The Florida Roundup - Summer reading special: pythons, mangos and a Florida vegetarian 

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

This week on The Florida Roundup, we chatted with three authors who have written in or about Florida. First, we spoke with veteran science journalist Stephan Hall about his book “Slither: How Nature’s Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World” (00:45). Then, we had a conversation with Annabelle Tometich, author of “The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony” (19:40). Plus, host of WUSF’s “The Zest” podcast Dalia Colón shared some of her favorite meals from “The Florida Vegetarian Cookbook”(37:22).

This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Tom Hudson. Great to have you along this week. Today is our annual Summer Bookshelf program. We have three authors who write about Florida and two are in Florida. We'll hear the story of being raised by, shall we say, a protective mother in Fort Myers? She has used her trusty BB gun to shoot at a man who she claimed was stealing mangoes from her yard. And we'll talk with a Florida transplant cooking with only plants.

I think a Florida vegetarian is a little bit different because you're kind of going against the grain. You're swimming upstream. And one writer who doesn't live here but has spent plenty of time out in the muck in and around the Florida Everglades. Stephen Hall was in search of what is probably the most hated reptile in the Sunshine State, the Burmese python, that uninvited snake that has ravaged the wild spaces

and native animals in the southern third of Florida. Hall is a veteran science journalist. He was writing a book about snakes, which naturally led him to the Everglades in hopes of seeing one of these cold-blooded creatures in their adapted and adopted environment. We did not actually see or encounter any pythons. But in retrospect, it turned out, in my opinion, to be kind of a representative experience, in a sense, in not finding them because they are so hard to find. Yeah, he came but he did not see. Not that the pythons weren't there. They were because just a few days after leaving Florida, his python hunter guide sent him a note.

She sent me a photograph a week later with a 15-foot python draped over her shoulders. So it may have been just that I was bringing her some bad luck. The pythons have brought plenty of bad luck to Florida. They've devastated the small native mammal population throughout the Everglades. The number of raccoons, rabbits, possums, bobcats, foxes have dropped by 90% or more. You just see things there that you don't see in other places. Now, unfortunately, almost every animal you see in the Everglades is potential prey for the for the snakes, which is something you know, you don't see snakes that large elsewhere, at least in this in this country. Some might be as long, but hardly as massive as the Burmese pythons.

Of course, snakes are not a new feature here in Florida. There are almost four dozen species native to the Sunshine State, the highest number along the East Coast of the US thanks to our generally warm and wet weather. And the creation of modern Florida has often put those snakes at risk. In 1923, there were no roads across the Everglades, but a group of men from Southwest Florida set off in Model T cars toward Miami, hoping to bring attention and federal money to build a highway. They had some Native American guides leading them on the way from the west coast toward Miami.

And at one point, some of the travelers in these Model T's killed a few water moccasins in the middle of the journey. And the Native Americans said, we're going to abandon you in the wilderness if the wilderness. If you continue to, to kill any more snakes because they're important to us. So they desisted and they finally made it all the way to Miami. That trip was supposed to last three days. It took 19. Today it only takes about 90 minutes and we can be forgiven if we're oblivious

to the snakes. Stephen Hall's book is Slither, How Nature's Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World. The snake, the serpent, it occupies such a space in human imagination, right? It tempts Adam and Eve in the Bible to eat an apple. It is intertwined, making the traditional logo for medicine. Why has one animal been used for such a spectrum of symbols? In one hand, health, with medicine. On the other hand, evil and Satan in biblical telling.

It's a really interesting progression because in ancient cultures, and this goes back to ancient Egypt where snakes played a very important role in Egyptian culture. If you look at the headdress, the crown of the Egyptian pharaohs, you will see right in the middle that it's called the uraeus is a raised cobra, spitting cobra, because that was believed to spit fire at any enemies of the pharaoh. And so it was a species, an animal of protection. There was a very interesting peeling cult that grew up around a Greek mythic figure called Asclepius. According to some mythological tales, learned the secret of healing and also of restoring

life to dead people from a snake, either by being whispering in his ear or he watched a snake treat another snake that had died with some herbs. And consequently, Asclepius's believed skill or perceived skill at healing was attributed to the snake. Snake elicits a strong opinion from people, unlike I think any other member of the animal kingdom. Folks aren't wishy-washy about how they feel about snakes, right? You either love them like you do and want to know all about them or you're repulsed by them. They cause worry, to put it kindly, or fear would probably be more accurate. Why do we have such a strong reaction to this animal?

Well, there's a really interesting theory. It hasn't been proven yet, but it's called the snake detection theory. And the Clif Notes version of this is that the early evolution of mammals, and we're talking about 70 to 100 million years ago, the main predators encountered by mammals at that point were constricting snakes like pythons.

