The Fruit Hunters Page 20
North of C&O’s office, orchards hug the Columbia River all the way to the Canadian border. Fewer and fewer belong to small growers. One of the farmers interviewed in Broken Limbs, Dave Crosby, says that he first got into apple farming in the 1970s because he had been told that, “You don’t have to work—you just pick the apples. You make lots of money and you can just have a good time.” It didn’t work out quite how he imagined. Crosby lost his orchard in 2003.
One of the main thoroughfares in Wenatchee, lined with the same fast-food franchises found all over America, is called Easy Street. It’s a name dear to apple growers’ hearts, especially to those who have adopted a monoculture approach. But no matter how many chemicals we throw at our food, humanity can’t weed-whack away the curse placed on Adam after eating the apple: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” Bleeding rainbows of iridescent oil, the only Easy Street around here is littered with used burger wrappers.
And just as a crisis in apple growing led to Grapples, crashes in other fruit prices are leading to similarly intriguing solutions. “Growing cranberries used to be a pleasant way of life,” says Hal Brown, moderator of a cranberry discussion group at www.cranberrystressline.com. “It’s pretty, it’s scenic, you could make some money, hire an employee or two, pay them a 30k salary. Unfortunately, the fruit’s value declined from eighty dollars a barrel in the 1990s to twelve dollars a barrel in 2001. If prices had stayed up, we could have easily made 300k per year. Thank God my wife is a librarian and I’m a psychotherapist.”
Brown has led the charge against a misguided attempt by Ocean Spray to market white cranberries as a new variety of cranberry. The original label on their juice stated: “These all natural, fully ripened, white cranberries come from the first harvest of the season so they’re milder than traditional red cranberries.” Brown wasn’t impressed. “White cranberries are just unripe berries,” he says. After he complained about these “outright lies” at the Federal Trade Commission, the language on the label was altered. “There’s no dirty secrets about growing cranberries,” he says. “It’s the marketing of them that has the dirty secrets.”
Ocean Spray has embarked on major advertising campaigns, coming up with an interactive concept called “Bogs across America.” Every fall, they construct bogs in major cities to demonstrate how cranberries are harvested under several feet of water. The idyllic swamps full of farmers in thigh-high rubber boots contrast with the industrial sorting methods cranberries undergo once they’re knocked off their low-hanging vines by tractorlike machines called egg-beaters. After being vacuumed into trucks and sorted on Bailey separators, they end up on a conveyor belt that sends them cascading over a precipice, sort of like a cranberry waterfall, where they’re filmed by optical sorters equipped with over a hundred cameras. At the slightest hint of an imperfection, a precision gun shoots out a burst of air that blows any damaged berries out of the lineup. The next level of verification takes the berries into a room lit with ultraviolet lights—bad berries emit a fluorescent glow that allows them to be picked off the conveyor belts.
Much of Ocean Spray’s marketing aims to recapture market share that they’ve been losing to pomegranate juice. Pom Wonderful juices are the brainchild of Stewart and Lynda Resnick, married Beverley Hills billionaires. They planted over a million pomegranate trees to capitalize on the fruit’s healthy image. The Resnick’s pomegranates are being sold with the promise that they “might even save a life. Yours!” Their slogan is: “Cheat death.”
Some of the other claims surrounding pomegranates are as faith-based as Mohammad telling his followers to eat pomegranates because “it purges the system of envy.” Pomegranates do contain myriad beneficial minutiae: tannins, antioxidant polyphenols, ellagic acid and punicalagin. But as the FDA-enforced warning states on one pomegranate-capsule maker’s website: “These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.” That hasn’t stopped new products like condoms soaked in pomegranate juice from being sold as having extra protection against HIV. Experiments on rabbits have shown that pomegranates positively affect erectile dysfunction—a condition not normally associated with bunnies.
Whenever news reports come out saying a fruit or juice is amazingly healthy, the corresponding study is almost invariably funded by producers with vested interests. Researchers from Boston’s Children’s Hospital examined the results of 111 juice and beverage studies financed by manufacturers, and—big surprise—they found that the studies were often biased. If you read the fine print on the American Association for Cancer Research Journal’s article on pomegranate juice’s effect on prostate cancer (which concludes that further study is necessary), you’ll see that the study was financed by a grant from the Resnicks.
