The Fruit Hunters Read online

  Harvey, who is familiar with the Kare conspiracy theory, thinks the sugar-industry conspiracy theory is more plausible. “It’s all speculative, but the sugar-industry group had more clout and resources to make it happen,” says Harvey. “Whoever it was, they convinced someone at the FDA to bypass the due process of law. It was skullduggery. Somebody at some level in the government was paid off.”

  Lawyers advised Harvey that moving Miralin forward would require years of litigation, an intense emotional commitment with no guarantee of success. “I was all worked up and upset and I was ready to sue everybody and do all kinds of things, but it was really starting to bear down on my health and create other problems,” he says. “So my wife and family and I decided we would just move on.” He established a cardio-equipment company called Thoratec now worth about a billion dollars. Currently seventy-six years old, he’s working on a book about his miracle-fruit experience.

  Harvey doesn’t believe that the miracle fruit or miraculin will ever become widely available in North America, due to the immense cost of overseeing plantations around the world. “If you translate the tens of millions of dollars from 1968 that’s one hundred fifty million dollars today,” he says. “Theoretically there’s no reason why somebody couldn’t. If you ask me what’s the likelihood of that happening today, I would say probably not very good. I wouldn’t bet on it.” Nevertheless, certain developments are afoot that are shifting the odds.

  Japan, where square watermelons designed to fit refrigerator shelves and peach-scented pink strawberries sell for vast sums, has embraced the miracle fruit. Researchers have developed genetically modified lettuce and tomatoes containing miraculin; a company named NGK Insulators Ltd. manufactures miraculin pills for diabetics; and miracle-fruit cafés have opened up in Osaka and Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district. The cafés’ investors developed a way of freeze-drying the miracle fruits so that they can be defrosted and then consumed before sampling a range of sour foods including tart cakes, high-acid fruits, rose-hip teas, lemon gelato and other ice creams. Cake and tea for two comes to about twenty-five dollars, but has one-fifth the calories of a normal dessert.

  The Japanese are also at the forefront of research on the lemba fruit. It contains curculin, a protein that, similarly to miraculin, converts sourness to sweetness. The country also sells natural sweeteners such as stevia, katemfe and the serendipity berry that are difficult to find in North America and Europe.

  In the absence of miracle-fruit research, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have patented brazzein, a sweetener found in yet another West African fruit, the ballion. Brazzein is now being genetically spliced into corn. In Gabon, it is called l’oublie (the forgetting) because it is so sweet it makes you forget everything.

  The miracle fruit is still grown by amateur enthusiasts in a few private gardens in America. From the time he procured a cutting from one of Fairchild’s plants in 1952 until his death in 2007, William Whitman ate a miracle fruit every morning before his fruit salad. It’s still served before dessert at the Palm Beach Four Seasons Resort. Richard Wilson, of Florida’s Excalibur Nurseries, gives many of his berries to cancer patients. Chemotherapy makes foods and drinks taste disagreeable and rubbery. According to Florida oncologists, the miracle fruit appears to replace the persistent metallic chemical taste in patients’ mouths with a sweet flavor that allows them to enjoy eating once again. “It also counteracts chemotherapy nausea,” contends Wilson.

  “There’s a lot of uses for it, some that can’t be mentioned on camera,” Wilson told me when I first interviewed him in Miami. “Just remember: it makes everything sweeter.” When, in a subsequent phone conversation, I asked for clarification, he answered forthrightly: “Girls like it a lot because it makes their boyfriends really sweet. They’re very candid about why they buy it. One girl said, ‘When I suck his dick it’s sweet as honey.’ I even caught a neighbor robbing berries off my bush at two A.M. I was out there with my pistol and I said, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ He said, ‘Sorry, my wife just needed those berries right now.’”