Consequently, there was selective pressure, as biologists put it, to develop means of detecting these predators before they obviously wiped out the mammals. So it contributed to the development of the visual system of the brain. This became enhanced in primates which derived from mammals. Essentially, the argument is we have developed our huge visual system and our huge brains as a result of our ability and necessity of spotting snakes. We're wired to spot them very quickly, but the other piece of it is it doesn't necessarily mean that we're aware to be afraid of them, although it could result in fear. But that instantaneous detection can be channeled either towards fear or in the argument that

I make in the book toward wonder and amazement and admiration when you get to the cognitive part of it and thinking about it. You make a good argument for that, Stephen, but I'm not sure I'm going to take a step closer next time I see a snake out of curiosity, as opposed to maybe take a step backward first and really kind of take a measure of the reptile. Never a bad idea to take a step backward,

especially if you're not sure what kind of snake you're dealing with. The main point is not to sort of attack it or harm it. Well, it is one of those animals that, almost regardless of size, is a threat. Sees humans certainly as a threat, but also as a potential food source. In the case that people are surprised

at how many people in the United States were killed by snake bite or died by snake bite each year, the roughly average answer is five people. It's very minimal. And part of that is because we have excellent medical care and people can get to hospitals and get treated with anti-venom. It's much different in the developing world though,

isn't it? In the developing world, it's a huge problem. It's upwards of 140,000 fatalities a year and significantly another half million disfigurements or permanent disability because of snake bite. In India alone, their estimate is about approximately 58,000 fatalities a year. So that's a huge issue. Florida has about four dozen native snakes. It's one of the highest number of any states with that number of native snakes. But of course, it's the non-native species that tend to get the headlines here.

Describe Florida's role in the world of snakes. Well, it's obviously been a very, what's the best word for it, in hospitable environment for snakes. Part of it is because the climate, part of it is because of the climate, part of it is because of the wilderness, part of it is because of the aqueous environment. That said, there's definitely been a lot of habitat destruction in Florida. I often ask people, what snakes did you see, you know, maybe 20, 30 years ago that you're not seeing as much anymore. And almost everybody mentions the indigo snake in Florida. And that has been largely because of habitat destruction.

What do we lose when we are losing those native snakes, though? A lot of folks, because of that fear, may not mourn the loss of snakes and think fewer of them may not be such a bad thing. First of all, snakes are merely one of myriad partners in an ecological web. And so whenever you start to take away pieces of a web,

this whole structure begins to become a bit more fragile and a bit more untenable. The second part of it is, especially in agricultural settings, snakes are usually valuable in the elimination of rodents. Now, people don't normally think of snakes as doing that, but they don't see the rats because the snakes are doing a good job of it.

The flip side, of course, is when non-native species are introduced. And that is ground zero here in Florida with the Everglades and the python, which is a result in popular culture of pets being released. But it really, I think, and you mentioned this in the book, it's really the consequence of the global trade of exotic species.

And South Florida, particularly in Florida generally, is really a crossroads of the global trade of exotic species. And South Florida, particularly in Florida generally, is really a crossroads of the global trade of a number of different exotic species. But when it comes to snakes, the consequences that we're seeing today was because of this exotic species trade, oftentimes illegal. Yeah, and there are statistics from the government that between the 1970s and maybe 2011, something like that, nearly 300,000 pythons

were imported into the United States. A lot of that went through Florida. And obviously, they were able to establish themselves. The amazing part of the story is this is not the native habitat of these animals. And yet, they are able to adapt and make a home for themselves and very successfully survive. They proliferate, they spread, and then you

have a massive problem on your hands. Indeed, we do. The mammal population in the Everglades has plummeted as a result of the presence of the python, which has only one predator, and it is humans, when it comes to the Everglades. But you do, just now, there's a hint of appreciation in your voice, right?

There's a hint of respect, certainly, about the python and what it has done in South Florida. All the damage and ecological trouble aside, as you write, it seems to me that the python problem might send a different equally important message. Snakes find a way to survive. Snakes have always found a way to survive.

And you point to a freeze in 2010 in South Florida. We make jokes about iguanas falling from trees, but this was a significant freeze where pythons were dying. But it was also a Darwinian experience for the python population. It really was evolution on display for us, wasn't it? Yeah, and they didn't really appreciate

the degree to which Darwinian evolution kicked into gear in a kind of up-tempo way until several years later when they started doing genomic studies, looking at the genes of the surviving snakes. And it was fortuitous because it was done by a group of researchers who had been investigating the genes of pythons for completely different reasons in completely different places. They were aware of both metabolic genes and genes that are involved in thermoregulation, sort of how the animal responds to the temperature conditions.

