The Fruit Hunters Read online

  We eat dinner—a crateful of wild local durians—as Jameson tells us about the first time he saw durians at a market. “They were cracked open, and I could smell them,” he says, his hair twitching. “I picked one up. I didn’t know if I’d die from eating it, but I tasted it—and loved it. So I backed my truck up, filled it with sixty durians and ate them for the next three days.”

  “How many durians do you eat at a meal?” I ask, feeling sated after eating two.

  “Ten at a sitting,” he says, and proceeds to demonstrate.

  Kiawe’s and Ta’s diet is even stranger. Although they join us in eating some durians, they explain that their main course is yet to come. Alongside fruits, they also eat raw meats, many of which they dry themselves. Kiawe calls it “the caveman diet.”

  “We eat original food,” explains Kiawe, “the way primal man ate before the advent of fire.” The proper term for this diet, he says, is instincto anopsology.

  Regular sushi or beef tartar pales in comparison to the raw meats they prefer. Kiawe describes one instincto who dries rabbits in the trunk of his car in order to eat the “beneficial maggots.” He also explains his belief that getting sick is actually a body’s way of getting healthy. “All illnesses are just cleansing reactions,” he says. “It’s your body’s way of expelling toxins.”

  When Ta brings out a platter of chicken bones, fish ligaments, meat jerkies and other air-dried meats, I’m pretty certain that I don’t want to taste any of it. They tear into the food with almost exaggerated pleasure. Kiawe holds a dried chicken out toward me.

  “Will it give me a ‘cleansing reaction’?” I ask, politely declining his offer. The prospect of getting ill—sorry, cleansed—on an isolated Thai island isn’t high on my list of priorities.

  “It might give you a cleansing reaction,” answers Kiawe, unhelpfully.

  “He’s nervous,” says Ta.

  “He should be,” says Kiawe.

  “You should be,” agrees Ta.

  I pick up a dark chicken carcass. There’s barely any flesh on it because of the shrinking caused by weeks of air-drying. I put a brittle tendon into my mouth. It has the texture and flavor of masking tape.

  “What do you think?” asks Ta, testily.

  “I really like plain things,” I say, diplomatically.

  “Yes!” agrees Kiawe, lurching in the hammock. “The bacteria is the seasoning. Aged meat is full of enzymes—like cheese or wine. Beef in the fridge for three months is great. You know how cheese gets mold? Beef gets it too, and it tastes just like cheese. We look like a bunch of cavemen, but it’s really sophisticated stuff.”

  The rest of the dinner consists of Jameson and Kiawe explaining their vision of creating a fantasy durian orchard with thousands of wild and heirloom varieties. All they need is five hundred thousand dollars for their “Save the Wild Durian Project.” I tell them that it sounds like a wonderful project. Kiawe places his hand on my shoulder and tells me that I have a special power: my curiosity.

  After clearing away the bowls of bones, Ta asks me to follow her into the woods nearby. She brings me to a bush full of ripe specimens of a purple blackberry-type fruit covered in what appears to be crystallized fructose. It looks exactly like the gummy Jujube candies I used to eat as a child. Perhaps the candy’s designer copied it, or maybe its shape has somehow been lodged in our collective unconscious from ancient times. I pluck one, and peer at its glistening sugar-frosted surface. The moist, meaty sections open up to reveal a blood-red raspberry jam interior. It tastes gritty, almost sandy, with a molasses flavor. Ta holds up a mirror. My tongue and teeth have turned completely black. “That’s our favorite fruit,” she laughs, assuring me that the effects will wear off by morning time. “We don’t know what it’s called, but we love it.”

  My blackened tongue wags good-bye to the original foodists. Jameson gives me a lift back to my hotel on his scooter. On the way, we pass a natural geyser that has erupted out of the sand. We pull over to look at the fountain. It is ringed by a lunar aureole, a sort of gray moon bow in the gloom. Jameson tells me I look like a zombie with my black mouth. Nearby, some fruit bats are munching on bananas. “They come in with six-meter wingspans over the water looking like pterodactyls,” says Jameson.