  Pat “The Blueberry King” Hartmann grew ten thousand miracle-fruit plants in a greenhouse in Michigan in the 1990s. “I monkeyed with ’em,” he says. “I thought I was sitting on a gold mine, but it didn’t turn out that way.” After being told that he couldn’t sell the fruits in the United States, he was happy to unload all the plants when a Chinese buyer inquired. “I sold them all to China, five dollars a plant,” he says. Hartmann remains incensed about the fruit’s unavailability. “The FDA feeds us baloney,” he says. “They’re dumb. They’re dumb. There y’are.”

  The regulatory limbo is the source of some confusion. One grower said that he’d been told he could sell up to four ounces at a time. “The FDA allows small-scale miracle-fruit operations to grow and sell the fruits,” Wilson told me. “From what I understand, the regulations prohibit marketing and selling the fruit on a wide basis.”

  Another grower, Curtis Mozie, in Fort Lauderdale, says he can sell as many fresh berries as he wants: “It’s perfectly okay to sell the fruit. What you can’t do is alter the fruit, by extracting miraculin, and then go and sell that.” He hasn’t ever confirmed this with the FDA, saying he has no reason to call them. He did, however, call me back several times to see if I could figure it out.

  I called the FDA about twenty times in attempts to verify the berries’ status. Many pointless messages and conversations later, all I could establish with any certainty is that miraculin is banned and the actual miracle fruit occupies a gray area. According to the FDA’s 1974 letter, the berries can’t be sold either. But today, while the FDA confirms that miraculin isn’t on their list of approved food additives (“meaning it isn’t allowed to be sold”), they say that the fresh berries aren’t covered by their jurisdiction. Fresh fruits, I was told, are regulated by the USDA. The half dozen departments I contacted at the USDA all said that they had no regulations concerning the miracle fruit’s sale or use as a fresh food. Then again, none of them had ever heard of the fruit before.

  Mozie, who has 1,500 trees, each of which bears hundreds of fruits, sells his harvest for $1.80 a berry at www.miraclefruitman.com. “Eventually, you’ll be able to go to a Winn-Dixie or any supermarket and buy my berries,” he said. In the spring of 2007, he managed to sell his entire crop—tens of thousands of berries. He had thousands more on back order. “The best thing about the miracle fruit is that it crops year-round,” he said, marveling that no one has made money with it yet. “I’m getting orders every day. I’ll have a hundred thousand fruits ready to ship by summertime. Think that’ll be enough?”

  11

  Mass Production:

  The Geopolitics of Sweetness

  Do I dare to eat a peach?

  —T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

  IN THE MIDDLE of the night, on May 16, 2001, a dozen masked intruders entered a corporate farm in California. Arriving at a test plot of strawberries, they plunged their hands into the soil and started wrenching out the plants.

  The marauders were a loose-knit band of activists called the Fragaria Freedom Fighters (fragaria being Latin for strawberry). The field laboratory they were stalking through belonged to DNA Plant Technology Holdings, a bioengineering company developing genetically modified (GM) fruit. “We invalidated the year’s experiment in less than ten minutes, and caused some uncounted amount of economic damage,” read a communiqué issued by the fruit rebels. “A good night’s work lying in shreds behind us, we melted into the night.”

  This wasn’t the strawberry liberation army’s first attack. Over fifty anti-GM actions had already taken place, since the inaugural 1987 demonstration against frost-resistant strawberries sprayed with modified bacteria. These missions weren’t simply frenzies of genetic obliteration. The Fragaria Freedom Fighters were demanding a return to organic methods, as a subsequent press release explained. After sabotaging the research field of GM strawberries belonging to another lab, Plant Scien
ces, Inc., they scattered a variety of organic seeds over the wreckage “to see to it that not only is GM material destroyed, but sustainable agriculture is left in its destructive wake.”

  Transgenic modification is what happens when DNA is spliced from one species into another. In the past, there was no way a sea urchin could mate with a pussy willow. In recent times, molecular technology has allowed scientists to pursue unlikely genetic combinations, such as goats with spider genes that lactate bulletproof silk, or glow-in-the-dark tobacco leaves bred with fireflies’ incandescence genes. In food, this technology has primarily been adopted by large-scale monoculture growers of corn, soybeans and grain crops. It has also been used with sweet fruits, but on a limited scale.

