2008nov18. It has come to my attention that at some point, I published totally fabricated excerpts for the 2008 publication The Fruit Hunters [2] by Adam Leith Gollner. This is my favorite book of the year, easily. What follows are actual excerpts from the actual book. Here is an introductory photo essay that has a link to this poster of the exotic fruits of Hawaii (available here).
A plaque identifies the tree as a sapucaia. In season, the cupcakes grow packed with a half dozen seeds shaped like orange segments. At ripeness, these burst through the base, scattering on the ground. Impatient young monkeys sometimes punch into an unripe muffin and wrap their fingers around a fistful of nuts. Because their cognitive faculties are not developed enough to understand that extracting their paws requires letting go of the nuts, they end up dragging their sapucaia handcuffs around for miles. [pg 2]
Within the tens of thousands of edible plant species, there are hundreds of thousands of varieties – and new ones are continually evolving. Magic beans, sundrops, cannonballs, delicious monsters, zombi apples, gingerbread plums, swan egg pears, Oaxacan trees of little skulls, Congo goobers, slow-match fruits, candle fruits, bastard cherries, bignays, belimbings, bilimbis and biribas. [ ... ] There are thousands upon thousands of fruits that we never imagined – and that few of us will ever taste, unless we embark on fruit-hunting expeditions. [pg 6]
Nowadays, fruits have become part of the daily grind. We have unlimited access: they’re sold year-round, they’re cheap, and they shrivel into moldy lumps on our countertops. Eating one is practically a chore. Many people dislike fruits. Perhaps that’s because, on average, fruits are eaten two to three weeks after being picked. [ ... ] Many of the fruits we eat were developed to ship well and spend ten days under the withering glow of fluorescent supermarket lights. The result is Stepford Fruits: gorgeous replicants that look perfect, feel like silicone implants and taste like tennis balls, mothballs, or mealy, juiceless cotton wads. [pg 14]
A pineapple is an inflorescence that fuses many berry-like fruitlets into a thorn-tipped aberration. [pg 23]
One of the most extreme examples of a hitchhiker fruit is the Sumatran bird-catching tree. Its fruits are covered with tiny barbed hooks and a sticky gum that glues itself to birds’ feathers. Certain birds carry the fruit to other islands; less fortunate ones get their wings jammed by it, and they end up dying at the tree base, becoming fertilizer. [pg 26]
Jaitt says he knows some people in Honolulu who’ve been serving peanut butter fruit with blackberry-jam fruit and breadfruit. Kids apparently go crazy for these all-fruit PBJ sandwiches. [pg 44]
Corn is believed to have evolved from a minuscule grain called teosinte, slightly bigger than an earwig. It took thousands of years of human selection for teosinte to become the size of a human finger, then thousands more years to become the thick cobs we slather with butter today. [pg 48]
Bubble gum used to come from chicle, the latex of the sapodilla tree, also know for its sweet chico fruits. [ ... ] Today, gum is made with a plastic oil derivative called PVA (polyvinyl acetate). [pg 52; mmmmm]
At the end of WWII, the British government allocated one banana to every child. Evelyn Waugh’s three children were giddy with excitement on the great day their bananas arrived. As Auberon Waugh recalls in Will This Do? their joy was short-lived: the bananas “were put on my father’s plate, and before the anguished eyes of his children, he poured on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and ate all three ... He was permanently marked down in my estimation from that moment on, in a way which no amount of sexual transgression would have achieved.” [pg 53]
Fruits could replace many toxic cleaning products (most of which contain artificial scents like “fresh citrus”). [ ... ] My Parisian friends do their laundry using soap nuts, the dried fruit of the Chinese soapberry tree (Sapindus mukorrosi). These berries contain saponin, a natural steroid that turns frothy and bubbly in water. I tried it; my laundry came out clean and smelling great. [pg 58]
