The U.S. Virgin Islands Fruit Tart Debate Is About Memory, Not Flavor

The plate came out with three tarts arranged like a question I didn’t know how to answer: coconut, guava, pineapple. Tanisha Bailey-Roka, the attorney and food writer known as the Crucian Contessa, made the request sound casual, but her eyes held steady on mine.

“Which one?”

I took a beat before picking. There was a weight to the question, one that might normally be received as a gesture of hospitality. I didn’t yet know that in the Virgin Islands, this wasn’t small talk. It was a declaration of lineage, of honoring memory, and what your grandmother made. The weight of it settled before anyone explained why it mattered.

Asking someone to choose between coconut, guava, and pineapple is not a casual question here. The Virgin Island’s fruit tarts, flaky pastry filled with one of three local fruits, have sparked a generational debate so heated that Governor Albert Bryan Jr. once pledged to sign an executive order declaring pineapple the official tart of the Virgin Islands, according to the VI Consortium. The rivalry is only partly a joke. “You’ll hear people passionately defending their favorite, and sometimes you’ll even lose a little respect for someone if they pick the wrong one,” Bailey-Roka says. She laughs when she says it, but the laughter doesn’t mean she’s not serious.

Beside us sat Frandelle Gerard, Executive Director of CHANT, an organization dedicated to preserving Crucian culture and traditional skills. Between us, those three tarts: coconut, rich and familiar; guava, bright and tangy; pineapple, tropical and fresh.

“It’s not just about taste,” Bailey-Roka warns. “It’s about heritage, memories, and what you grew up with.”

Each flavor carries its own weight. Coconut is the most traditional, the tart most likely to evoke a grandmother’s kitchen. “Coconut has been in the kitchens of grandmothers for generations,” Bailey-Roka says. “Eating it takes you right back to your childhood, to those moments when you watched your elders bake. That’s what food does: it’s a time machine to your past.”

Guava runs a close second in devotion, tied to the experience of growing up around fruit trees. “It grows everywhere here,” Bailey-Roka explains. “Many families had guava trees. It’s bright and sweet, and it’s a flavor that reminds us of home.”

Pineapple skews younger and more modern, yet still rooted in the island’s story. “It’s grown in popularity, especially with younger folks,” Gerard adds. “But it still fits into who we are.”

Why the ingredients matter more than the recipe

What struck me wasn’t just the passion but the specificity: coconut, guava, pineapple, all three growing on the island, none requiring imports or dependent on supply chains that can be disrupted.

In 2006, St. Croix’s last dairy cows were shipped to Puerto Rico, and Island Dairies closed with them. Two hundred years of fresh milk production, according to the St. Croix Source, ended in a season. Access to fresh cream, the real thing, not reconstituted, disappeared.

How colonization shaped what grows here

Agriculture here has always been complicated. Like much of the Caribbean, the island’s farming history is inseparable from the legacy of sugarcane plantations and the brutal exploitation of enslaved Africans who worked them. For generations, the land produced wealth for export: crops grown not to feed the people who lived there but to enrich people who didn’t.

That history doesn’t disappear, but a different conversation is taking hold, one centered on reclamation: growing food that feeds the island rather than the global market, building self-sufficiency, and reclaiming control over what a community eats.

The fruit tarts fit into this story, made from what’s here and what’s stayed. These are flavors that don’t depend on imports or industries that might leave. Guava is indigenous to the Caribbean, while coconut and pineapple arrived later through colonial trade routes. But all three grow here now, have for generations, and belong to the people who tend them, and all three are Crucian.

What AgriFest protects

Revived in 1971, AgriFest emerged during a period when, as historian David Bond documented for the St. Thomas Source, coercive industrialization threatened to dismantle agriculture’s entire infrastructure. The government had tried to auction off agricultural land and bulldoze homesteads to make way for industry. What emerged was part agricultural fair, part food festival, part reclamation. Now in its fifty-fifth year, it draws people from across the Caribbean, making it one of the largest agricultural expositions in the region.

Walking through AgriFest, I saw farming techniques passed between generations, traditional costumes and dances, fresh fruit juices, plates of kallaloo and slices of Crucian Vienna cake.

Gerard sees food as central to that effort. CHANT is committed to preserving Crucian culture and heritage while promoting sustainable community development, with a focus on traditional skills and heritage-based workforce training. “Food is a huge part of that,” she says. “These fruits are part of what we grow here, and what we’ve grown for generations.”

Access to local ingredients isn’t guaranteed in a place shaped by colonization and export economies. It has to be protected, passed down, and taught.

Why the debate won’t end

The debate will continue at dinner tables and food festivals, and apparently in the halls of government. Coconut loyalists will hold their ground. Guava devotees won’t be moved. Pineapple’s popularity will continue to rise among younger generations.

But what looks like a playful rivalry is something more. “We want to make sure the younger generation knows how to make these tarts, and that they understand the traditions they’re inheriting,” Gerard says. “There’s pride in keeping these skills alive. It’s about holding onto the past while also preparing for the future.”