The Fruit Hunters Read online

  He even gets into a dissection of fisting while discussing William Dickey’s poem “Plum,” citing the lines “Forcing their unlubricated entry, / a fist in spring & the bruised membranes clench / & convulse.” Palter concludes that the poem “is always on the verge of shattering the clenched delicacies of the traditional villanelle form.”

  I found Palter’s number in the phone book and gave him a call. He wasn’t particularly interested in edible fruits. “I deplore the fruits that I do get,” he sighed, speaking from his home in Connecticut. But then his mood brightened as he explained that he had recently tasted a fresh fig for the first time. “I thought, ‘there can’t be such an organism—it’s just too much!’” he exclaimed, excitedly sending short, staccato bursts of air into the receiver.

  I asked him how he came to be so interested in literary fruits. “There’s an obvious association with fruits and human life and love and sex and enjoyment,” he told me. “But fruit rots! So there are negative connotations, as well. Fruits can represent political corruption. I can find you literary examples that make use of fruit to present any human feeling, sometimes rather subtle feelings—it’s the whole spectrum.”

  Bob Dylan, in the liner notes to “Highway 61 Revisited,” wrote ironically of someone “writing a book about the true meaning of a pear.” Palter’s book, which doesn’t include Dylan’s quote, notes that pears can have infinite meanings, whether as sexual objects, images of failed hopes, or metaphors of entropy. The essence of Palter’s investigation is that the true power of fruits lies in their ability to seduce us.

  He began by envisaging a short essay on fruits, but his research started accumulating at an alarming rate. He was soon overwhelmed by examples. “Every time I’d find another instance of fruits in a story, I’d say, ‘Wow! I can’t believe this!’” Librarians started referring to him as “the fruit guy” behind his back. After he’d gathered a mountain of fruit anecdotes, he approached the University of South Carolina Press about doing a three-hundred-page book. By the time he submitted his manuscript, it had swelled to six hundred pages. As it was being prepared for publishing, he kept sending in new material, until he was finally told that enough’s enough.

  According to his introduction, the project is inherently open-ended, the book merely an “interim report.” He decided to end the book with no punctuation, as a sign of its endlessness. Long after publication, he still couldn’t stop finding fruit episodes. As he put it in a reminiscence called My Big Fruit Book: “Involuntarily, and even against my conscious intentions, I persist in scanning for fruit everything I encounter in the way of print and pictures.”

  Toward the end of our conversation, Palter said that he was considering donating all his fruit books to the library. “I have to stop with the fruits,” he said, letting out another huge sigh. Still, months after we spoke, he’d send me e-mails with fruit anecdotes. One contained his “recent discovery” of a scene in Javier Marias’s novel All Souls. Listing the page numbers and the context—a faculty dinner—Palter recounted that during dessert the Warden “‘insisted on decorating the bosom of the Dean of York’s wife with a necklace made out of mandarin segments.’ What a picture! Best, Robert.”

  AS FASCINATING AS literary fruits may be, I also wanted to learn the stories behind the actual fruits we eat. Our supermarket staples can be traced back to particular people and places. The Hass avocado began when Pasadena postman Rudolph Hass was persuaded by his children to not cut down an odd seedling. He patented his avocados in 1935; today Hasses account for the overwhelming majority of avocados sold worldwide. Bing cherries are named after Oregon’s Ah Bing, a nineteenth-century Manchurian. The clementine is a type of mandarin baptized by Father Clément Rodier at his Algerian orphanage in 1902. The tangerine is a mandarin variant from the city of Tangiers. Dingaan’s apple is named after an African chief who was murdered after murdering his brother. The McIntosh apple began with a broken heart.

  John McIntosh was born in 1777 in New York. As a young man, he fell in love with Dolly Irwin, whose United Empire Loyalist parents were against the American Revolution—and their daughter’s marriage. Eighteen-year-old McIntosh followed Dolly soon after she and her family fled to Canada. Tragically, by the time he arrived at their encampment in Cornwall, she had passed away. In a state of grief and disbelief, he exhumed Dolly’s remains to confirm that she was really dead. After sobbing upon her decomposing corpse, he set out on foot, eventually settling on a plot of land near the village of Iroquois, Ontario. The terrain was overgrown with weeds, brambles, and bushes. Clearing it, he found twenty small apple trees, all of which soon died, except one—which bore exceptional fruit. Cuttings were grafted onto other trees, and by the early twentieth century, McIntosh apples were widely available.

