A light green, pear-shaped vegetable from a climbing vine, popular in Central and South American cuisine, also called mirliton or vegetable pear.
From Nahuatl chayotl, the original name given by Aztec peoples. The word traveled through Spanish and Portuguese into English as Europeans encountered the plant in the New World.
Chayotes are mysteriously underused outside their native regions—they're nutritious, prolific, and delicious, but global food systems have prioritized a few crops while marginalizing hundreds of others developed over centuries by indigenous peoples.
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