The Fruit Hunters Read online

  The idle rich have always had a penchant for unobtainable delights. Today, the most unusual subgroup of smuggler consists of the independently wealthy fruitleggers. These obsessive collectors are willing to pay whoever they have to and break whatever laws necessary to obtain the objects of their desire.

  Consider the case of S, a portly, wisecracking plant aficionado in his early fifties. I first met him when Kurt Ossenfort and I were looking for a place to film fruit footage. David Karp suggested S’s backyard, a jungle about the size of a football field in the upper enclaves of Bel-Air. Karp also told us that S lived with a pair of elderly sisters—spinsters who were the heiresses to some unspecified fortune. Mysteriously, they had adopted S as their legal heir.

  Looking like Humpty Dumpty with his matted-down hair and tight XXL polo shirt, S waddled through the winding footpaths of his estate, pointing out cinnamon trees and palms covered with metallic spikes. “My bitch-tit tree is coming along nicely,” he gloated, stroking a nipplelike appendage with his chubby hands. “Come, quats,” he said, ushering us deeper into the forest.

  He had just received a huge shipment of rare trees in jars, including one he delighted in calling “the testicle tree.” He fixed me with a withering glare when I said he’d probably have trouble growing his mangosteen trees. “Oh, you’re one of those people who thinks they know everything, aren’t you?” he said, with the unflappable confidence of the overwealthy. William Whitman told me that nobody in America had ever brought a mangosteen to fruition besides him. I tried to ask if anyone had ever done so in California, but he’d already moved on. “Here’s an African jelly fig I bought from an ugly old woman in Santa Monica,” he said. “Oh look! My first finger-lime buds! Let’s dance!

  “These are some unknown palms that a woman smuggled in from China,” he said, as we walked through the tangled greenery. “I forced her, at gunpoint, to sell them to me.” I asked him more about the smuggling. “It’s the only way to get some of the most remarkable trees,” he continued. “We’ve brought many endangered, exotic species into this sanctuary.” Caressing one particularly thorny trunk, he said, “I’m the only person in continental United States with one of these. We had it airlifted into the garden using a seventy-thousand-ton crane.”

  One of his strangest acquisitions was a fried-egg tree. “The shells of these fruits are used as protective penis covers by tribes in Africa,” he explained, adding that his friends use it the same way at pool parties. He then invited me to witness this firsthand at an upcoming “bacchanalian revelry.”

  “Everyone who comes has to wear a penis shell,” he said. “And we all take Chinese Viagra—‘it’s good for the male.’”

  Although I never made it to one of those pool parties, I did accept his invitation, a few weeks later, to an afternoon barbecue in the jungle.

  PARKING MY 1982 Acura from Rent-A-Wreck near the four bronze statues of Pan which stand sentinel at the entrance to S’s property, I knock on the door. Nobody answers. I ring again. After waiting around three minutes, I push on the door, which is ajar, and enter the mansion. The living room is alarmingly cluttered. Stacks of dusty unopened envelopes, catalogs, postcards, stock appraisals, bank drafts and letters are heaped in corners. I pick one up at random; it’s a legal notice from the early 1980s. Display cases full of trinkets overflow onto unhung paintings. The floor is a tangled heap of discarded scarves, rolled-up carpets and other debris. “Hello!” I yell. No response.

  I head into the kitchen, where the circular table holds a gravity-defying mix of unwashed plates and cutlery, cracker boxes, chocolate containers, half-eaten bonbons and more junk mail. Cereal bowls, possibly from that morning, are precariously balanced on top of everything. The walls are covered with ornate landscape paintings and portraits of wan aristocrats.

  Feeling like I’ve somehow landed in an alternate version of Grey Gardens, I head upstairs, calling S’s name. No answer. I peer into a room, and one of the old ladies leaps out. “Don’t look in here,” she snarls. “Did you see something you weren’t supposed to?”

  “I don’t even know what I wasn’t supposed to see,” I stammer.

