The Fruit Hunters Read online

  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.’”

  All fruit people are propelled by the notion of protecting biodiversity, whether through documenting wild species or propagating the plants at home. Bringing rare fruits home is a safety net against the pitfalls of extinction. Susan and Alan Carle have spent nearly three decades undergoing extensive collecting expeditions into endangered forests in order to protect disappearing species that they grow on their Australian property, called the Botanical Ark.

  Harold Olmo, known as the “Indiana Jones of viticulture” for his grape-collecting adventures in Afghanistan and Iran, once spent three days having his car pulled out of a twenty-five-foot gorge by nomads using camel-hair ropes. The grapes he collected and bred played a major role in creating and sustaining California’s wine industry. Afghan botanists recently obtained cuttings of fruits he’d collected that ended up disappearing from their native soil.

  Roy Danforth and Paul Noren are Christian missionaries who have set up a tropical fruit preserve in the Ubangi region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Their Loko Agroforestry Project is devoted to preservation and reforestation, primarily with fruit trees intended to provide sustenance. I considered visiting them, until I read reports from otherwise staid botanists explaining that traveling to this source to interview them would entail hiring a helicopter gunship and a personal militia.

  As Popenoe said, the best place to start looking for fruits is the marketplace. Anything worth growing or eating invariably ends up at these central congregations. Alongside uniting all of a region’s bounty, produce markets are also social affairs where visitors meet locals, where friends touch base and where strangers bond over shared interests. I can spend hours at a market in a state of pure contentment, transfixed by the abundance and overstimulated by the contact with fellow humans and nature.

  With all the raw ingredients waiting to be transformed into culinary splendors, markets are imbued with a sense of promise. They’re harbingers of delights to come, colorful way stations on a journey to further happiness. Looking at the vast quantities on display, we feel a sense that we’ll never be hungry again. We also love markets because the food there is real. It’s fresher, of a higher quality, than food at the grocery store. This is especially true of North American and European farmer’s markets.

  There’s something different about tropical jungle markets, full of native harvests dragged in from remote tributaries, perhaps never to be seen again. Something else attracts us to those markets, something darker. It may be the unruly nature of the negotiating, the shadowy codes of commerce, so different from the orderliness of supermarkets. There’s also a sense of danger, of chaos, at tropical markets. Animals are slaughtered in front of your eyes. The smell of death hangs in the air. Such markets are more like intermediary zones between civilization and wilderness.

  In the past, Western markets were just as strange. Medieval marketplaces in Europe and New France were more than shopping stops: they were places where justice was meted out, where bailiffs made legal announcements, where bards and fiddlers entertained travelers, commoners and the privileged. They were also execution sites. Joan of Arc was burned alive in the marketplace (although her heart, it’s said, remained impervious to the flames). The rabble jostled each other to catch a glimpse of the burning cadavers, to inhale the smoke of corpses.

  At Kuching’s Sunday market in Borneo, you can find everything from blowpipes and feathered arrows to meter-long green bean pods to hairy plant parts out of nightmares. As soon as you enter, balmy effluvia rising off the sidewalk clamp down on your sinus cavity. Duku husks, rotting coconuts, innards, transparent sacks containing muddy liquids and the pointy notes of overripe durians combine in an ague-inciting bouquet. Fermenting vegetables and dough cooking in rancid oil give off an additional sour aroma that actually gets caught in the back of the throat. The smell molecules are so powerful you can taste them. Carnivorous pitcher plants mottled with red veining and unpleasant prickly hairs are placed in plastic pouches where their open mouths gasp for breath. Writhing, roiling masses of fat sago worms are sold out of tree trunks. Men shout death threats at one another over corridors littered with squid tentacles. Dozens of bananas, from thumb-sized to over two feet long, nestle among sweet soursops, mountains of chilis, bright pink guavas, sea legumes and brown, dusky, powder-covered obelisks.

