dried- up, leafless vine stems tangled in the outer branches of trees ten or fifteen feet off the ground. One is shown at the right. In a few weeks these pods will open and release into the wind dozens of flat, lentil-size seeds equipped with fuzzy, white parachutes.

I've read that young milkweed shoots can be cooked and eaten. Actually I've tried them, but found the leaves too bitter and fuzzy to fool with. I'm a bit hesitant to eat anything in the Milkweed Family because the white latex they produce so abundantly when injured contains powerful chemicals, alkaloids I suppose.

Therefore I was intrigued the other day when a local farmer pointed out a "Climbing Milkweed" fruit pod dangling from a tree and said that they weren't bad to eat. That's the farmer and his collected pod atop this page.

Collecting some pods was a messy process because they issue white, very sticky latex from the merest injury. The latex turns black on your hands and your fingers get gummy.

Per instructions, the next morning I roasted the pod in my campfire's embers as my breakfast stew happily bubbled away. The pod's thin skin charred black but the interior remained white, as shown below:

Inside the pod I found two things to eat. First were the seeds, which in the pictures are the brown, scaly things packed atop one another. The seeds' future fuzz parachutes will arise from the white, slender items lying horizontally to the right of the seeds. The future fuzz was too hard and stiff to consider eating. The seeds didn't have much taste at all, only a slight bitterness, but they left a certain fungusy, not unpleasant aftertaste. I'll bet they provided some protein, though.

Most of the pod's eating is offered by the white, spongy material surrounding the seed/parachute chamber, and you can see that there's plenty of that. This material definitely tasted fungusy, and even had the texture of a mature mushroom cap.

Actually, it wasn't bad. I can imagine that with a little salt, pepper and maybe some butter -- preparing it as you might a good mushroom -- it could be quite good.

However, I like how parachuted milkweed seeds launch from their pods, and I like seeing the milkweeds' unusual, very pretty flowers with special adaptations for their sophisticated pollination system, so I'd rather just let the vines be, and forego any modest meal of fungusy-tasting pod goo.

entry from field notes dated October 6, 2022, taken along the main road on the northern side of Gómez Farías, El Cielo Biosphere Reserve, southern Tamaulipas state, MÉXICO; elevation about 350m (1150 ft), ± LAT. 23.04°N, LONG. -99.15°W
EDIBLE CLIMBING MILKWEED WITH LEAVES

Vigorously entangled in a chain link fence along the main street leading north out of the little village of Gómez Farías, the above fruit caught my eye. It looked like a somewhat immature fruit of the same kind I'd eaten in Chiapas {above entry}, and which I think may be Gonolobus edulis. However that species apparently isn't native to Mexico, and without flowers I can't be sure what it is. I've always assumed that the species has been introduced into Mexico as an edible cultivar, but I find no literature supporting that idea. In fact, Carla Chizmar Fernández in her 2009 publication Plantas comestibles de Centroamérica tells us that the species is not cultivated.

In Chiapas I'd not seen the vine's leaves, but here at last was a fruiting vine bearing leaves, which might help confirm the identification. In the above picture, a small, heart-shaped one arises opposite the fruit's attachment to the stem. Below, two small leaves arise a little farther up the stem:

These leaves' undersides are softly and sparsely hairy:

Farther down the fence, what may have been a different vine bore a less mature fruit on an offshoot of the vine's main stem, bearing much larger leaves than seen above:

I followed this vine's stem to the ground and found that it never became woody, though the main stem itself was rather stiff and tough.

These leaf and stem features appear to match those on plants identified on the Internet as Gonolobus edulis. However, without flowers and supporting observations that this edible species has been introduced into Mexico, I still can't be 100% that on this page we're seeing is Gonolobus edulis.

By the way, as I was photographing the plants, the lot's owner, an old lady, came out to see what I was doing. As we spoke, two other old ladies came down the street, one of which came up and began telling us how good these pods were to eat. The landowner was astonished, considering the vines as nothing but weeds she needed to clear away.