Warning, this is a long post about fruit.
I just finished “The Fruit Hunters”, by Adam Leith Gollner. This was an awesome book! Now before you go out and buy it solely based on that recommendation, let me explain something. Primarily, the book was a gift from S., who has impeccable taste, but she also knows that I am into some rather eclectic things viz. exotic fruit.
This book is about the world of exotic and ultra-exotic fruit and the strange people and industries involved with them. I have started numerous blog entries about this topic, but actually posted very few. The latest one I started was because, when at a juice bar in Manaus, called “Skina de Succos”, deep in the Amazon, I was enamored with the idea of traveling the world and tasting strange fruits. I was inspired by the vast array of fruit juices that they had and I was going down the list sampling them. It looks like the author had the same idea, but he had it in Rio De Janeiro. There must be something about Brasil that makes you want to study fruit. He didn’t have the same muse as I did, though. It seems like he was taken with the jaboticaba, while I was seduced by jeniapapo.
The jenipapo is a small green fruit that when you open and mash up the insides with a knife, it makes a henna-type dye that stains your skin black. The taste of the jennipapo is even stranger. It tastes slightly like vomit, slightly like burning plastic and slightly like a SweetTart. The author of the book didn’t get a chance to taste this fruit and he also didn’t paint it on his skin. Just for the record, I had some jaboticaba’s when I was in Rio recently and I loved them. They are like giant sweet grapes with thicker skins, and a really sweet gelatinous center. There is a slimy seed in the center and the skin is really tart.
He did however devote a few pages to one of my favorite fruits. The miracle fruit is really amazing. The actual flavor of the fruit is not very interesting, in fact it is pretty bland, but the cool thing is what it does to your sensation of taste. Somehow the fruit numbs the sour sensors of your tongue for about an hour, so basically all sour things taste sweet. After having a miracle fruit, you can sit down and eat a huge sour lemon and it tastes like lemonade. The blocking of the sour makes the remaining sugars in the lemon stand out like it was candy. The effect wears off after a while and there are no lasting side effects. Of course, it wasn’t made into a sweetener in America, perhaps it would have been a cure for our problems with obesity and diabetes.
Want to know why?
Well, Donald Rumsfeld, that’s why. Isn’t it amazing that even in the most innocuous topics, like tropical fruit, Donald Rumsfeld has to jump out of a cake and play the villain? It is like this evil little f$%^er is following me around. Anyway, when he was CEO of Searle Inc, he unsuccessfully tried to get approval for Nutrasweet (aspartame) for 16 years! All of the scientists were saying the stuff was poison and they weren’t going to approve it. Then, in a fortuitous turn of events, Rummy was added to President Regan’s Transition Team. One of the fist things he did when he was hired was appoint someone to the FDA that would approve the drug. Along come the Miracle Fruit and Donald was panicked. This was a very cheap, natural compound that could save lives, therefore he had it blocked from approval. So once again, Dr. Evil, Donald “Torture is ok!” Rumsfeld, has his nefarious way. This time with a fruit. Of course, the Japanese have actually started using the stuff in force, that is because they are from the future.
One of the biggest payoffs I got from the book were some of the resources. Imagine, for example, that you have some secret vice that you are really into and you don’t know anyone else that is into it. You bumble around cocktail parties wishing that you could talk to someone about it, but you secretly know that people probably won’t be that into it. Imagine for example that you are super-into model trains. This is something you like but other people might, if they found out about your interest, start to think there is something not quite right with you. Then you find a bunch of resources on the Internet. Bulletin boards, research sites, legions of people dedicated to your strange vice. That is what this book did for me. And that is what the Internet is all about. Since I didn’t know anyone who was into weird fruits, I erroneously assumed that they didn’t exist. Now I can talk to people about my strange interest. At least I’m not into something vulgar.
The book also showed that there are people who take their love of fruit too far. Way too far. There are a bunch of people in the world who eat nothing but fruit. I really like fruit, but I also like variety. There are even varying levels of insanity. Some people only eat fruit that has fallen off the tree naturally. And then there are raging debates as well, like is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable. There are even some people in Miami that smuggle exotic fruits into the country. In this rather strange twist on Miami Vice, these people are risking the freedom to import fruit that tastes like chocolate pudding. I haven’t taken things this far, in fact, on the entire scale of “being into fruit” I’m really very far down the scale. I don’t want to do time for fruit.
If you are into strange fruit, I really encourage you to read the book. If you aren’t that into them, it might be only mildly entertaining. I really liked it.