  I’m the only white person here. Some vendors smile at me; most, however, treat me indifferently, shouting and barking orders to buy their products. I’m a terrible bargainer, but the pushy vendors seem to enjoy my comic attempts at negotiating (perhaps because they invariably come out on top). Everything is so tempting and magical—not to mention fantastically cheap. I leave carrying way too many bags of fruits and vegetables, many of which I have no idea how to eat or prepare. I arrange them into neat piles on the desk in my hotel room, appreciating their symmetry and colors, and occasionally taking cautious tastes of something possibly poisonous. I gorge on dukus, rambutans, soursops, mangosteens and durians, knowing that I may never again taste them in their native habitats.

  Over the next week, I devour a guidebook Voon’s given me called Indigenous Fruits of Sarawak, making a checklist of all the fruits that I still want to taste. There’s the thumb-sized keranji papan, with its sweet orange caramel-flavored pulp. There are several varieties of tampois with pearly, transluscent interiors that make me almost tremble with desire. And then there’s that pitabu, William Whitman’s beloved blend of orange sherbet, almonds and raspberries. As I make my way through the rural food centers, I learn that many of the fruits I’m craving aren’t actually in season now.

  Voon’s wife tells me that, one time when they were hanging out with Graftin’ Crafton Clift, she said, “You guys are always talking fruit, fruit, fruit. Isn’t there anything else?”

  “Is there anything else?” deadpanned Clift.

  In fruits, there’s always something newer, better or rarer. It’s the pursuit of infinity. Naively thinking I might somehow be able to sample everything, I start planning a return visit. Speaking to growers, they explain that different fruits ripen every month. There is no single period where a visitor can taste all of the fruits; the only way to taste them all is to spend an entire year in Borneo. Even then, there’d be many I wouldn’t be able to taste because they’re so remote. As I lie in bed, feverishly contemplating these fruits, the phone rings. It’s my girlfriend, Liane. As I go on about all the different fruits I’ve been tasting, she says that it sounds like my subjects aren’t the only ones lost in a naive wonderland of fruits.

  To alleviate my gnawing desire, I eat dozens of durians in hawker stalls, marketplaces and restaurants. Whenever I catch a whiff of durian in the night air, I head over to the nearest vendor to eat a chunk, sold on a Styrofoam tray, which makes it look like chicken breasts.

  I find myself succumbing to the same pensive, dreamy, glazed-over look I see come over other durian eaters. At first, I thought I was simply hypnotized by the flavor, a kind of custard perfection. Gradually, I’m starting to suspect that the act of eating it sets in motion certain ancient mechanisms in the brain.

  At Voon’s house, this precognitive process again makes itself felt when I taste a jackfruit. This time, there’s none of the fear I felt with Ken Love in Hawaii. Licking jackfruit goo off my fingers, I feel like I’ve triggered some pathways in hitherto cauterized memory banks. Not only does tasting fruits bring us back to childhood, it brings us back to earlier evolutionary moments. Enjoying these fruits instills a sense of kinship with the ancestral humans who needed them to survive in the forest. Seeing, tasting and encountering durians, taraps and jackfruits seems to reanimate a primitive dimension of our subcortex, making our pulse quicken the way it would’ve if we were swinging through the trees eons ago.

  Accordi
ng to Nancy J. Turner, an ethnobiologist specialized in aboriginal ecosystems and plant resources, “foraging for wild crops satisfies some instinctive yearning left over from man’s evolutionary past when this occupation was essential for survival.” When I first saw that Brazilian paradise nut tree, covered in muffins, it jolted me with a hardwired sense of excitement. The same neural circuits flash to life when I taste these jungle fruits: it’s not only a sense of hope, it’s an intimation of self-preservation, the knowledge that we’ll remain alive for another day. That hunting and finding these fruits can activate deep centers in our unconscious minds is another example of biophilia, the love of life.

