YOU might know Raul Bermudez as the man who sometimes gives out free breadfruit trees across TT, but he is also an author.

Last year he published a children’s book that has deep personal meaning to him called The Breadfruit Three.

Set in Tobago, the place where he honeymooned with the love of his life decades ago, the story echoes his early life in TT. It begins with a poor widowed woman with two children who sends her son to the market to buy a breadfruit to make oil down, a local delicacy. Thanks to the kindness of a nearby farmer, he returns with one as well as a breadfruit tree, which changes the family’s fortune when it begins to bear.

Bermudez told Newsday his mother was widowed at age 35 and she had seven children under the age of 18. He said because it would take a year or more before his father’s will was probated, they were left penniless. So she took them to Venezuela, where her family lived and helped care for them.

It was 17 years before he would return to the land of his birth and even more than before he developed a passion for breadfruit.

“My name is a big handicap. People see the name and assume you’re born with a golden spoon in your mouth. I do not have the money to go with the name. It’s because I know what it is not to have. I know what hunger is. That I am doing what I am doing today.”

And what he is doing is trying to help people feed themselves and care for their families.

The story of The Breadfruit Three is one of kindness, resilience, community, creativity and entrepreneurship, with the hopes of planting those values in the hearts of children.

[caption id="attachment_1145674" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Author Raul Bermudez holds up the reading and colouring versions of his book A love Story: The Breadfruit Three in Port of Spain on March 19.[/caption]

Asked how his love for breadfruit and the subsequent storybook came about, Bermudez explained that in 2015, then prime minister Dr Keith Rowley did a radio interview and spoke on many different issues.

One of those things was the country’s high food import bill. Rowley said TT needed to re-educate the tastebuds of its children, starting with the school feeding programme.

He went on to say he had recently been invited to lunch and was excited that the menu was breadfruit and peas.

Bermudez said, “At home, we buy breadfruit, cook it and eat it, and that is that. Because I was at my computer when the radio was on, I googled breadfruit for the first time to discover what a wondrous superfood it is.”

Breadfruit is rich in vitamins and minerals, is an excellent source of proteins and fibre, and has been linked to improved heart, skin and bone health, brain function and digestion. It is also said to help regulate weight, diabetes, cholesterol, arthritis, asthma and more.

The following day Bermudez bought a breadfruit tree and planted it in his backyard. He also wrote Rowley and all the MPs letters suggesting the government plant breadfruit trees in the common areas of Housing Development Corporation developments a