Although most of Miami’s fruit hunters following importing protocols, some skirt regulations. For that reason, government officials at the USDA have started conducting armed raids on rare fruit growers, bursting into their backyards with attack dogs. [ ... ] “They came in here like the goddamn Gestapo,” he says angrily. “It was like they were gonna save us from terrorism. Six agents burst in and started rifling through everything trying to find illegal seeds. They orchestrated it like it was a big drug raid. It scared the shit outta my wife, not to mention my customers. They photographed stuff, and confiscated seeds. They thought I had smuggled ‘noxious weeds’ in from Asia. They were after an illegal seed that was one-sixteenth of an inch long. My palm seeds were an inch long. They didn’t know a noxious weed from a palm seed. They wouldn’t know a noxious weed if it grew in their butt. I got a five-million-dollar business here; you think I’m gonna grow an illegal plant and screw it up? They took three of my palms – palms not known in cultivation – and they killed them. They all died.” [pg 67]
“Up to the end of the middle ages, grafting was considered a secret by the initiated and a miracle by the public,” wrote Frederic Janson. Some believed that, for a graft to hold, it was necessary for a man and woman to make love in the moonlight. At the moment of climax, the woman was to secure the graft between the tree and its new limb. [pg 69]
At one point, he says, incredulously, Clift was offered a job working with fruits in Costa Rica. He decided to drive down from Florida. In Guatemala, his suitcases were stolen. In El Salvador he was sleeping by the road when someone robbed the clothes off his back. He continued to drive in the nude. Abandoning the car in Nicaragua, he proceeded to walk the rest of the way to Costa Rica, living on jungle fruits and trekking naked through forests for weeks. [ ... ] at another point, Clift had been hired by a wealthy Thai family to create the world’s biggest tropical fruit garden. He was forbidden from sending seeds to other fruit enthusiasts, but was caught in the act. His hands were to be chopped off as punishment. Luckily, he managed to escape, fleeing Thailand. [pg 71]
As Thomas Jefferson said, “The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.” This rationale was how Jefferson justified smuggling rice out of Italy (risking execution) and hemp seeds out of China. [pg 84]
As Richard Campbell puts it: “You fly into the closest airport, drive through town, peer into backyards, and find the guys who know where the best stuff is. Then you say, ‘Hi, I’m from America, I’m crazy and I want to look at your mameys.” [pg 85]
Armed with a name, I immediately uncover some online images. Not only is the lady fruit real, but it is easily the sexiest fruit in the plant kingdom. Its risqu[eaccent] is a life-sized simulacrum of the female reproductive region, including hips, an exposed midriff, two thighs and a pudendal cleft – complete with a tuft of alarmingly lifelike hair on the mons pubis. From the back, it bears a striking resemblance to a woman’s derriere. [pg 109]
Another farmer I spoke to referred to industrial peaches as “plastic Kraft dinner fruit created by dead brains.” [pg 196]
Apples can spend close to a year sitting in oxygen- and carbon-dixoide-controlled cold-storage facilities. [pg 205]
Ackee, the national fruit of Jamaica, is tricky: when underripe, it contains hypoglycin, a violent purgative that can make you vomit until you die. [pg 249]
How can you not want to try these awesome fruits described within the book like so: “maple syrup pudding,” “cherry cola,” “lemon meringue pie,” “snowy, sweet, cotton-candylike,” “vanilla cream,” “lemonade-infused cotton candy,” “chocolate pudding,” “raspberry jam,” “strawberry milkshakes,” “Froot Loops,” “coconut flesh, only sexier,” “vanilla ice cream,” “pear cream custard,” etc.
Organizations etc mentioned in the book: North American Fruit Exporters (see their supply source page), Rare Fruit Council International, California Rare Fruit Growers, Fruit Gardener Magazine, Fruit Lover’s Nursery, Figs 4 Fun, Hawaii Fruit, Durian Palace (temporarily (?) down), NYT Bill Whitman obituary, Uncommon Fruits and Vegetables, Five Decades with Tropical Fruit, The Duchess of Malfi’s Apricots, and Other Literary Fruits, The Anatomy of Dessert, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand Epitaph for a Peach, Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden.
Follow-up essay: Going to Bananaland. Interviews.