  At the same time that I’m experiencing this bewildering neurochemical reaction, I’m constantly being presented with dismaying evidence of overlogging. The deforestation of Borneo has reduced the tree cover by more than half over the past fifty years. Driving through the country’s heartland, I see decimated, defiled, embarrassed landscapes. The hillsides are covered in bald spots. Deep swaths are cut through the wilderness. Vast expanses of rain forest have been razed for palm-oil plantations. Nearly 13 percent of Malaysia is now covered in squat palm trees. Their orange, peach-sized fruits contain palm oil, a vital commodity used for cooking and biofuels. With the cost of food having increased by 37 percent in 2007 (and palm oil by more than 70 percent), families have started hoarding oil. Riots are breaking out in protest against shortages, so more and more of the forest is being converted to palm oil production. Fume-spewing timber trucks make up a hefty percentage of the traffic. The scars of human interference hang about the mist-enshrouded mountain-tops like shafts of light in a darkened, smoky room.

  Deforestation, besides eliminating the planet’s best defense against global warming—carbon-munching plants—also releases vast amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Losing these forests is suicidal. Sixty acres of rain forests vanish every minute. That’s 32 million acres a year. One percent of African forests disappear annually. “The Amazon loses an area the size of New Jersey every year to clear-cutting and timbering,” reports the The New York Times.

  Here in Borneo, it’s muggy and overcast every day. An ominous brown cloud lingers over the entire island. Voon tells me that this haze sticks around for months at a time, the result of forest fires in Indonesia.

  The devastation of these ancient forests has tragic consequences. Nomadic tribes, like the Penan, who used to survive on wild tree fruits can no longer maintain their traditional lifestyles. As their feeding spots have vanished, Malaysian officials have focused on assimilating them. Abdul Raham Yakub, a former chief minister of Sarawak, has said, “I would rather see them eating McDonald’s hamburgers than the unmentionables they eat in the jungle.”

  While I’m in Kuching, the front-page story in Malaysian Today tells of a twenty-one-year-old former tribesman who was shot while picking wild durians in the jungle. After he crawled through underbrush for four hours, his grandfather found him and rushed him to the hospital. The bullets were surgically removed, and he ended up in stable condition, but the shooter was never found.

  My hotel, the Telang Usan, is owned and managed by members of the Orang Ulu tribes. The front desk clerk tells me she can take me to a grove she knows that grows the best langsats. As we’re driving out to the countryside, she explains that she is a descendent of the Iban, also known as Sea Dayaks, a once-ferocious tribe that practiced head-hunting. At her village, a little painted sign bears the motto: “We believe in infinity.” In a longhouse, I drink some tuak (a local rice liquor) with her family, who are now pepper farmers. Her grandmother stands up on a grid and demonstrates how to separate the green pepper berries from their stems by crunching them beneath her feet.

  On my last day in Borneo, I fly to the erstwhile domain of the White Rajahs, Sarikei, for a Farmer’s Day celebration. Outside the plane’s window, plantations of oil palms stretch to the horizon. These fruit trees, with their bounty of edible oil, are the stars of Farmer’s Day, which ends up being way less traditional than I had imagined. Voon promised that there would be many indigenous seasonal fruits to sample at this gathering, and indeed there are. Concomitantly, the event feels so corporate. Biotechnology companies hand out pamphlets explaining how their products will help maximize agricultural returns. The event’s logo is a chemistry beaker sprouting a little green leaf. The theme is better living through agroscience.

  Looking at some photos of the Penan, I see them eating other fruits that aren’t even in the guidebook Voon gave me. It’s saddening to think that, as the forest recedes, riches are being lost forever; yet, as I’ve learned on this trip, massive abundance still surrounds us. As Borneo’s wilderness vanishes, there also exists an array of cultivated fruits so broad that it’s impossible to taste them all.

  At the end of the day, I join Voon and his colleagues at a folk dancing performance in an open-air stadium. The traditional forest dances seem out of place on this amplified, metallic stage. The crowd, wearing button-up shirts and dress shoes, watches the dancing and then stands up to sing along to an anthem. It’s a catchy song with a syncopated Casio beat and couplets about embracing progress and cyber technologies: “Thank you for the way the old things were done,” they sing. “Now it’s time for the modern age.”

  6

  The Fruitarians

  Naught but fruit doth ever pass my lips … Eat of this fruit; believe me, it is the only true food for man.