Nutrition is a shifting field riddled with contradictions, misbeliefs and fantasies. Despite the unanimity among nutritionists that we need to eat a variety of fruits and vegetables daily, as well as exercise, most of us don’t. Entrepreneurs, capitalizing on misinformation, are using the power of marketing to magnify certain fruits’ curative effects. As a result, vast amounts of money are being spent in the hope that individual fruits can heal all woes.
A 2006 ADVERTISEMENT in the Farmer’s Almanac for a book called Unleash the Inner Healing Power of Foods claims that two servings a week of grape juice fights “heart attack, stroke, diabetes and cancer!” Its main source is a 1928 book called The Grape Cure that has sold more than one million copies and is still in print today. Written by Johanna Brandt, the book recommends that sick people should eat nothing but grapes. The author provided anecdotal evidence of curing terminal cancer patients. She told of a woman in the Bronx who couldn’t stop vomiting day and night until Brandt administered some grapes. Another young woman with rectal and colon problems started the Grape Cure and began oozing pus. “When she began to pass worms, I knew that the terrible ordeal was nearly over. The grapes seemed to ferret out the most deep-seated cause of trouble and drive it from the system … Sanctified by suffering, this woman has emerged from the abyss of premature death to be a witness to the divine healing properties of the grape.”
The American Cancer Society investigated the Grape Cure on a number of occasions and never established any proof of it healing cancer or other diseases. Quackwatch.org concludes that it is a book worth ignoring: “There is no scientific evidence that the Johanna Brandt’s Grape Cure has any value.”
Following grapes, there was an unsubstantiated craze for apricot seeds in the 1960s and 1970s. This mania can be traced to reports of the Hunzas, a remote people living in the Himalayas who were renowned for their longevity, endurance and lack of diseases. Apricots were the Hunza staple, used fresh, dried, crushed, baked and in an oil extracted from the kernel. As a result, a chemical compound in the apricot kernels, called Laetrile, came to be marketed as nature’s anticarcinogen. Celebrity advocates such as a dying Steve McQueen as well as other desperate cancer patients latched on to Laetrile as a final hope, but it never seemed to cure anybody. Eventually, the National Cancer Institute sponsored a study to determine Laetrile’s effectiveness. They found nothing. The New England Journal of Medicine declared that “the evidence, beyond reasonable doubt, is that it doesn’t benefit patients with advanced cancer, and there is no reason to believe that it would be any more effective in the earlier stages of the disease.” As a result, the sale of Laetrile was banned, and some of its marketers incarcerated. It continues to be sold online from clinics in Tijuana. In recent years, the United States has cracked down on companies such as Holistic Alternatives and World Without Cancer, Inc., that have sold Laetrile.
The latest fruit panacea to hit the market has also been linked to the Hunza. According to a booklet called Goji: The Himalayan Health Secret, tests involving infrared molecular bonds, a spectroscopic fingerprinting analysis and a mathematical formula called the Fourier Transform suggest that the goji is “quite possibly the most nutritionally dense food on the planet!” The book’s author, Dr. E
arl Mindell (who bills himself as “the world’s leading nutritionist”), starts by asking readers how long they want to live. “Eighty years? Ninety? One hundred-plus years? Perhaps even forever?”
The goji not only extends your life, it improves sexual function, helps you see in the dark, alleviates stress, relieves headaches, causes old blood to turn young again—and prevents cancer. To substantiate these claims historically, Mindell trots out someone called Master Li Qing Yuen, “the most famous goji user of all time.” Yuen, so the tale spins, was born in 1678 and died in 1930, aged 252. His secret? Daily goji berries.
Mindell prescribes daily glassfuls of his specially formulated Himalayan Goji juice—which retails at a mere forty dollars a liter. Goji berries are certainly good for you as are most fruits. In order to find out how this juice differs from the goji berries available in Chinatown for a couple of dollars a pound, I tried contacting Dr. Earl Mindell repeatedly. None of the messages I left on his answering machine were answered. Calls to FreeLife (manufacturers of his Goji juice) and Momentum Media (the publishers of Goji) yielded nothing. According to the National Council Against Health Fraud, Mindell’s doctorate is from the University of Beverly Hills, “an unaccredited school which lacks a campus or laboratory facilities.” I also tried contacting Mindell at Pacific Western University in Los Angeles, where he is, according to his bio, a professor of nutrition. When I called, the university claimed that, according to their files, no Dr. Mindell had worked there, nor had it ever offered any classes in nutrition.