  Composing herself, she tells me that S is down at the picnic table. Going outside, I descend a spiral staircase surrounded by dozens of colorful bromeliads and reach a multitiered, man-made waterfall. Here’s where things get bacchanalian, I imagine, looking at the lagoon under the waterfall. Nearby, an outsized hot tub is carved into the rocks. S later mentions that he is in the process of having another lake installed—for fishing—to be stocked exclusively with fruit-eating piranhas.

  I descend into the heart of the forest, getting lost several times before finding S manning the grill in a picnic area breathtakingly situated inside a gorge. The walls of the nook are fashioned out of large pieces of quartz and other crystals. Shards of amphoras and ancient jugs are fitted into the facade. A refrigerator is built into the rock. A couple of ornamental giant clam shells are filled with crabs, lobster tails, oysters and other shellfish.

  I sit down in the shade of Costa Rican palm trees. S describes the entire picnic area as “Costa Rica” because of all the imported flora. As I sip some fresh lemonade, S regales me with a few jokes.

  “Did you hear about the guy with five penises?” he asks. “His pants fit like a glove.”

  The conversation turns to S’s favorite local spots to get a “joe-blob.” He recounts a recent trip to an adult cinema: “I was there and this guy behind me says, ‘[S], is that you?’ ‘No, it isn’t,’ I said. It was this old German guy I used to buy antiques from.”

  He then starts talking about his all-time favorite names: Marina Pickless, Arlen Snuckles, Bootsy Caucus. “There was Dick Tickle, a furniture salesman,” he said. “And Blithe Piddle, a decadent mink-and-manure Virginian. Hussies and tarts, trolleys and tramps, trollops and hustlers. I even knew a guy named Rich Tinky. He had fat, sweaty, Pillsbury-doughboy hands and sold insurance. Who’d ever buy insurance from someone named Rich Tinky?”

  David Karp’s name comes up. S calls him “the Freak Detective.” “His mom was so beautiful. I guess he has a recessive gene. In fruit terms, he’d be called a mutant—no, a hybrid.” He then tells a story about how Karp had once invited him to a formal gathering. “On the way there, he asked me not to embarrass him. I said ‘Embarrass you how?’ He said, ‘You always say offbeat things—-just don’t say anything offbeat.’ So when I arrived, the first thing I said to everybody was that ‘Karp didn’t want me to say anything offbeat, which is fine because anything offbeat makes me want to beat off.’”

  A few minutes later, the sisters come hobbling through the ferns, and the tone becomes more G-rated. They speak of S like a precocious child. “He’s so clever,” fawns one of them. “He even writes screenplays and Irish poetry that is very wise and spicy. You can only hear them at private readings.” S proceeds to recite one about a butterfly being a caterpillar with wings that taste like powder.

  As we eat, I ask how they met. “We used to bid on the same paintings at auctions,” says one of the sisters. “I’d always see them at flea markets,” continues S. “They’d be driving around in a ’62 Cressida and we were always interested in the same things. We got to talking, and then one day they invited me over.”

  S, the real fresh prince of Bel-Air, had made the ultimate thrift store find. The trio started hanging out more and more, going on art buying adventures together. Soon enough, S was coming over and taking care of them—and their garden. In 1991, the sisters designated him as their sole heir. Their lawyers spent an afternoon convincing them not to do it, saying that it was madness, explains S. “But the ladies knew what they wanted. The lawyers said, ‘Fine, but as soon as we sign the papers, he can walk with everything.’ The sisters said they were comfortable with that.” When the lawyers finally let S into the room, he acted very courteously— until the papers were signed. “As soon as they signed, I stood up and yelled, ‘You can get your own damn ride back home!’ I left, slamming the d
oor. And then a few seconds later, I peeked back in, just to see the look of surprise on everybody’s face.”

  IN THE FOURTH century B.C., Ch’u Yuan wrote about why he loved fruits in a poem called “Li Sao,” translated as “Getting into Trouble.” As the popular saying goes, “a stolen apple always tastes better.” The British have actual words for pinching fruits. “Scrumping,” according to an online slang dictionary, means stealing apples from someone else’s trees. The art of apple theft is “oggy raiding.”

