NONI
MORINDA CITRIFOLIA. Coffee family: RUBIACEAE Other names include great morinda, Indian mulberry, beach mulberry, vomit fruit, awl tree, cheese fruit.
To most people, and I'm sure most kids can agree, it's almost a joke how you can be fairly sure that if something is healthy, it doesn't taste very good or smells bad. Well, meet the king of this concept!
This odd looking fruit is packed with nutrients and you may have seen it in supplement form or tonic form at various stores and certainly at many health shops. It also smells and tastes incredibly foul. It's nickname "survival fruit" - may have something to do with the fact that most people would probably only eat this if they had absolutely no other options of any kind. It also has another nickname: Vomit fruit or cheese fruit. You can probably guess why. And yes, it smells that bad. The taste and the smell of this fruit is somewhere between really stinky cheese, vomit and feet that haven't been washed for a couple of decades.
Now why on earth would anyone willingly eat this kind of thing? Let's get to that!
The main reason noni has become more and more popular, is most likely because it's packed with antioxidants. Research is ongoing, but is showing very promising signs of a variety of health benefits, including lowering cholesterol, reducing inflammation and regulating blood sugar. It has also for centuries been used as a pain reliever and there are scientific signs that it does in fact help with gout and arthritis. Studies also suggest that it improves memory and has skin healing properties.
Now in its defense, we would say that if you can somehow ignore the foul smell, the flavor actually isn't so horrible. It's like a mixture of apple, some sort of citrus and then the sharpness of the cheese smell, that we don't find is as potent in the actual flavor of the fruit. All this, may be why it is "safer" to use in juices, mixed with other fruits, and not so much on its own.
A few fun facts about noni:
The seeds are edible, when they are roasted. The leaves are also edible. They're quite bitter but not at all bad tasting, compared to the actual fruit. The younger the leaves, the less bitter they are - and they do well in a salad.
Noni "juice" is most popular in its fermented form, where noni is thrown in containers, and left in the sun for a few months, producing a beverage with many of the health benefits intact.
The fruit is quite high in sugar, compared to other fruits, and also high in potassium. So anyone who watches these things should study this a bit further before consuming too much noni.
Roots have been used medicinally for many years, however, we haven't yet used them for anything.
You will often see many ants on a noni tree. This is no cause for alarm, as they nest there and actually help protect the plant from various other harmful insects.
So far, at least for us, the plant doesn't seem very susceptible to the problems so many other plants often face. Maybe the ants help there too. We haven't yet seen mildew, rot, leaf miners, caterpillars or other pests invade the trees, even a little. So they seem fairly pest resistant in general, and perhaps in part thanks to the ants.
Noni is incredibly fast growing and will start fruiting less than a year after being planted from seed. It will also continue to fruit for its lifetime, so if you decide this is your new favorite, as soon as it starts fruiting, you will have fresh supplies all year round.
They seem to do well in pots - but sooner or later they will need to be planted with some space, as trees grow to about 30 feet tall and can live for at least 40 years and most likely longer.