  After he drops me off at Silver Beach, I lie down on the sand under a large tree. It seems to be pulsating with faint lights. Am I hallucinating? Suddenly, one of the glimmering lights lands on my chest. It’s a firefly. The tree is full of them.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, a wizened old woman with two rows of lower front teeth hobbles into the lobby. Stopping at my table, she opens a suitcase containing strange poultices, wood chips, translucent orange liquids, brown pellets and what appears to be a dirty tropical truffle snaked-through with green and red sprouts. I point at it, and the traveling witchdoctor shakes her head and starts laughing. It’s not for me, apparently.

  Paying my hotel bill, I set off for the ferry on the back of another motorcycle. The driver points out sites of interest. We stop by a temple called Wat Khunaram, which boasts a macabre tourist attraction: a dead monk sitting upright in a glass case. Although he died in 1973, his body hasn’t ever decomposed. He wears an orange robe and sunglasses to cover his empty eye sockets. His final request was that his body be put on display as an inspiration to future generations to follow Buddhism and escape the chains of suffering.

  After docking on the island of Koh Phangan, I pass through Tong Sila, a saloon town with sandy dirt roads that’s like a Thai replica of Dodge City. Soon enough, I arrive at Shunyam Nirav’s beachfront hut, the one with a bough of purple bougainvillea hanging over the balcony.

  A skinny, sarong-clad fifty-five-year-old with curly blond-and-gray hair comes out to greet me. As we sit on the stoop, Nirav opens a chempedak, careful not to stain his green sarong. The fruit is delicious, again reminding me of Froot Loops.

  Nirav explains how he became hooked on durians when traveling to Bangkok in 1989. “I liked them immediately,” he recalls. “Wow!” My eyes opened up, and I was totally enthusiastic right from the start. My girlfriend at the time was like ‘Get that thing out of here.’” In the intervening years, Nirav has written songs and poems about the fruit, as well as the following haiku: “Ecstatic flavor/Spiky fruit’s luscious pudding/Nature’s grandest food.”

  Nirav has been on durian-tasting trips all over Southeast Asia and is part of what he calls “a real connoisseur scene.” When he speaks of certain top-pedigreed Malay durians he’s tasted in far-flung villages, words fail him. “They were just like …” he says, his eyes closing, his eyelids fluttering, and his hands rising in the air and waving slowly in total submission. And then, he snaps back to reality. “Mentally, I keep a one to ten scale. Some of these were thirteens.”

  For Nirav, eating durians is a spiritual practice. His name, he says, means “Emptiness Silence” in Sanskrit. The name was chosen for him by his guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, otherwise known as Osho (or the “Rolls-Royce Guru,” due to his vast collection). Born Robert James Palmer, Shunyam Nirav became his legal name in 1990.

  As a young man, Nirav had been a member of est, Werner Erhard’s personal transformation seminars, later known as the Forum, or Landmark Education. On June 7, 1973, at the age of twenty-one, he attained enlightenment. “But I don’t make a big deal out of that,” he writes in an online bio. “It was and is a very ‘so what’ phenomenon.”

  Since that time, he’s divided his time between a tree house in Maui and this beach hut in Koh Phangan. He writes books about growing durians, organic gardening and other subjects, including a project on one-word affirmations called Switchwords. The idea is that whenever you find yourself in a predicament, you simply need to chant a certain word over and over again and a solution will present itself. For example, if you are hitchhiking and need a lift, simply repeat the word “on.” Whenever you lose something, the switchword is “reach.” The book is a guide to a hundred condensed incantations.

  Nirav’s girlfriend,
American and in her fifties, makes us banana, cashew and aloe vera shakes with rock dust from ancient seabeds in Utah. “Nirav has been ingesting mineralized rock dust in shakes for years,” she says. The two met through Osho. They were both orange-robed disciples of his free-love cult, initially based on a ranch in Oregon called Rajneeshpuram, and then, following Rajneesh’s deportation for violating immigration laws, at his ashram in Pune, India. She speaks fondly of their travels in search of perfect mangoes and meditation.

  I rent my own beach bungalow, also home to some lizards, which I hear scampering around all night. Before bed, I flip through some guidebooks on fruitarianism. In Fruits: Best of All Foods, Klaus Wolfram explains that learning the habit of eating fruits exclusively is an arduous journey that few can complete. Morris Krok’s Fruit: The Food and Medicine for Man relates how he attended a fruitarian lecture with Essie Honiball, author of I Live on Fruit. Asked what one should eat, the answer is: “Fruit, of course.” What all the fruitarian gurus have in common is their belief that subsisting on fruits leads to transcendental experiences.