Venomous debates have sprung up online regarding the juice’s putative benefits. Not coincidentally, the most vociferous defenders of the juice often happen to sell it. These salesmen’s websites offer goji juice in shipments of four bottles for twelve monthly payments of $186—coming to over $2,200 per year.
Multilevel marketing, or MLM, is a quasi-legal form of pyramid selling, which involves locking recruits into yearly contracts. Repackaging cheap fruit-juice ingredients, and branding them as cure-alls, MLM juice installment plans often leave customers with thousands of dollars in fruit-stained debt, rather than a reprieve from their terminal illness.
Goji juice isn’t alone. Tahitian Noni juice nabbed thousands of suckers in the 1990s, until the scheme fell apart. Today, eight bottles of Mon-aVie açai juice—“the authentic solution for humanity”—sell for $298. Never mind that it’s a blend of nineteen fruits (mainly apple juice), or that pure fair trade organic Sambazon açai juice can be purchased at grocery stores for $3.50 a bottle. Yet another addition to the MLM’s roster is XanGo mangosteen juice. Its sellers’ promotional materials say it heals cancer, depression, fevers, glaucoma, tumors, ulcers, allergies, eczema, thrush, scabies, headaches, back pain, erectile dysfunction, glandular swelling, crooked teeth and on and on. No published clinical trials substantiate these claims, but Oprah loves it. Having generated over 200 million dollars in 2005, XanGo is predicting annual sales of 1 billion dollars by 2009.
Supplements sold through multilevel marketing generate over 4.2 billion dollars annually. The miracle-juice industry is clustered alongside the I-15 in a part of Utah known as Cellulose Valley. Pushing faith is a long-standing Mormon tradition, with generations of door-to-door elders spreading the evangelical message. But there’s another reason Utah is the nucleus for these unproven natural remedies.
Senator Orrin Hatch was the architect of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which absolved producers from having to gain Food and Drug Administration approval before being sold. Not surprisingly, Hatch is himself an investor in Utah herbal companies such as Pharmics and accepts major financial donations from supplement manufacturers. The makers of XanGo made campaign contributions of $46,200 to Hatch in 2006.
Many MLM companies have managed to sidestep regulatory conflicts because unaffiliated salesmen make the fraudulent health claims on their behalf. There doesn’t seem to be anything that can be done to prevent families from spending large sums on empty promises: and perhaps these juices, even at their inflated costs, may help certain adherents. The glimmering half-facts of fruit marketing tap into our need to believe. Getting to the truth is its own adventure, as I learned when I started investigating the story of how one truly miraculous fruit was banned in America.
10
Miraculin:
The Story of the Miracle Fruit
There were fruit trees with fruit that sang its way down
dry throats like the gurgle of rippling brooks …. Strange
native fruits, flaming with color, bursting with juice.
Nature on holiday, spending herself like a drunken sailor.
—Galbraith Welch, The Unveiling of Timbuctoo
MY DESCENT into Douala, the largest city in Cameroon, is a dark one. As the plane dips through swirling mist in the cloud base, only a few streetlights shimmer below, like smudged pearls in an inky sea of night. A truck with a broken headlight grins gap-toothedly on the runway.
Cameroon describes itself as “Africa in miniature.” With its rain forests, mountains, deserts, savanna grasslands and ocean coastlands, the country is a hotbed of biodiversity. Its countless wild plant and animal species would make it a prime ecotourism destination—if only it were a little more visitor-friendly.
The transport infrastructure consists of dirt roads that swallow vehicles whole. Stoned teenaged soldiers with Kalashnikovs roam around at night. Transparency International places Cameroon between Iran and Pakistan in their list of the world’s most corrupt nations. It’s hard to get through a few hours without being embroiled in a bribe scenario. Forget about using credit cards or bank cards: it’s cash only, U.S. dollars preferably. Foreigners get fleeced at every turn.