  Today, there are more than twenty thousand named varieties of apples—not including all the countless wild weirdos that never merited a moniker. So many apples exist that we can’t even count them all. Forget an apple a day—you could eat a different apple every day for the rest of your life, or at least for the next fifty-five years. Some of the best taste like raspberries, fennel, pineapple, cinnamon, watermelon, broccoli, crayons or banana-hazelnut ice cream. There is a variety of rectangular yellow apple whose hollow core seeps mellifluous liquid as you eat it. It’s like the natural version of that gusher bubblegum with juice in the center. There are black-skinned Gilliflower apples, ivory hued White Transparents, orange-fleshed Apricot apples, and others with deep red interiors. A few summers ago, in the heirloom apple orchard at Vancouver’s Strathcona park, I came across a nacreous apple identified by its tag as a Pink Pearl. As I cut out the first neat slice for some friends, we all gasped: its flesh was bright pink.

  Every time we eat a fruit, we’re tasting forgotten histories. Emperors, tsars, kings and queens used to prize fruits. In one poem by Ibn Sara, oranges appear as damsel’s cheeks, red-hot coals, tears reddened by the torments of love and balls of carnelian in branches of topaz. They’ve made us run riot metaphorically and literally. When pineapples first arrived in Britain they created a frenzy among aristocrats. Bananas once caused such a sensation in the United States that they were served as the pièce de résistance at the hundredth-anniversary celebration of the Declaration of Independence. They symbolized freedom, as they did in East Berlin when the wall came down—garbage cans were surrounded by banana peels, as they were the first thing the Ossis bought.

  In the ongoing dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, there have been moments of truce over sharbat, a local fruit juice. In 2000, some twenty-five thousand Indians offered Pakistani border guards sharbat as a gesture of goodwill. Both Israelis and Palestinians see the cactus pear as a symbol of their people. For Israelis, it represents their own prickly exteriors and sweet interiors. Palestinians see it as a symbol of patience, the patience it takes to peel and prepare the fruit, as well as the patience needed to cope with their ongoing challenges.

  Fruits have fueled wars, dictatorships and the discovery of new worlds. A horse may have ended the Trojan War, but it began when Paris gave Aphrodite the apple of discord. Attica’s figs spurred King Xerxes to embark on the Greco-Persian Wars. The Third Punic war was launched when Cato held up a fresh ripe fig and said, “Know this, it was picked two days ago in Carthage; that’s how near the enemy are to our walls!” Albion brandishing oranges galvanized the troops of Lombard to invade Italy. The addictive fruit of the poppy plant was at the heart of Britain’s opium wars with China. The nineteenth-century Maoris, who eradicated the Moriori in the Chatham Islands, went there because they heard it was the land of the karaka berry. In Scandinavia, battles that erupt between cloudberry harvesters in Finland, Sweden and Norway have caused foreign affairs ministries to set up departments for “cloudberry diplomacy.”

  Fruits aren’t what they seem. Red hearts and black eyes, capsules of sunlight and crystal drops of blood, as tempting—and deceitful—as the knowledge of good and evil, these sweet mirages have filled us with wonder
from the start of time.

  The earliest humans moved from tree to tree, eating their fill. Settling into sedentary agriculture, their descendents worshipped fruits. Religions deified them, royalty clamored for them, poets seeking to express the ineffable carved symbols out of them, and mystics used them in rituals to facilitate visions. Fruits have activated our basest genetic instincts and elevated us to rapturous heights.