And they found that the surviving snakes seemed to adapt, had rapid adaptation to cold and also, you mentioned that the decimated mammal population, that requires frequent smaller meals. And there was a suggestion that in this adaptation they were adapting to more frequent meals of smaller dimension as opposed to... Pythons can go a year without eating, once a year. So they were adapting to this changing circumstance rather rapidly. It can happen very quickly. The eating of pythons occupies some space in the book and I found this piece think, to be most fascinating when it comes to particularly pythons, which are a problem in Florida. Let's not one way or the other. But the metabolism of a python is kind of cutting edge

science when it comes to investigation about genomics of reptiles and pythons, particularly. What can be learned here? And what's the application of what's being learned about this non-native species in Florida that can eat once, twice, three times a year and still thrive? Well, this is still an unfolding scientific story, but it's a really interesting one.

And it also adverts to this idea that we've been so hung up on the physical dimensions of the snake, how many feet long it is and how much it weighs and all that stuff. And the fact that they only eat one meal maybe in a year and a huge meal. The sort of yardstick is that a python eating one of these huge meals is equivalent to a human, 140 pound human eating a 220 pound cheeseburger or something like that in one gulp. Just unimaginable. Unimaginable.

Unimaginable. Yeah. But we didn't actually know what was happening inside the animal while this was going on. And it wasn't until probably the last 15 years that they started to take a molecular look at this. And among the things they've discovered is that within, you know, hours and in some cases minutes of ingesting a meal, the snakes are turning on something like 2,000 genes. And these genes are kicking into action for all sorts of reasons, but one of which

is it actually enlarges the organs in the snake. So the heart grows bigger, the intestine grows bigger, kidneys grow larger, liver grows larger. This doesn't happen in humans except in cases of a medical condition like cardiac hypertrophy or enlarged heart is a medical condition. Snakes know how to do this, grow the heart larger in part because they got to pump this incredibly fat and rich blood through their body. It's been likened to whipped cream by people who've studied it. It's snake sludge is what it is. It's snake sludge. And it's going to last for only like a week to two weeks, a week to 10 days. But it needs to have a bigger and stronger heart to pump all that stuff

through the body. And then it has the ability to carve away all that size that it's added. So it's, you know, I sometimes liken it, and this is a loose analogy, but it's a way to talk about how amazing this phenomenon is. In humans, cell proliferation is associated with cancer, basically. So it's like a short-lived cancer that causes these organs to expand. And then at the end of it, there's some kind of genetic scalpel that goes in and calls away the size again so that they're back to normal.

And some of the application here possibly is diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cholesterol, all these kind of modern issues, particularly in American society that we have, that you're seeing reptiles, snakes, pythons, are now this new kind of center of investigative science, this metabolic science. It's fascinating.

Basically, insulin is the growth signal. So in the growth phase, the animal is pumping out huge amounts of insulin. Typically, when there's too much insulin, you just sort of tune it out. We would tune it out. That's known as insulin insensitivity. That's kind of the hallmark of diabetes, type 2 diabetes.

Snakes don't get type 2 diabetes. There's typically these sort of stop signs in human metabolism, vertebrate metabolism. Nobody has seen what these snakes are doing, which is they're kind of running through the stop signs without harm. They're able to, again, keep growing and they're not tuning out insulin. And they've identified a series of pathways that basically seem to control both the metabolism and this regeneration of tissue, regenerating organs.

And there's only one other vertebrate apparently that they've been able to find a parallel to and it's to people who have had gut reduction surgery where they remove part of the intestines or stomach in order to, for reasons of obesity. There's been an NIH study of thousands of people, about 9,000 people showing that 85% of them were cured of their type 2 diabetes going out five years from the time of the surgery. So something's going on. We don't know exactly what it is.

We don't know entirely how to interpret it, but there are lots of clues to regeneration and maybe working around diabetes that might be helpful in this case. There's a growing interest in you write about this using snakes as lab animals. The proverbial lab rat actually was a rat or a mouse, right? It was a small mammal. But the scientists you work with and you've reported on,

and you make the case that the snake actually may provide a better incubation for any number of biological sciences as we try to continue to unlock the human mystery. Well, most research on gut metabolism has been done on mice. And mice lack the particular cell that seems to be orchestrating this activity in snakes and is also present in humans.

So it's an example we might be completely overlooking this whole aspect of it. Stephen, a great read. I really appreciate you spending some time with us. Thanks so much. Thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it. Stephen Hall is the author of Slither how nature's most malign

creatures illuminate our world. Up next, a growing up in Fort Myers with a mango obsessed mother. It was just a fact of life in our house. It wasn't even like a treat. It was just like, oh, there's mangoes, you know, like, oh, like, there's fresh mangoes now because it's mango season. That's next. I'm Tom Hudson, you're listening to the Florida Roundup from your Florida Public Radio station. This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Tom Hudson. Always a pleasure to have you along. This is our annual summer bookshelf program.