  Ice-Minus and Frost Ban strawberries were grown with the addition of genetically modified bacteria called “frost-inhibitors,” but they never passed the developmental phase. The Flavr-savr tomato, which contained cold-resistant fish genes (arctic flounder, to be precise), failed after a few years on the market. Most Hawaiian papayas are GM, containing within themselves a vaccination-like genetic dose of the ringspot virus which decimates crops. Papayas’ survival has proven to be a mixed blessing for Hawaiian farmers: their fruits are sold in North America, but are banned in many other countries. In 2004, Thai Greenpeace activists dressed in full-body hazmat outfits placed GM papayas into hazardous-waste disposal bins in a widely broadcast action that led to arrests and imprisonment.

  It’s hard to determine which foods have been altered because they aren’t labeled as such. Most consumers reject GM foods when alerted to their presence, but modified crops have creeped into many of the processed foods we eat. With its higher yields, GM has been embraced by industrialized agriculture. Opponents argue that GM crops contaminate nearby fields and warn that not enough testing has been done to establish the safety of molecular engineering. The technology, they say, is to be another step away from diversified and sustainable farming methods. The debate will continue in coming years as transgenic intervention is being touted as the only way to feed a booming global population with diminishing arable land. The technology may also be the solution to a looming banana crisis.

  UNTIL THE 1960S, the Gros Michel was the world’s top banana. When a lethal fungus called Panama Disease struck, the first reaction was to keep replanting banana trees on new land. After plowing through enormous tracts of virgin rain forest, only to find the virus following wherever they went, growers were finally forced to replace the Gros Michel. Billions of dollars were spent to make the transition to a variety called Cavendish, which has become the main variety in global commerce.

  The Cavendish’s time draws nigh, however, as it now finds itself under threat by a mutation of the original disease. Entire valleys full of bananas throughout the tropics are succumbing to Panama Disease Race 4 and another highly contagious fungus called black sigatoka. The Cavendish’s plight is not unlike what happened during the Irish potato famine, when the country’s single variety of potato was struck by a disease that wiped out every plant.

  Research teams are working to forestall disaster with the Cavendish: the disease could lead to famine, destabilization and economic collapse in a number of nations. Bananas, an essential part of many tropical countries’ diets, are the primary source of carbohydrates throughout East Africa. Seventy-two million metric tons are produced every year in the developing world—compared to a mere one metric ton in the developed world.

  To save the Cavendish from viral extinction requires uncovering varieties that are resistant to the new virus. Unfortunately, as the search for these forgotten strains has gotten under way, researchers have discovered that many wild banana varieties have disappeared as a result of logging and mass urbanization. Fortunately, thanks to the efforts of several independent groups, numerous bananas from remote regions have been cataloged and backed up at seed banks around the world. The Thai Banana Club has been rescuing rare bananas from remaining forests and growing them all over the world. Members include Helsinki University’s Markku Häkkinen, who lives in an apartment in Finland crammed with weird bananas, and Miami’s William O. Lessard, whose nursery has been holding special cultivars in captivity for decades.

  According to the U.N., a single banana plant, preserved in a botanical garden in Calcutta, contains DNA that is immune to black sigatoka (it is called Musa acuminata spp burmannicoides). If other resistant genes cannot be found in bananas, scientists will have two choices: either replace the Cavendish with another variety, or borrow genes from unrelated species. The Laboratory for Tropical Crop Improvement has already created a black sigatoka–resistant banana that contains radish DNA. It seems likely that transgenic splicing will be the only way to save the Cavendish.