  In certain circumstances, scrumping is entirely legal. The term usufruct refers to the right to use and enjoy something that belongs to another person when it extends beyond their property. The word comes from the Latin usus, to use, and fructus, fruit. It applies to fruit dangling from a tree into the street, or an alleyway or into another person’s lawn. It’s courteous to ask before plucking, but in case of a disagreement, usufruct provides a legal justification for eating them.

  Thoreau was a firm advocate of scrumpers’ rights. “What sort of country is that where the huckleberry fields are private property?” he howled. If only St. Augustine had known about usufruct, perhaps he’d have been less hard on himself—and the rest of Western Civilization. Book Two of his Confessions describes the night he and a band of fellow ruffians stole pears off a neighbor’s trees. It was a thrilling sin—which later filled him with tremendous guilt. “Perhaps we ate some of them, but our real plea sure consisted in doing something that was forbidden.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions tells how he was beaten for stealing apples as a thirteen-year-old, an incident that marked him for life: “The horror of that moment returns—the pen drops from my hand.” Lucky for him he didn’t grow up in ancient Greece, where a law passed in A.D. 620 meted out the death penalty to fruit thieves and fruit tree molesters.

  John McPhee, reporting on orange thefts in Florida, learned of burglars jumping out of anchored boats with burlap bags, picking fruits under the cover of night, and making getaways with thousands of stolen oranges in luxury sedans. One thief boasted that he could pick enough oranges by moonlight to fill a Cadillac in three hours.

  A 2006 banana shortage in Australia caused by orchard-flattening cyclones led to a rash of fruit thefts. The Times of London reported that rustlers were breaking into unguarded plantations at nighttime and cutting off bunches of fruits. Bananas more than quadrupled in value. Fruit stores were also being targeted: one grocer put out a sign saying, “No bananas are kept on these premises overnight.”

  Safeguarding fruits has become increasingly vital. In Florida, sapote farmers guard their trees with rifles. Others pile fresh soil around their trees to track footprints. Bands of crop-heisting guerrillas roam rural Madagascar, leading farmers to stock firearms for self-defense. Corsica’s kiwi Mafia are notorious for attempted murders of farmers unwilling to pay protection money. Avocado commandos have told Californian farm workers, “We’re coming to steal these avocados, and if you don’t like it we’ll kill you.” Three Flags Ranch, the biggest mango farm in California, occupies a sprawling 192 acres near the Salton Sea. The ranch’s thirty thousand trees are entirely cordoned off with razor wire, a precaution taken after their first planting of mango trees was stolen. Not the fruits, mind you, but the actual young trees.

  Stories circulate among fruit growers of industrial espionage, of spies breaking into seed banks and stealing rare clonal materials in the hopes of turning a profit. For that reason, the original navel orange tree and the Golden Delicious apple tree were enclosed within padlocked cages. Intellectual-property theft is rampant in the fruit world. According to the National Licensing Association, roughly one in three patented fruit trees are grown illegally. Several farmers told me that name “Dinosaur Egg” was stolen from the inventor of the Pluot when another grower heard him use the name, and quickly trademarked it. The recent wave of white-collar fruit crime has taken on an international dimension. “Stand By to Repel the Fruit Pirates” blared the headline of a Thai newspaper about western countries removing Southeast Asian fruit in order to breed improved varieties.

  As I was writing this book, some disturbing crime occurred in my own Montreal neighborhood. A fruit store just down the street was fire-bombed on two different occasions, and no culprit was ever found. Some suggested that it was a mob hit, others that it was orchestrated by their main competitor—another fruit store a few doors away. The crime has never been solved. After the second Molotov cocktail, the demolished store rebuilt itself and reopened again, but a cloud of distrust has descended upon the grocers.

  There’s certainly a violence and desperation to the produce industry. While in Shanghai’s enormous wholesale fruit market, I was accosted by a young pineapple wholesaler from Hainan Province. “Fruit is a dangerous business,” he said. He didn’t believe I was a journalist, and was convinced that I was there as a fruit importer. He gave me a piece of cardboard with his contact info on it: “Pay attention to me!” he wrote at the top of the card. “Remember me,” he yelled out as I was leaving. “Introduce me!”