  —H. Rider Haggard, She

  BANGKOK MEANS “village of wild plums.” The city’s main food market, which reaches full stride in the middle of the night and is over by dawn, is more like a megalopolis of wild plums. Rising at 4 A.M., I flag down a market-bound tuk tuk driver. As soon as I embark on his motorized Thai rickshaw, he turns us around in a full circle, and then puts the pedal to the metal only to slam on the brakes a meter later, inches away from a parked truck. He then nearly runs over a bald pedestrian with a bushy black mustache. As we race over speed bumps, I fly around on the backseat wondering what to hold on to, the only choice being metal railings on the tuk tuk’s exterior that’ll crush my fingers in the seemingly unavoidable event of a collision. Instead of letting my digits cushion any impact, I just grip the seat as my body flops around like a spawning salmon. We speed right up to enormous trucks and then pass them with millimeters to spare. Eschewing traditional lane changes and signals, my driver prefers to climb up a car’s tailpipe and then swerve around it like a motorized bat.

  I can smell the market before we arrive. At first it’s pleasant: scents of basil, lemongrass, gingers, turmerics, galangals, mounds of freshly ground curry powder, heaps of coconut shavings. Once inside, however, the smells become so overwhelming that they tickle the back of my eyeballs. This is not the fragrance of guavas. This is the raw, cutting odor of the jungle, the gash of the tropics, the fetor of equatorial darkness, the essence of everything Western civilization glosses over, dyes and tries to not think about. The epicenter of this olfactory swamp seems to be a corner where crates of eviscerated frogs are piled next to barrels containing thousands of squirming crabs. The sharp odor of the splayed amphibians, their steaming organs perfuming the night air, mingles with the decomposing crabby emanations to create a stench nobody should ever have to experience again.

  A smiling man chopping chilis gives me a moon fruit—a flat, yellow persimmon-like fruit that shoppers smell to block out the market odors. Wandering around with my nose buried in the moon fruit, I try to stay out of the way of porters, their loads toppling over on broken market alleys. As I jot down some observations, a car hits me—not fast enough to break any bones, but enough to shake me up. Feeling light-headed, I leave with a backpack full of mangoes, salaks, santols, rambutans, jambus and mangosteens.

  By now, the sun is about to rise and the market is slowing down. A motorcycle taxi offers me a lift home. We drive so fast the helmet levitates inches above my head, barely tethered by the cord around my chin. Traffic lights don’t seem to matter or
make any sense. Neon signs blur into LCD cuneiforms. Closing my eyes as we race through the darkness, weaving in and out of traffic at 120 miles an hour, I imagine my body splayed across the road like a dissected market frog.

  I’M ONLY PASSING through Bangkok, on my way down to a couple of islands in southern Thailand. Still curious about the fruitarian Punatics I heard about in Hawaii, I’ve arranged a meeting with the legendary durinarian Shunyam Nirav, creator of durianpalace.com. He spends half the year in a two dollars per night beach hut on a remote stretch of Koh Phangan. Getting there first requires making it to the island of Koh Samui. From Bangkok, I book an all-night train ride through central Siam.

  Still itching from a sleepless night spent battling mosquitoes in my humidor of a train car, I arrive at my hotel on Silver Beach. Waiting for me is a note from Nirav suggesting that, while in Koh Samui, I meet up with his friend Scott “Kiawe” Martin. Not quite sure what to expect, I hitch a motorcycle ride to his home that evening.

  Kiawe and his Thai girlfriend, Ta, live in a dilapidated beach bungalow surrounded by majestic palms and gramophone-like flowers. When I pull up, Kiawe, a tanned, rugged and handsome American, is lying in a hammock on the small front porch. He spends the rest of the evening in the hammock, lying back or bolting upright depending on his enthusiasm for the topic at hand. I sit opposite him on a wooden bench. Ta, wearing a headband and a tank top, is rather shy and spends most of her time indoors.

  Soon after I arrive, a lanky twentysomething fruitarian named Jameson pulls up on a scooter. Taking off his helmet, he says that he heard I was interested in durinarians. “Pretty much all I eat is durians,” Jameson says, shaking out his long blond hair. “Have you heard of the durian trail? There’s a group of people who basically travel around following ripe durians so they can always find them in season.”