We want to know what you're reading or listening to with an audiobook this summer. Drop us a line, radio at the floridaroundup.org is our email address, radio at the floridaroundup.org. Annabel Tomatic spent almost 20 years as a journalist writing about food and restaurants for the news press in Fort Myers. There's one food that dominated her childhood in Southwest Florida,

the mango. She didn't have any special love for the fruit though, but her mother did. It's a love that sent her mom to jail for a short time, a decade ago. No one was hurt, but the incident busted the back window of a pickup truck. ago. No one was hurt, but the incident busted the back window of a pickup truck. Now there are few fruits that elicit such strong opinions like the mango. You either love them or hate them. And for those of us who love them, even a mediocre mango is better than no mango at all. And Tomatic's mom has a devotion to mangoes that can be credited to her own childhood.

Parents, we try to share our passions with our children, don't we? For better or worse. Tomatic's book is The Mango Tree, a memoir of fruit, Florida, and felony. Annabelle, thanks so much for joining us. I want to start with the subtitle, A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony. And let's focus first on Florida. You have been a journalist for a good long time and in this profession, we focus a lot on that lead sentence the first thing that folks are going to

read or hear to really capture their attention. And in Chapter One of the book you write your first paragraph of the book. Nobody's from Fort Myers. You're from Fort Myers though. Yeah, right? Exactly. Exactly my point. I was a journalist for 18 years, first in sports and then in food, and it really ingrains

in you the necessity of hooking the reader. At the end of that chapter though, you write, you're right. Nobody is. Nobody's from Fort Myers. But you're not a nobody, Annabelle. You know that. You know that now. But it seems like you kind of felt that way growing up, though. Oh, for sure. Yeah. I also think there's a humility to being a nobody. Like, I think we still consider ourselves nobody's to start with. Right.

I think that would be help things a lot if you can kind of come from that place of like, okay, like where do I fit in here? Where's my spot? Who are my people? You know, like what is my role? As opposed to just coming in and being like, well I'm Annabel Tomitich, I'm an author, I'm a, you know, I think there's a humility to being in nobody. I think so much of Florida, so much of the state is tourist driven and is driven by snowbirds and these kind of seasonal residents. So that was honestly what I heard growing up. It's like, oh, you're from Fort Myers?

Like, nobody's from Fort Myers. And then, you know, being half Filipino and, you know, a multiracial person, like that kind of sinks in on another level. So like, I wanted to lead with that, like, from very, very early on. I was like, oh, we need to talk about how nobody's from Fort Myers. Yeah. How do you think that kind of influenced your childhood in Fort Myers as someone who is a native Floridian, but clearly felt really still not part of the community, not directly, not fully connected to this land. Oh, yeah, or like any land in a way, you know,

because definitely not here. And the funny thing about, you know, kind of being a brown person in, you know, Southwest Florida is like a lot of people assumed that my family and my mother was Latino of some kind, you know, either Cuban or Puerto Rican, Dominican. Frequently, my mother would have people come up to her and speak Spanish, and, you know, she actually knew a little bit of Spanish, which really threw things off for me when I was a kid, because I didn't know Spanish and I also didn't know Tagalog, like the primary

language in the Philippines. And so I was like, wait, I thought those were the same. They were just languages I didn't understand. And so there was a lot of confusion over who I know, who I was, where I belonged, like who my people were. And not just here, but also in going to the Philippines and kind of like hoping for like some kind of, you know, population or some kind of connection there and getting some, but also be like, oh no, like these like aren't quite like, this isn't quite, you know, a perfect fit for you either. Yeah. Do you consider yourself a perfect fit for you either. Yeah.

Do you consider yourself a Floridian? Do you feel connected now as an adult? 100%. Like now for sure. I, my little tagline, you know, in my, my, well, not that we have Twitter anymore, but in my Instagram bio is like Filipino, Yugoslavia, and Florida cracker. And I think that kind of encompasses, you know, a little more perfectly who I am, but the Florida part is, is 100% in me. It is my roots.

It is my soul. The Filipino part there comes from your mom. The Yugoslavian part comes from your father. And you are all Floridian being who you are, Annabel, from Fort Myers. All right. So that's the Florida part. The fruit part, you write in chapter six, it starts, mango rumors travel fast among a certain sect of the Florida population.

Floridians have strong feelings about their mangoes. Oh, they do. Yeah. Especially in South Florida. You know, like the trees are everywhere. And come summer, the fruit are everywhere. You know, you're slipping in them when you're walking down the sidewalk because they end up just littering the streets quite literally.

And yeah, people love or kind of don't, and they're mangoes. They kind of want nothing to do with them, or they are protecting them with their lives and their BB guns, as my mother did. Well, we'll get to the felony part in a moment here. Let's not get too far ahead of ourselves in our storytelling here, Annabelle. But on the mango, I grew up in corn country in Iowa. Iowa's very proud of their corn. I've got friends in Washington state, they're proud of their apples, right?

