 If you eat a cashew apple and drink milk or mix it with dairy, it becomes toxic to your body and could harm you. Is this a myth or a fact? Let's find out the truth shall we? Hello there and welcome to another video on me plus you is us and last weekend we went on a food safari organised by the Ghana food movement and Jolinaiko ikotos with support from GIZ. Level how organic we classify it because we are using too much pesticide we want just to have it ripe for the market. Now what is a food safari? A food safari is a culinary tourism event where participants are taking on a trip to learn about a particular food directly from where and how it's grown or sourced while learning a lot about the economic importance of the particular food and enjoying different variations of meals prepared by chefs using this food. And we had the chance to learn about a fairly unknown food which is the cashew. So I shall be doing this with my correspondent Elaine who will be chipping in some facts and reports from time to time. A cashew nursery and this is actually a cashew tree look at the beautiful leaves very round the cashew season is actually over so it will be difficult to spot the fruit but we'll go to the farm soon and then hopefully we can see it but it's really cool to you know observe the trees there's some they just showed us how to like kind of cut the cashews and it's called grafting it's called grafting yeah and how to do it and they do like 300 a day which is very impressive and it's specifically for women because I think they're good with like the position and a delicate delicate handling here you literally connect two different plants in one and then it grows into a tree like this so these what you see around here are all the mother trees so these are the most like fruitful ones and then they fold in and then you take it off and then not at all the leaves will come back this is the actual fruit so the fruit the birds like it a lot but this is what's actually turning into the passion help them remove the plants from there and use it like the passion if it's you can cut it off in the past 10 years cashew consumption in India has more than doubled Europe has grown by 30% and China is on the rise to Africa is the only continent that has the opportunity to supply this demand by increasing yields and investing in processing cashew trees were originally brought to most countries in Africa to retain soil in dry areas they are suitable for poor dry lands and can withstand drought we are in the cashew farm this is actually how it grows so first the kernel matures and then the apple will grow bigger yeah you can only pick it once it falls down and here you see different stages of it these are very fresh it takes 120 days for the apple to fully grow you enter all that in how many minutes it usually takes about three to four years for the cashew tree to mature and have the best yield and harvest is between December and February so for most farmers while the dry season is in full swing cashew provides them with some income the region in Ghana which grows the most produces the largest amount of cashew is the bono and a half region they need the bees so they need more bees in order to pollinate the trees so one bees are up and running so you see one here and one over there then he says it can triple like the yield so the bees are coming and then this will blow up so many cashews are coming in Ghana hey we stopped at the first star chalets in Adar to have our cashew rich lunch and on the menu was cashew apple juice cashew apple aubergine spread cashew apple burger and so much more Africa accounts for 53 percent of global cashew production but less than 10 percent of global processing through local processing there's a value addition potential of $2.8 billion every year and a potential employment of 275,000 people in the processing plants now we're going to taste some cashew jamie we're at the Ghana Free Zone area at the CWT and they store a lot of cashew and they know exactly how to treat it so let's see Research conducted by the Madras Diabetes Research Center in October 2015 found that taking 30 grams of cashew kernels per day over a three-month period can increase good cholesterol levels this can help reduce the risk of heart disease cashew contains a high amount of vital minerals such as phosphorus which builds bones and teeth magnesium which promotes energy release and bone growth contrary to widely accepted myth studies have shown that eating cashew apples with milk or mixing the two is not toxic it would not cause any health problems in fact there is a popular Jamaican cashew apple juice recipe that combines cashew apple juice with condensed milk it smells very creamy but sour I'm not sure if I really like it it's very different so I'm gonna try some cashew brandy wow it's really strong okay that's nice it's not really sour like the like the cheese I could drink this but maybe with the cook not like raw after a long day so there is no excuse to be deprived of the health benefits of the tasty and healthy cashew apple and the very nutritious cashew nuts about cashew while watching this vlog and we'll catch you in the next one thank you for watching