This is Part III of New Worlder’s first series: Food & The Amazon Rainforest, which explores the relationships and possibilities surrounding food in one of the most diverse and vulnerable ecosystems on Earth.

I’ve had açaí infused into carbonated drinks in the United States and the pasteurized, frozen açaí pulp sweetened with condensed milk and tapioca at cafés in other parts of Brazil, but how it’s serve in the stalls at Belém do Pará’s Ver-O-Peso market is different. For one, it’s warm. Cylindrical machines, batedores de açaí, remove the thin outer layer of the super-fruit from the pit and turn it into a pulp, which the woman who runs the stall waters down in a large metal pot and scoops out into a hollow gourd to serve. It resembles a soupy bowl of kidney beans more than tropical fruit. It’s like tasting coffee from fresh ground beans for the first time. There’s nothing overtly sweet about it. The flavor is earthier than the versions I’ve had before. There’s a slight funk to it.

I arrived early that morning to Belém, not far from where the Amazon River meets the Atlantic Ocean. I dropped off my bag at my hotel and went straight to Ver-O-Peso, more specifically the Feira do Açaí, the section where riverboats loaded with baskets of açaí pull up to sell their harvest. The state of Pará produces 90 percent of the world’s açaí (pronounced “ah-sigh-ee”) and this market is the epicenter of the trade.

It is well before dawn and hundreds of people are rushing about. Both the deep purple and seasonal white varieties of açaí are there, filling woven 14 kilogram latas, or thatched baskets, covered with green leaves, that are being stacked or tossed directly from the boats into trucks. Fresh açaí has less than 24 hours before it spoils, so the activity is ferocious. About 70 percent of it is going to some of the hundreds of stands in the market or to vendors around Belem, while another 20 percent will be processed into pre-sweetened pulp and sent throughout Brazil. The remaining 10 percent is frozen and shipped internationally. Almost everything will be gone by the time the day breaks.

At Ver-O-Peso you see the consumption of açaí in its most basic form. While the price has been steadily increasing as global demand grows, açaí is still served as it was when it was the food of the poor, thought of more for calories than an energy boost. For lunch that same porridge like bowl gets paired with fried fish like pirarucu or dourado, while sweeter versions, favored by younger generations, might add farofa, tapioca, or sugar.

In Caboclo communities açaí can be as much as 42 percent of total food intake by weight. It’s what they survive on. Even in Belém açaí has taken on new life in the past decade as its popularity has soared. There are fancy cafés in air-conditioned malls and restaurants in posh districts all over Brazil that focus on selling the fruit into smoothies.

“My dad is like an addict for açaí,” said Thiago Castanho, the chef of Remanso do Bosque near Belém’s botanical gardens. “He needs it several times a day.”

The açaí palm (Euterpe oleracea) grows along the edges of rivers and streams of the rainforest, places that flood regularly and there is plenty of shade. It is a multi-stemmed palm with an average of four to nine stems in a single root system. It can grow as high as 100 feet. The fruit, technically a drupe like a pitted olive and not a berry, is harvested during the dry season between July and December. The existence of these trees equates to a healthy forest. They need organic material from other trees and the tides to fertilize them, so açaí tends to be found in places of high biodiversity. As the value of acai increases more palms are planted. They are replacing cattle farms, which has made a significant impact on deforestation rates in the region and is helping rebuild diverse ecosystems.

Yet, a few decades or so ago, most açaí palms were being cut down to extract the heart of the palm. The trees died and nothing was put back into the forest.

“The heart of palm industry that originated in the south of Brazil was an extractivist business,” says Georges Schnyder, who was the director of Muaná Alimentos, a now closed açaí fruit pulp company founded in 1998 as a subsidiary of a palm heart processor located on Marajó Island at the mouth of the Amazon River, not far from Belém. “The workers would go into the forest and cut the stem of the Euterpe edulis, the palm tree commonly known as Jussara. The Jussara has only one stem. When you cut it, you kill the tree. When the southern heart of palm industry began to cope with raw material shortage they moved up to Belém do Pará where a relative species to that palm tree could be found. This was the açaí palm, Euterpe oleracea.”

The difference between the palm trees was that açaí had multiple stems. Still, up until the end of the 1980s, all the stems of the açaí palm would be cut off at the same time. However, it began to be a problem when there was much less açaí around, which was an integral part of the local diet. So Muaná helped install a 3x3x3 sustainable management system where each acaí palm must have nine stems: three younger ones (1 year old), three middle aged (two years old), and three ready to harvest (3 years old). In the first year, the stem has no production. In the second year, the production of the stem is left on the tree for the birds and the forest. In the third year, the fruit is harvested and sold after the harvest of the stems for heart of palm. After they are cut the palm sprouts again and goes back into the cycle. Under this system, which was simply what locals had been doing for centuries, a single açaí can produce both the fruit and the heart of palm for more than thirty years.

“This wasn’t our discovery,” says Schnyder, now the president of Slow Food Brasil and executive editor of the magazine Prazeres da Mesa. “This was how the oldest people treated the palm trees near their houses.”

There was resistance among the ribeirinhos at first. The heart of palm industry was exchanging medicine, food, and all kind of merchandise for the processed stems. It was almost a slave labor situation, but when they began to see their income double under the new system it quickly spread to all of Marajó and eventually the rest of the Brazilian Amazon.