Different parts of the country, those natives are proud of whatever agriculture or fruit or food comes from that. But the mango in Florida is different though. It's a deep passion. It's personal for Floridians too. Yeah. And it really, and it's that tie to other places. It is that immigrant culture. It's what you bring with you. And it's honestly the reason my mother chose to live in Florida. She graduated at the top of her class in the Philippines, the University of the Philippines in nursing school.

When she was being placed to come to the US and be a nurse here, she had her choice of wherever. She could have gone to New York or San Francisco or LA, places that have much broader, deeper Filipino populations. She was like, no, I don't want to be cold. Then she wanted that familiarity of the heat, but she also wanted to be able to grow

the foods that she grew up eating. And I think that's why the mangoes especially are so vehemently loved down here is that for not just Filipinos, but for Caribbean people and South American people. And even I've heard like my Egyptian friends and, you know, obviously South Asian, Indian, Vietnamese, all those populations in southeastern Asia. The mango is king, you know, it is it is the fruit. And to live in a place where you can grow your own is freedom in a lot of ways.

I don't think I tasted a real mango until I was well into my 30s or 40s. You grew up with them though. They were in your kitchen, in your refrigerator, dried mango, mango juice. Yep, frozen, all the things, yep. Yeah, describe what that was like for a childhood and that affinity that your mother shared with you gave to you for the mango. Yeah. I wouldn't even call it an affinity until much later.

I think we kind of resented the mango trees because it was like we had to take care of them. We had to go and like, we didn't throw scraps away. We would take all the food scraps and, you know, they would go under the mango trees. You call chopping up mango skins and walking out to the backyard and lying them down on some seedlings as an offering to the mango trees. Oh yeah. Yeah.

And as a kid, I just wanted to sit and watch cartoons. I didn't want to go like take this big giant bowl of like stinky stuff out to the mango trees, but that was what we did. Then in return, we got beautiful, juicy mangoes. It was just a fact of life in our house. It wasn't even like a treat. It was just like, oh, there's mangoes. There's fresh mangoes now because it's mango season

versus the frozen ones from the freezer or the dried ones from the pantry or whatever. But yeah, it was just kind of there. It hasn't been until I've grown up and kind of realized what a treat that was and how special that was because as a kid, you're just like, oh, more mangoes, great. I've had that before. Yeah, a lot more mangoes and clearly the love of mangoes from your mother gets us to the felony part of your memoir here. We've covered Florida and fruit, now the felony.

You write, Rose of orange people sit handcuffed in a beige room. One of them is my mother. Yeah, that is the opening sentence of the book. That's right. And, you know, I definitely wanted to kind of capture that idea of how color is part of this story from start to finish.

But yeah, that's me and my sister sitting in a downtown Fort Myers courtroom. Our mom is on this little closed circuit television. She's in the jail on the other side of the railroad tracks, sitting in front of the judge for her first appearance hearing because she has used her trusty BB gun to shoot at a man who she claimed was stealing mangoes from her yard. At this point, it is all very fresh and my sister and I are mainly just like, what did she do this time? Like how, you know, how have we gotten to this level where it's not just her, you know, yelling at us or, you know, traumatizing us, but it's her getting arrested for these kind of manic emotions that she had and that we as a family were always trying to manage.

Clearly, a newsworthy item in Fort Myers, very much an old Florida story. And you absolutely know, everybody knows what we mean by that. But I have to tell you Annabelle, I personally not shocked. I have a friend here in South Florida who works in law enforcement, who has put up ring video cameras covering his mango trees in his front yard. And we'll catch people, you know, in the dawn's early light, stopping and picking plump mangoes in June from his tree. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So rain camera, they didn't have those in 2015. Or if they did, they were much more expensive. Now I feel like it'd be a lot easier to like defend your mango tree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we do have to end this part of the felony piece of your storytelling because the book starts with mom, you know, handcuffed because she was defending

her mangoes. You write at the end of the book, each winter as the tourists fly down and the snowbirds feather their seasonal nests, the mango shooting fades from our family's collective memory. And then each summer it comes back. Right, exactly. So now's the time. That's right. And then the summer storms roll in and the air turns hot, soggy, and emotional. Emotional. The mango trees branches droop with thick fruits and we kids Drewp with worry. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's the emotions of the seasons. Like, the seasonality of, like, managing mango thievery. Never ends. It just, you know, it's cyclical.

It's annual. Yeah, so we actually, my mother, unfortunately, is, is, so she's still over, she's still here, she's still with us. She is the convicted felon. That's a little bit of a spoiler, I guess. But she recently left the house, and she's still living now. And the person who bought the house, the main mango tree came down, like the mango tree, like her most prized one.