  The basic teaching of author Johnny Lovewisdom is that fruits are the way for humans to get back to Paradise, or, as he puts it, “the Hyperborean homeland, the region of sunshine and everlasting spring, where the inhabitants lived on juicy fruits, and knew not what suffering and death were.” In his forty-page photocopied treatise, The Ascensional Science of Spiritualizing Fruitarian Dietetics, he suggests that fruits can be catalysts for clairvoyancy. “We are not referring to imagining things in the mind,” he writes, “but rather a brilliant Technicolor Cinerama experience contemplated by the single eye of the forehead.” On a citrus bender in Florida, he witnessed a being descend from the air and materialize out of the ether like Captain Kirk returning to the Enterprise. Fruits, he maintains, transform humans into a vaporous essence that can float to heaven like white light. After moving to a crater on the peak of a dormant volcano in the Andes, he spent seven months without eating anything at all and experienced full-blown rapture. Despite his firm belief that fruits bestow eternal life, he died in 2000.

  I rise at dawn. Opening the shutters, I see a stray dog walking along the beach and then out into the ocean. The tide is out, but the light bending on the wet sand makes it appear as though the dog is walking on water. He runs out into a mirage that shimmers for miles.

  THE SUBSET OF the nutritional demimonde who eat only fruit usually do so by necessity. Druids really only ate acorns and berries. Certain tribes dwelling near the lower Amazon, as well as foragers called caboclos often eat nothing but açai berries, brazil nuts and the sap from the milk tree. Nomadic tribes in North Africa wander for long stretches eating little other than dates.

  The primary form of sustenance for the hunter-gathering !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert is the mongongo fruit, which has a fleshy exterior and an edible kernel. They also eat !Gwa berries and Tsama melons, which grow underground and contain a liquid that sustains them through periods of drought, but when a !Kung bushman was asked in the 1960s why his people hadn’t taken up agriculture, he replied: “Why should we plant when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?” There was such a plentiful abundance of mongongos in the Kalahari that they couldn’t even eat them all. Given the widespread malnutrition today throughout the Sub-Sahel region, I can’t help but wonder where the mongongos have gone.

  In a famous essay, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins called hunter-gatherers “the original affluent society” because the simplicity of their material wants, needs and diet left them with so much leisure time on their hands. Murders certainly occurred with greater frequency, but hunter-gatherers also enjoyed tight social bonds, and greater support from their families and friends. Mongongos and other foods were always shared between tribespeople. According to anthropologist Lorna J. Marshall, the idea of eating alone and not sharing is inconceivable to the !Kung.

  The Seri Indians of Mexico, one of the last hunter-gatherer societies in the Americas, were intimately linked to the pitahaya, or dragon fruit, as it’s now known. Food was so scarce that, after eating the cactus fruits in season, they’d rummage through their own feces for pitahaya seeds, which they would then roast and crush for use in the coming winter. As the Seri have been assimilated, younger generations have already forgotten that pitahayas are even edible.

  There have been many fruitarians through history. The writings of Buddhist disciples portray Siddhārtha Gautama as a fruitarian. Plutarch wrote that before Lycurgus the ancient Greeks subsisted on fruits. Mohammad is said to have lived on dates and water in Madinah. St. John the Baptist lived on strawberries for a period (some suggest that he actually ate carob beans). Even Idi Amin, the tyrannical Ugandan dictator, lived his final years in Saudi Arabia as a fruitarian (his affinity for oranges earned him the nickname “Dr. Jaffa”).

  Gandhi’s flirtations with fruitarianism were inspired by Louis Kuhne, the frugivorous German author of New Science of Healing. Germany was an epicenter of bohemian fruit experimentation from the late nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century, when it took off in California. Adolf Just, author of Return to Nature, claims that Proto-Germans ate nothing but berries and other forest fruits. The origins of the hippie movement can be traced to German subcultures wandervogel (free spirits), and naturmensch (nature men). These errant youths congregated at a spiritual community in Ascona, Switzerland, from 1900 to 1920. The rebel health colony, called Monte Verità (Mountain of Truth), espoused fruitarianism and practiced nude organic gardening.