  Others are suggesting that growers and governments should actually focus on a number of new varieties. Crop diversity could act as a natural buffer against disease. Red bananas and dwarf bananas have started to become available, but alternatives abound, including the blood banana, the sugared-fig banana and the pregnant banana. The Ice Cream banana is silvery-blue on the outside and tastes like vanilla ice cream. The Popoulou’s bubble-gum pink interior has a distinct apple flavor. The Haa Haa has bright orange flesh and the Burmese Blue’s name says it all. Connoisseurs swear by the Macaboo, otherwise known as the Jamaican Red. In China, the Golden Aromatic is called Go San Heong (“You can smell it from over the next mountain”). The Thousand-Fingered is a manic outgrowth of thumb-sized banoonies. The Praying Hands is like a bunch of individual bananas fused into something resembling a baseball glove. However exciting they sound, monoculture farmers aren’t likely to focus on these inefficient varieties for the simple reason that growing them goes against the tenets of agrarian capitalism: high yields and reliability. The alarm over genetic engineering isn’t too far removed from the suspicion that initially greeted grafting. Indeed, GM could play a vital role in bolstering Africa’s food supply. Bananas have been developed that contain vaccines so that children without access to immunization shots can simply eat bananas to protect themselves from deadly viruses. This could prevent millions of deaths every year.

  The public, however, is growing wary of the promises of transnational agribusinesses. The green revolution’s pesticides and irrigation schemes did lead to increased yields, but it didn’t end world hunger; it certainly saved lives, but it also forced farmers to become dependent on chemical seed corporations. The debate surrounding GM must take into account the entire structure of modern food production. Those supporting the technology see it as a way of fortifying a perilous system; those opposing it are calling for sustainable alternatives to petrochemical monocultures. As political philosophers point out, fighting transgenic engineering can be construed, at a certain point, as an act of resistance against the hegemony of global capitalism and its political supplement, liberal democracy.

  THE STORY OF the modern banana began in the 1870s, when a twenty-three-year-old American named Minor Keith started building a railroad network through the Costa Rican forest. He planted bananas alongside the railways, not realizing that the seedlings would one day grow into an empire of fruits. Transporting passengers through Costa Rica proved an unwise investment, but Keith managed to turn a profit bringing railcars of bananas to North America. Around the same time, a Massachusetts fisherman named Lorenzo Dow Baker started shipping bananas from Jamaica. They joined forces, and by 1899, the United Fruit Company was overseeing a banana monopoly throughout Central America and the Caribbean.

  The “Banana Republics,” as they became known, had few other products to export. United Fruit, with their control of countries’ banana trade and transportation infrastructures, exerted a dominating influence on local governments. The company took full advantage of its clout, becoming known as “the Octopus” for its many-tentacled agglomeration of political ambition, postal services and banana plantations.

  Their human rights violations became legion. For decades, United Fruit resolved labor disputes with armed confrontations.
Using brute force as their main negotiating tactic, representatives of the United Fruit Company opened fire on striking workers in the Santa Marta Massacre of Colombia. Their “Great White Fleet” was used in the world wars to transport soldiers and supplies. They funded the Bay of Pigs invasion to protest Castro’s nationalization of plantations. They engaged the Hon-duran army to bulldoze villages to make way for processing plants and banana fields. They were caught by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission bribing Central American presidents to reduce export taxes. As papers released by the Library of Congress in 1995 reveal, the company played a decisive role in the military coup that ousted the government of Guatemala in 1954, crippling the nation for decades. They also knowingly exposed workers to lethal levels of pesticides. The use of DBCP, which battles rootworms, resulted in more than thirty thousand South American men becoming sterile. In 1975, the company’s CEO, Eli M. Black, committed suicide with a spectacular self-defenestration from his forty-fourth-floor office onto Park Avenue below.

  Nowadays, we think of Banana Republic as a clothing chain, but this sordid legacy of exploitation is more than mere dirty laundry. The United Fruit Company, now known as Chiquita, has made efforts to enhance conditions for its workers, building schools and providing health care, and allowing environmental watch groups like the Rainforest Alliance, with their Better Banana program, to recommend adjustments in its growing operations. But in 2007, it was revealed that the company has been funding a Colombian terrorist organization, the paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, to protect their banana plantations.