That came down to Hurricane Irma. So 2017, Hurricane Irma snapped that tree in half, which felt prophetic. It felt like, okay, like maybe she, maybe someone out there realized she didn't need this tree anymore, that it was bringing her too much trouble, that it was worth. And then, and Ian, because we have been so storm battered on this show, Ian took down her second largest mango tree. And so she had a bunch, I mean, she had a bunch of mango trees still. I think, you know, a year ago when the book came out,

I went around discounting, and she had like 30-some mango trees in her little quarter-acre yard still. And in various stages, you know, a lot of them were young, younger trees, smaller trees, but she had some bigger ones in the backyard. But we have sold the house now, so the house is no longer in our possession. And they saved two mango trees of the 30,

and the rest of them have been taken down. So there's less worry. There's less worry, but also less mangoes in our household each year now. How does mom get her mangoes now? Via Pine Island, which is where we would get them when we were kids. So that part also kind of come full circle.

So Pine Island here, you know, one of the barrier islands down here has a handful of really amazing mango orchards that have survived all the storms and their trees are still doing pretty well. I mean, I think those kind of ebb and flow like the number of mangoes each year, but it's enough to get a crate or two and process them accordingly. I'm Tom Hudson. You're listening to The Florida Roundup from your Florida Public Radio station.

We're speaking with Annabel Tomatic, author of The Mango Tree, a memoir of fruit, Florida, and felony. Annabel, you grew up from Florida, a native Floridian. You grew up in Florida. The mango tree played a center position in your life, in your family's life and upbringing. What do you think about how Florida has influenced you as an author?

I had never really read a book set in my part of Florida. You read a lot of books from Miami or from Northern Florida, things like that. But I had never read anything specifically set in Fort Myers. I felt this kind of almost pressure to capture this place. Having not read a ton about it in literature, I was like, well, we need to do Fort Myers justice and do this wacky Robert E. Lee County, this very complex, hugely diverse in some ways,

but also very red county, like justice in kind of explaining a little bit at least of what this place is and how that influences somebody who is already kind of not tethered in either this world or the Filipino world. Just how unique that is or how that affects somebody growing up in a place like this. But yeah, so Florida was a huge part of it. I really wanted it to kind of be another character in the book of like, you know, it is earning its forces and its hurricanes and its heat and everything every year. Can I share a mango tragedy story with you real quick?

I guess so. We bought our own house in South Florida, had a mango tree, very excited to buy it. Had the first mango crop, dropped to the ground, picked some of the ripe fruit, sliced it open, looked at the meat. It was stringier than I was used to. Oh yeah. Was it a turpentine mango? It was a turpentine mango tree.

Yeah, it's a good root stock. Yeah, so crestfallen, I have to tell you. Oh my gosh. Yeah, it's a kind of root stock. Yeah, so crestfallen, I have to tell you. Oh my gosh. Yeah, exactly. So Florida mangoes, like mangoes weren't supposed to really grow in Florida. When the first person to make mangoes grow here was a guy in Coral Gables in Miami, and he realized that these turpentine mangoes, like my mama called them Cuban mangoes, they're what grows in this loamy, sandy soil, you know?

But they don't taste good. But he realized that you could graft on the good tasting mangoes to the turpentine base. And he thought you would get whatever you grafted onto it, but you wouldn't. You would get this unique, these unique Florida variety, like the Kent's and the Hayden's that don't grow anywhere else. But they're turpentine mango bases with different mangoes grafted onto them that then became these Florida mango varieties,

which if you then plant those seeds, you will get another Kent or another Hayden. It's very fascinating about the origins of Florida mangoes and how the mangoes you get here aren't exactly like the mangoes you get anywhere else, even if you, you know, try to plant or grow other varieties. Annabelle, I think it's another metaphor that the mango is Florida. Right? Yeah.

They're ours and ours alone. Indeed. Annabelle, thanks so much for sharing some time with us and congratulations on the book. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Annabelle Tomatic, the author of The Mango Tree, a memoir of Fruit, Florida and Felony. Tell us what you're reading this week or what audiobooks you are listening to by emailing radio at the floridaroundup.org.

Still to come on this program when a writer moves to Florida and winds up writing a cookbook. I literally thought it is too hot to eat. Delia Klone eventually whipped up a meal and kept whipping up meals, gathering many of her recipes in her book, The Florida Vegetarian Cookbook. That's next. I'm Tom Hudson. You're listening to the Florida Roundup from your Florida Public Radio Station. This is the Florida Roundup. I'm Tom Hudson. This week, it's our summer reading special program,

three authors in or about Florida. Delia Cologne is a journalist, podcaster and author. She moved to Florida about 20 years ago after what she describes as one too many Ohio winters. She's been an entertainment reporter and health reporter and has always been active in the kitchen. She says she perfected making burritos in her dorm room while in college in Ohio, because the nearest chipotle was 90 miles away. She hosts the zest podcast focusing on Florida food and foodies. She became a vegetarian more than a decade ago. And she's author of the Florida vegetarian cookbook. Delia, thanks for joining us. I want to start when you move to Florida. You

write about this in the introduction to your cookbook. You moved to Florida from Cleveland in 2005. And you concluded then that quote, in Florida, it's too hot to eat. I did. I think a lot of folks who have moved to Florida would agree with that because that heat that first summer you suffer through here in the Sunshine State, boy, you just don't want to eat. How did you get through it? When you go on a road trip, every time you get out of the car at a rest stop, it's like the temperature has changed a little bit. You're in like a different climate. So by the time we got to St. Pete and I came here for my job at the St.

