Thaiyum Mango

MANGGA LINGUA FRANCA. A happy discovery in Zaragosa, Nueva Ecija: rare hybrid marsh mangoes. A single farmer grafted scions from Thailand mangoes onto young carabao mango seedlings to produce an exceedingly delicious fruit. You’ll love these, you’ll never find this taste anywhere else. We believe Thais call these mangoes Khaio Sawoei Sampran (pronounced kyew-sawey-sampran), which translates as “green eat”, which figures. Such a mango deserves a memorable name so we came up with Thaiyum, go figure. The one undesirable characteristic of this mango is that the outside looks quite unappealing. The more unforgiving use the word “ghastly”. Because of this, there is little local demand and these mangoes ripen, rot and fall to the ground mostly. After we introduced them as a special RuRi Discovery, members started taking to them and we started doing a “take all” from the farmer every year. “The beauty is inside, the joy is in the eating,” we say over and over. Over time Thaiyum became lingua franca in RuRi for good mango.