  After all, Adam and Eve chose the fleeting taste of a fruit over eternal paradise. Buddha attained enlightenment under a fig tree. Mohammed said, regarding those who enter paradise, “for them there is a known provision: fruits.” The Aztec upper world of Tlalócan is an orchard full of glowing fruit trees. Tribes in the Malay Peninsula, such as the Jakun or the Semang, speak of a “Fruit Island” where dead souls end up. The Egyptian promised land was called Yaa, and according to a hieroglyphic epistle by Sinuhe, its trees were laden with figs, grapes and many other fruits. In Asgard, the Norse otherworld, apples keep gods young and immortal. Ancient Greece’s Elysian Fields, reported Robert Graves, are apple orchards where only the souls of heroes are granted access. Avalon, meaning “Apple-land” or “Isle of Apples,” is where King Arthur went to live forever and eat apples. In Jewish lore, when you enter paradise, you get eight myrtle berries and a standing ovation. Africa’s Brakna nomads believe that heaven is full of gourd-sized berries. The Wampanoags of New England follow the smell of strawberries to get to the Spirit World. Thomas Campion described paradise as a place wherein all pleasant fruits do flow. Paramahansa Yogananda notes that “a Hindu’s heaven without mangos is inconceivable!”

  In Chinese mythology, peaches tended by Hsi Wang Mu, the Queen Mother of the West, are said to grant eternal life. She dwells in a palace encircled by a golden wall on the mountains at the summit of the world. Her garden is full of perfumed blossoms and trees dripping with blue-green fairy jewels. Beside a lake of gems, where invisible instruments play gentle melodies, Hsi Wang Mu’s beautiful daughters serve peaches that take three thousand years to ripen. These fruits render the eater immortal.

  In recent years, a scholarly debate has raged around literal interpretations of certain Islamic precepts. German linguist Christoph Luxenberg claims that today’s version of the Koran has been mistranslated from the original text, and that the seventy-two virgins (houris) promised to martyrs are in fact “white raisins” and “juicy fruits.” Luxenberg’s chief hypothesis is that the original language of the Koran was not Arabic but something closer to Aramaic. Through an analysis of the paradise passage in Aramaic, he confirms that the mysterious houris become fruit—much more common components of the heaven myth.

  The term paradise itself derives from the Persian language of Avestan. Pairidaeza initially meant an irrigated pleasure garden full of fruit trees. In the Islamic tradition, gardens replicate heaven. The same applied in ancient China, where the Imperial gardens were magical diagrams of the otherworld. Britain’s Stephen Switzer, author of 1724’s The Practical Fruit Gardener, wrote that “a well-contriv’d Fruit-Garden is an Epitome of Paradise itself.” The glowing lights on Christmas trees are linked to the pagan Germanic belief in wish-fulfilling trees laden with numinous fruits. References to the divine crop up repeatedly in the scientific names for fruits. Taxonomists named cacao fruits Theobroma, Greek for “food of gods.” A Latin binomial for bananas was Musa paradisica, or fruits of paradise. In 1830, grapefruits became Citrus paradisi. Persimmons are Diospyros: “fruit of the gods.”

  IN THE PAST, fruits were elusive treasures. When my father was a student in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, his elementary school’s top prize for the year’s best student was half an orange. Mark Twain considered watermelons chief of this world’s luxuries. Thoreau saw apples as “fairy food, too beautiful to eat.” In the early Middle Ages, fruits were so rare they were likened to angels’ tears of joy. If you were able to taste a plum only once or twice in your life, you’d probably think of it as a holy mauve sphere speckled with golden pixie dust too.

  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 even dislike fruits. Perhaps that’s because, on average, fruits are eaten two to three weeks after being picked.

  Our global economy demands standardized products: dependable, consistent and uniform. Having commodified nature, we’re eating the shrapnel of a worldwide homogeneity bomb. I’ve purchased identical apples in Borneo, Brazil, Budapest and Boston. 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 silicon implants and taste like tennis balls, mothballs or mealy, juiceless cotton wads.

  Real fruits are delicate, living things that need to be handled with care. Despite our manipulations, fruits are at their core rebellious and unpredictable. Apples from the same tree have different flavors. The time of day a fruit gets picked affects its quality. Individual sections of a single orange vary in sugar levels. Next time you find a good peach, try biting the bottom—it’s sweeter. Fruits are ephemeral, meant to be enjoyed at the time of harvest. We’ve found ways of circumventing the restrictions of seasonality—distribution cold chains, precision agriculture, genetic meddling—but in doing so, we sacrifice flavor. Fruits today are as bland as they are ubiquitous.