Petersburg Times now Tampa Bay Times, I literally thought it is too hot to eat. This is going to be great. I'm going to save so much money by just making smoothies. And so I used to make fruit smoothies, and that lasted a couple weeks, and then I realized I kinda miss chewing my food, and I had thought at the time, Florida was just grouper sandwiches and key lime pie, which I still love, key lime pie,

but the longer I've lived here, and it's been almost 20 years now this summer, I have discovered the bounty that Florida has to offer and who wouldn't want to eat all these wonderful foods. It is a terrific review in your book, The Florida Vegetarian Cookbook. What is a Florida vegetarian? Is that different than a vegetarian from some other place? I think a Florida vegetarian is a little bit different because you're kind of going against

the grain. You're swimming upstream, I guess, to use a Florida metaphor, because there are a lot of grouper sandwiches here. There's a ton of seafood. There's a ton of pulled pork. I just went to a meeting the other day and they said lunch would be served and it was hamburgers. So I didn't eat lunch. I ate a heavy breakfast and then I ate lunch when I left. So I think we are a club that is growing and nationally, about 3% of Americans are vegetarians and 1% vegan. That means they don't eat any animal products at all, not even things like dairy, cheese, eggs, honey, according to the Pew Research Institute.

So we are a pretty small club, but we are growing and even mainstream restaurants are starting to offer more vegetarian options. So let's talk about protein here. The Wall Street Journal recently published an article with the headline, Americans are obsessed with protein and it's driving nutrition experts nuts. You write, if I had a dollar for every time someone asked me, where do you get your protein, I could buy a house in Miami's star island. Why are we so obsessed with protein? And how

does that play into a vegetarian cookbook? I think we're obsessed with protein because of the macros. It's the only one that hasn't been vilified, right? Like fat has gone through its ups and downs. We remember in like the 80s and 90s, everything was fat free and then carbs. Oh my gosh, we can't eat carbs. Carbs are the devil. But protein is safe. Everybody can get excited about protein, right? And so I think it's been the safest one. I mean, at the gym, they're always telling us, get your protein. I had a protein shake this morning, a plant based protein shake. So I'm also trying to get my protein. And I think as a meat eater, it's easy to believe

that meat is the only source of protein. What am I going to do? But I feel like once you enter a world that seems small and you really do your homework, you realize how big the world is. So once you find one source of protein, I mean edamame is a great source of plant-based protein and you can roast that and sprinkle it with salt. And I mean you can top it as, you know, like a salad topper or a stir fry, but you're gonna find yourself just eating it like straight, straight off the pan.

The one that I like to start with is chickpeas because they're inexpensive. You know, you might also hear them called garbanzo beans. Canned are fine and you just rinse them, drizzle them with a little bit of olive oil. You can put salt and other seasonings if you want and then roast them. A lot of times I just roast them in the toaster oven and they're amazing. I'll sprinkle pumpkin seeds on my oatmeal. You can add chia seeds and then of course you have all the nuts and nut butters and things like that. And my advice would be, you know, start with one meal if that's what you decide

to do. I'm not here to preach to anyone, but if you decide you want to lean into a plant-based diet, just start with one meal and go from there. You've made the focus as a cookbook author to focus on Florida with your recipes. Florida Vegetarian Cookbook, after all, is the name of the book. Is preparing a vegetarian meal in Florida different than preparing a vegetarian meal, say, if you were still in Cleveland, Ohio? I feel like everything in Florida is different than up north, I don't know about you.

First of all, our growing seasons. I'm not saying it's any better or worse, just different, right? No, no judgment, no judgment on any of these places. But to start with, our growing seasons are reversed. It's flipped, yeah. And a lot of people, exactly. So a lot of people wanna grow their own food. That's a great way to get excited about eating veggies, our growing seasons are reversed. It's flipped, yeah. Exactly. So a lot of people want to grow their own food.