  In H. G. Wells’s dystopian fantasy The Time Machine, humankind bifurcates into two species: the Morlocks, underground toilers who live in darkness; and the Eloi, feeble, childlike little beings who sing and dance in the sunshine and eat only “strange and delightful” fruits such as hypertrophied raspberries and a floury oddity in a three-sided husk.

  Although science fiction seems an appropriate realm for this diet, for some it’s a real way of life. Fruitarians tell of feeling an ineffable joy on fruits (others might call it fructose-induced delirium). “Many people report telepathy, increased inner awareness, connectedness to all life, a feeling of aliveness like never before, and on and on,” writes Rejean “David” Durette, author of the 2004 handbook Fruit: The Ultimate Diet. Durette claims that fruits improved his vision to such an extent that, after becoming a fruitarian, he was able to pass his driver’s license eye exam without glasses for the first time. Fruitarians “have better looks,” says instructor Inez Matus, who says she went from legally blind to 20/20 vision. Female fruitarians talk of their bodies becoming “so chic” that they experience increased male attention. A Japanese fruitarian has reported having such supersensitive hearing that he could make out the sound of ants crawling on the ground or conversations happening six miles away.

  Most doctors warn that the fruitarian diet lacks the nutrients required for a balanced lifestyle. There are few objectively validated examples of long-term fruitivores. Another problem fruitarians encounter is a deficiency in B12. One fruitarian, posting on a raw food forum, claims that he gets “B12 from performing cunnilingus.”

  Because it lacks a balanced variety of amino acids, the fruitarian diet is especially dangerous for children. In 2001, Britain’s Garebet Manuelyan and his wife, Hasmik, were charged with manslaughter in the malnutrition death of their nine-month-old daughter, Areni, who was fed only fruit. Two years later, Hasmik apparently committed suicide; her body was found in the sea near Brighton. In 1999, Christopher Fink’s malnourished two-year-old son was admitted to a Utah hospital by health authorities after it emerged that Fink had been feeding him only watermelon and lettuce. After allegedly kidnapping his hospitalized son, Fink pled guilty to the charges of attempted aggravated assault and second-degree felony child abuse and admitted that the borderline fruitarian diet was the cause of his son’s health problems.

  Fruitarians seem to prefer the colloquial definition of a fruit rather than the botanical. Some raw foodists I met at a raw food boutiqu
e in San Diego (including a young man who was eating only raw cacao nibs and feeling “totally epic”) snickered that they had recently busted their fruitarian colleague eating avocados. But isn’t an avocado a fruit? Absolutely, say a splinter denomination called rockguacamolians who eat only avocados seasoned with powdered asteroid dust. Cooked-fruitarians claim they can eat everything from pasta marinara minus oregano, soy veggieburgers (hold the lettuce and onions), and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Die-hard fruitarians frown on the inclusion of cooked or processed foods.

  Some factions eat only fallen fruit. Others refuse to eat any seeds because they contain future plants. One fruitarian Kiawe and Jameson mentioned eats nothing but nonoily fruits and raw pollen. Johnny Lovewisdom, citing Nubian desert hermits eating fifteen figs a day, said only modest amounts should be eaten daily. Others disagree. Dogma abounds. According to the Raw Food Pearamid, fruits should be eaten on an empty stomach. Forget about fruit salads; different kinds of fruit should never be combined. Durette, America’s foremost authority on fruitarianism, says the optimum meal should consist of only one kind of fruit eaten to satiety. But with a daily intake of at least ten pounds of fruit, he seems to spend all day eating. Here’s an average daily menu:

  8:00 1–2 pounds watermelon

  9:00 1/2 pound grapes

  10:00 1 pound bananas

  10:30 1 pound peaches

  11:30 2 Hass avocados, 1/2 pound tomatoes

  12:30 2 pounds watermelon

  1:30 1/2 pound grapes

  2:30 1 mango

  3:30 1 pound bananas

  4:30 3 pounds watermelon

  5:30 1/4 pound grapes

  6:30 1 pound peaches or 1/2 pint blueberries

  7:00 1–2 pounds watermelon

  8:00 1 Hass avocado or 1 pound bananas

  In the winter, he adds citrus, persimmons and perhaps some almonds and sunflower seeds, although he admits that eating nuts and seeds isn’t exactly kosher.