When: July 22
National Mango Day on July 22nd celebrates the world's most popular fruit — a tropical drupe with 5,000 years of cultivation history, extraordinary flavor complexity, and a cultural significance in South and Southeast Asia that rivals the apple's role in Western food culture.
Mangoes are the most consumed fruit in the world by volume — more mangoes are eaten globally each year than apples, oranges, and bananas combined, though they remain underrepresented in Western markets.
The mango has been cultivated in South Asia for over 5,000 years. Mughal emperor Akbar planted a grove of 100,000 mango trees in what is now Bihar, India. The Buddha is said to have meditated in a mango grove given to him by a courtesan named Amrapali. Buddhist monks carried mango cultivation to Southeast Asia. Portuguese colonizers brought grafting techniques that made cultivar propagation reliable, and from there the fruit spread to Brazil, the Caribbean, East Africa, and Mexico. Mangoes are now the national fruit of India, Pakistan, and the Philippines, and the most consumed fresh fruit in the world by weight. The flavor chemistry of a ripe mango is unusually complex. Over 272 volatile aromatic compounds have been identified in mango's flavor profile — a number that exceeds most other fruits and explains why mango aroma is simultaneously floral, citrusy, coconutty, piney, and peachy without being fully any of those things. The dominant compound in most cultivars, (Z)-ocimene, isn't...