That's a great way to get excited about eating veggies, especially if you have kids. In Cleveland, the strawberry season would be in the summer. And in Florida, it's in the winter and early spring. So that's a difference. I think that the types of foods we want to eat are different. If you're from up north or someplace cold, you want those comfort foods. You love a casserole. You love tater tots. I know you. You are my people. But down here, some people say it's too hot to eat. And so in the book, you'll find a lot of like cold salads or salads

that can be eaten at room temperature. We're looking for foods that we can take on a picnic or to the beach or on a boat ride. Just pack it and go. Maybe you have it for dinner one night. Maybe you make one of these salads and you put like grilled shrimp on top and I'm totally cool with that. And then the next day you have it for lunch with edamame. One of the things that I thought was great about your salad selection in your recipe book was fully endorsing Florida fruits in salads, but not necessarily a fruit salad Yes, right. I love mixing it up I love fruits with veggies in the same, you know, they can play together in the same sandbox

So adding something like strawberries or clementines dates, which we don't grow in Florida, but dates are great Yes Yeah, and make your own dressing Florida, but dates are great. Mangoes, star fruits. Yes, mango. Yeah. And make your own dressing. You know, when I moved here in 2010 from the Midwest, upper Midwest, one of the first things that struck me was how colorful Florida is and how colorful Florida is. The fauna, the fruits, the vegetables, everything. And all year round, you go to the upper Midwest, you know, in the wintertime,

it's brown and dreary. Here in Florida, it is green, it's yellow, it's orange, and you really encourage your readers and your eaters to reflect that color on their plates. How important is a colorful plate of food for us? A colorful plate of food is probably the most important thing. I mean, I've been hosting the Zest Podcast for years now now and something chefs have said over and over is we eat with our eyes first. I mean, we all have those like struggle meals that we just grab because it's late and retired. But when you're serving company, you know how to present a meal, make it colorful. I mean, yes, every every colored food has its own superpower, they say. And so you're getting more nutrients.

But we don't even need to worry about that. If you just make something colorful that's delicious, then you'll want to keep eating it and you don't have to worry about tracking your protein and your macros and all that good stuff. So when you're choosing your foods, make it appetizing, make it look like a work of art. You know when you're scrolling through say Instagram and you stop on that salad that looks like a million bucks. you can do that too. There's no, you know, there's no proprietary information there.

I'm Tom Hudson. You're listening to the Florida Rhonda from your Florida Public Radio station. It's our summer reading special. We're speaking with Delia Colon, author of the Florida vegetarian cookbook and the podcaster behind the Zest podcast from our partner station WUSF in Tampa. You also mention in this cookbook historic role of pumpkin in Florida. Now, modern day Florida is one of those sources for the sugar industry and the sugar cane south

of Lake Okeechobee particularly. But you write about how Native Americans that weren't growing sugar in Florida yet still were able to satisfy their sweet tooth with pumpkin, how'd that work? Yes, I love this. So I learned this from Andrew Batten, who's a historian in the St. Augustine area.

And you think about it, the first people of Florida, the indigenous people, they didn't have sugar because it hadn't been brought here yet by the Europeans. They didn't have, you know, garlic and wine and olive oil and some of these other things and the things that the enslaved West Africans brought. But they had, among other things, they had their three staples, which were squash, corn, and beans, which are still growing a lot in Mexico and Central America. They call them the three sisters because they grow very well together. But the squash was that big gourd.

In Spanish, it's calabaza, which means pumpkin. Your Spanish-speaking listeners will know. It was that type of squash. If anyone has roasted a root vegetable or a squash, you know that intensifies the natural sugars that are in the squash caramelized. So they would do that. They would dry the squash, grind it up and use it as a natural sweetener, which I think is so cool.

That's terrific. All right. Favorite Florida fruit. Oh, that's like asking my favorite child. I know it is. I mean, I know you're having Annabel Tomitich, author of The Mango Tree on this episode. I do love a mango. There's so many things you can do with it.

You can go sweet. You can go savory. Sometimes I'll run through my neighborhood. I have like a little loop that I do and there's a wall that faces somebody's backyard. So there's a mango tree in the backyard, but the mango branches are hanging over and the mangoes are falling onto the sidewalk. I have been known to swipe a mango or two that have fallen onto the sidewalk. I know. I'll tend to do a lot of yard work in June and July in that part of my yard just in case they happen to come over with a bag

of mangoes from their yard. Secrets out Mr. Chiu. The best neighbor is a mango tree owning neighbor. Indeed it is. Delia Colon is the author of the Florida vegetarian cookbook and is the host of the zest podcast. That's our program for today. It's produced by WLN public media in Miami and WSF in Tampa by Bridgette O'Brien and Grace and doctor with assistance from Denise Royal. WLRN's Vice President of Radio is Peter Merz. The program's technical director is MJ Smith, engineer, he'll help each and every week

from Doug Peterson, Ernesto J and Jackson Hart. Our theme music is provided by Miami jazz guitarist Aaron Leibos at aaronleibos.com. If you missed any of today's program, you want to catch up on it or share the podcast, then just search the Florida Roundup on the NPR app. Thanks for emailing, listening, and above all, supporting public media in your corner of the Sunshine State. I'm Tom Hudson.

Have a terrific weekend.