It’s mango mania in the Bay Area and beyond for Indian Americans  

When mango season heats up in India, the golden warmth of ripening Indian mangoes is felt 10,000 miles away here in the San Francisco Bay Area. The sweet mango—Mangifera Indica, India’s national fruit—has disembarked at San Francisco International Airport by the plane loads. As spring opens to summer here in America, the Indian mango lures shoppers in Indian-American grocery stores, its cloying sweetness wafting through its supple skin.  

With some 1,500 varieties of mangoes, India is the largest mango-producing country in the world. It produces 50 percent of the world’s mangoes and is the fifth biggest exporter of the fruit. In southeast Asia, mangoes are eaten in every imaginable way possible: sautéed with rice, simmered in a stew, grated for salad, diced or pureed for dessert, or simply juiced or eaten whole—minus the seed, of course.