One guava delivers more than twice a day's vitamin C
A 100-gram serving of raw guava supplies about 254 percent of the daily value for vitamin C. The fruit has been grown in Peru since at least 2500 BC, its name comes from the Taíno language of the Caribbean, and one of its wild cousins now threatens more than a hundred Hawaiian plant species.
The common guava, Psidium guajava, is a small tree in the myrtle family whose native range runs from Mexico through Central America and the Caribbean into the north of South America. Botanically its fruit is a many-seeded berry, 4 to 12 centimetres long, with a scent like milder lemon rind. Skins can be rough and bitter or soft and sweet, ripening yellow, maroon or green, and the pulp ranges from off-white to deep pink. The English word, in use since the mid-sixteenth century, passed from Taíno guayabo through Spanish guayaba.
Guava spread widely, to tropical Asia, Africa and Oceania, to Florida in the nineteenth century and Hawaii, and even to Spain's Costa del Sol and Greece, where it has been grown commercially since the mid-twentieth century. Mature trees tolerate brief dips just below minus 4 degrees Celsius. Seed-grown trees can fruit within two years and keep bearing for forty, and guava is one of the few tropical fruits that will ripen in a pot indoors. Birds eat the fruit and scatter the seeds, which helps explain how strawberry guava became an aggressive invader in Hawaii. Meanwhile other guava species have grown rare, and the Jamaican guava is already extinct.
Kitchens everywhere have adopted it. Its high pectin content makes it ideal for jellies and pastes such as Brazilian goiabada and the bocadillo of Colombia and Venezuela. Mexicans blend it into agua fresca and ferment it into pulque de guayaba. Taiwanese street vendors sell slices with packets of sweet and salty plum powder, Filipinos add ripe guava to sinigang soup, and red guavas can stand in for tomatoes in sauces to cut acidity. Guava wood smokes meat in Hawaii and at barbecue contests across the United States.
Growers fight pests, especially fruit flies that lay eggs in overripe fruit and have caused losses running into millions for Central American countries. World production, reported together with mangoes and mangosteens, reached 62 million tonnes in 2024, and India grew 45 percent of it.
Source: Guava