  This Faustian transaction includes unpleasant side effects. Chemical and pesticidal residues. Waxes and dyes. Uncontrollable oil hemorrhages. Banana republics. Irradiation and fumigation facilities. Cold-storage rooms where fruits rust for months on end. Billionaire fruit barons importing illicit substances on eighteen-wheelers from Colombia. Indentured laborers dying in tropical fields.

  But things are changing. There are alternatives to monoculture, whether it’s velvety peaches that gush nectar or heirloom pears dating back to the Renaissance. Growing these blasts of taste-bud bliss requires obstinacy, perseverance, and above all, passion. Fortunately, small producers’ devotion is being mirrored by consumers and chefs, with the ensuing coverage in food media contributing to the emergence of rock-star farmers. The next step may be a rediscovery of lost tropical crops, many of which could reduce global hunger. In his book Biophilia, Wilson suggests three “star species,” all fruits, that represent this hope: the winged bean, the wax gourd and the Babussa palm. We have much to look forward to.

  For now, the fruits most likely to be found in fruit bowls the world over, based on the United Nations’ statistics, are bananas (and plantains), apples, citrus fruits, grapes, mangoes, melons, coconuts and pears. Peaches, plums, dates and pineapples occupy a smaller dish off to the side. The developed world’s bowl is bigger, and also full of strawberries. The developing world cradles infinite varieties of underutilized tropical fruits.

  By discovering fruits, whether in our backyards or abroad, we can reconnect with nature, the realm of the sublime. To experience biophilia is to love a diversity that, as limitless as it is fragile, both haunts us and fills us with hope. This then, is the story of fruits, and of the intense connections between fruits and humans. A caveat: they can become an all-consuming preoccupation.

  “Near complete absorption in an eccentric interest was seen as admirable and virtuous in the 19th century,” explains historian of science Lorraine Daston, noting, however, that by the twentieth century, the single-minded pursuit of natural knowledge came to be perceived as “almost pathological, a magnificent but dangerous obsession.” Delight has a price. Daston gives examples of how those intoxicated by the marvels of nature, particularly those with an unremitting attention to a single subject, face nervous collapse, isolation and, curiously, the same obstacles faced by any addict. The need to know has been perilous since Genesis.

  I started dreaming of fruits almost nightly. I dreamed of finding important scrolls hidden under peaches at the grocery store. I learned how to play music with ma
ngoes and take photos with oranges. I came across edible kaleidoscopes while hunting treasure inside labyrinth caves on secret islands. I dreamt of self-immolation, and in the heart of the flames, fruits appeared to me.

  From the beginning, it was unclear whether I was hunting fruits or whether they were hunting me. It was in Brazil that I was first lured by the siren song of fruits, but the Newton-like epiphany that I had to tell their story came a couple of years later. I was sprawled on a poolside deck chair at Hollywood’s Highland Gardens Hotel, reading about how fairy tales are the basis for our modern stories. Just as I began a paragraph describing the magic seeds that guide the hero through treacherous trials, a golden speck landed on the page. I looked up at the branch overhead. A moment later, a second speck fell onto the open book, right on the y in eternity. Pressing my finger into it, I picked up the plant particle to give it a closer examination. Slightly smaller than a peppercorn, it was oblong and covered in tiny bristles. I popped it with my pencil tip, and a tender yellow seed rolled out. My botanical knowledge was so rudimentary I wasn’t even sure what part of the plant it might be, but my suspicions proved true. Fruits, so ordinary they’re extraordinary, were summoning me.

  PART 1

  NATURE

  1

  Wild, Ripe and Juicy:

  What Is a Fruit?

  Homer: Lisa, would you like a doughnut?

  Lisa: No thanks. Do you have any fruit?

  Homer: This has purple in it. Purple is a fruit.

  —The Simpsons

  WHEN I THINK about opening a book in front of the fireplace, I don’t imagine myself reading about fruits,” a family friend confessed when he heard about my research. But as the discussion turned to the fruits we loved as kids, he suddenly remembered how his girlfriend had, a few years earlier, surprised him by hiding a guava in the house. “I could smell it as soon as I came in,” he said. He hadn’t tasted one since leaving Israel decades earlier as a fifteen-year-old. When he found the guava, he triumphantly carried it into bed and curled up with it. After deeply inhaling its fragrance, he started kissing it like a long-lost lover and rubbing it all over himself.