I pay off a guard to get my bags through customs. Outside, a dozen red-eyed young men immediately pounce on me, barking information and hawking services ranging from hotels and taxis to relieving me of my possessions. My contact, a horticultural administrator from Limbe’s botanical garden named Joseph Mbelle, is nowhere to be seen. He’d confirmed several times by e-mail that he would be here with a “plycard” bearing my name. Clutching the gift he asked me to bring (a silver-plated watch with “genuine leather strap”), I look around expectantly. At that moment, a dwarf breaks through the throng to assail me. “What company are you with?” he shouts. “What company?”
I shake my head. “I’m not with a company.” He leers at me and hobbles away. The back of his T-shirt reads “Ungodly Brutality, Urban Reality.”
A man in a fez walks by with a goat. A soldier wearing a red beret starts waving his machine gun at the youths clustered around me. “Danger!” he shouts. “Very dangerous!” As they disperse, the soldier stands next to me, explaining that they want to take my “loot.” (I end up paying him fifty dollars in protection money that he starts angrily demanding.)
The Canadian embassy had warned me to stay off the streets at night because of carjacking bandits. Unfortunately, my flight arrived at 2 A.M. Instead of getting a hotel in Douala for the night, I’d been counseled by Joseph to hire him—as well as a car, a driver and a security guard—to meet me at the airport and bring me to the botanical garden that night. An hour and a half later, Joseph, accompanied by two sullen men, finally appears. They’d been pulled over by police and fined for not having the correct paperwork.
As we drive into the darkness, I catch glimpses of shacks and huts in the moonlight. Every fifteen minutes we come to a military roadblock. Invariably, as the gendarmes go through my papers, they try to squeeze payments out of me. One officer asks if it has occurred to me that I have no idea who these men are and that they could be taking me hostage. Shouting matches ensue. As dawn is breaking, we arrive at a crumbling, vine-covered, plaster cube building on the grounds of Limbe’s 110-year-old botanical garden. I set up my mosquito tent and fall asleep immediately.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, I make my way through lush foliage and brilliant sunshine to the entrance of the Mount Cameroon Biodiversity Conservation Center. At the front de
sk, a painted sign offers visitors “Nature Interpretation for Maximal Enjoyment.” The cursive letters recommend hiring a guide: “Otherwise everything will just be green and nice or strange and spectacular—without meaning.”
Not wanting everything to be merely strange and spectacular, I take on the services of thirty-seven-year-old Benjamin Jayin Jomi, a colleague of Joseph’s. With a sly, baby-faced smile and cocked eyebrow, Benjamin is soft-spoken but has a deep knowledge of Cameroon’s plants. As we stroll about the grounds of the living gene bank, he explains how many of these indigenous trees have become raw materials for the international pharmaceutical industry.
The African cherry is marketed in pill form to treat prostate illness. The Ancistrocladus korupensis, discovered in 1987 by American bio-prospectors seeking cancer medication in the nearby Korup forest, contains an anti-HIV compound called Michellamine b that is in preclinical development. The yohimbe tree, known as African Viagra, is used in impotency supplements sold with the tagline “killer erections all nite!”
“There is always something new out of Africa,” wrote Pliny the Elder in the first century A.D. Today, medical corporations are studying vin-camin, the active ingredient in itongongo for its effects on hypoglycemia and cerebral metabolism. Benjamin says locals use it the same way nomadic tribes have for millennia: to cure toothaches and facilitate lactation. When rubbed on postpartum mothers’ breasts, exudates in these heart-shaped galactagogues increase milk flow.
Cameroonians consume medicinal plants the way Westerners use Advil or Nyquil. The majaimainjombe, or blood-of-an-animal plant, is used as a pain reliever. The oil palm counteracts everything from measles to hernias. The bush mango is said to produce Y chromosomes, so members of the Ebu and Bayangi tribes eat it before procreating in order to conceive boys. Benjamin and his wife, Doris, have three children—all girls. Didn’t he use bush mango? “Traditions differ,” he laughs. “We don’t eat it where I come from.”