  Part 3

  COMMERCE

  9

  Marketing: From Grapples to Gojis

  This rendition comes to you by courtesy of Kaiser’s

  Stoneless Peaches. Remember no other peach now mar-

  keted is perfect and completely stoneless. When you buy

  Kaiser’s Stoneless Peach you are buying full weight of

  succulent peach flesh and nothing else.

  —Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One

  IN 1903, Isabel Fraser, the principal of an alternative girls’ school in New Zealand, suffered a breakdown from overexertion. Leaving her woes behind, she set off into the heartland of China. Traveling up the Yangtze River, she came upon some trees bearing yang taos: dusty, fuzzy, ovoid fruits with glistening emerald interiors. Seduced by their flavor, Fraser set aside some seeds, determined to grow them at home. By the time she died in 1942, those few seeds had multiplied into hundreds of thousands of trees.

  The Ichang gooseberry, as New Zealanders came to call it, became such a bountiful crop that growers started to export it in the years after World War II. Shipped overseas as the Chinese gooseberry, the fruit’s binomial was greeted in America with McCarthyist sneers. No way was some pinko Chinese fruit going to make it in the land of apple pie. The fruit’s other names—the monkey peach, the macaque peach, the vegetal mouse, the hairy pear and the unusual fruit—weren’t much better. Auckland packers realized that a catchier name was crucial to foreign sales. After settling on the Melonette, the possibility of American melon tariffs forced them to reconsider. At a brainstorm session, someone suggested the Maori word for New Zealand’s national bird: the kiwi.

  Soon enough, the kiwi began to soar; 1960s catalogs blared the news: “You had better order now; they are scarcer than screen doors on submarines.” The kiwi’s metamorphosis from obdurate, unsellable foreign weirdo to megafruit quickened the pulse of growers, shippers, sellers—and marketers. What other rubies were languishing in the dust, just waiting for a nickname to nudge them into mass production?

  Orchestrating another smash like the kiwi wasn’t as simple as investors assumed. For every mango and papaya there are countless voavangas and farkleberries that simply don’t break through in Europe and North America. Lucuma, a yellow fruit from the Andes, much loved by the Incas, was predicted to be “the next major crop” by Fruit Gardener magazine in 1990. Nearly two decades later, it doesn’t appear to have lived up to its hype. Still, Peruvian government websites offer investors the opportunity to sink funds into the industrialization of this “excellent/flagship” fruit. Putting lucuma on the map requires, according to one brochure, an initial investment of only $499,290.

  Few fruits ever become permanent fixtures like kiwi, but new varieties keep trying. In the 1980s, large sums went into pushing the babaco, an Ecuadorian fruit related to the papaya. By 1989 it was called an “Exotic Failure” because people just weren’t into it.

  Another fruit that flopped was
the naranjilla, also known as the lulo. A fuzzy golden orb with green flesh that grows on trees with enormous purple-veined leaves, is used to make a popular juice in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. The Campbell’s soup company invested years and millions of dollars attempting to popularize naranjilla in North America in the mid-1960s. Test-marketing of the juice garnered rave reviews, but the project was abandoned in 1972 because the juice’s high price deterred consumers accustomed to cheaper domestic fruit drinks. In this era of boutique juices, naranjilla juice could make a comeback.

  How do you make a hit fruit? There’s no precise methodology. Financial success with new fruits requires such an intricate confluence of factors that it’s as uncertain as raising a happy child. Servicing the cravings of a passionate few is a start. Isolating an immigrant demographic and catering to their taste buds also helps. Corporations term this phenomenon “nostalgic trade.”

  The football-shaped, red-fleshed mamey sapote grows in Cuba, as well as in southern Florida. Most Americans are unfamiliar with the fruit, but Miami’s Hispanic population loves eating it fresh or as the main ingredient in a delicious milk shake called a batido. Most places outside Miami sell powdered mamey batidos, but fresh ones are light-years better. Still, because its shelf life is limited, fresh mamey seems likely to remain confined to Florida and the tropics.