The Fruit Hunters Read online

  Henry Thoreau saw in fruits “a certain volatile and ethereal quality which represents their highest value, and which cannot be vulgarized, or bought and sold.” In many ways, it’s true. Raspberries are at their height when eaten straight off the bramble. Within ten minutes of picking them, they’ve lost something. “That on which commerce seizes is always the very coarsest part of a fruit,” wrote Thoreau in Wild Fruits. “It is a grand fact that you cannot make the fairer fruits or parts of fruits matters of commerce; that is, you cannot buy the highest use and enjoyment of them. You cannot buy that pleasure which it yields to him who truly plucks it.”

  Few stores want to deal with the hassle of getting good fruit. Fruits are often located near a store’s entrance as a way of luring shoppers in to buy other more expensive processed foods, snacks and soft drinks manufactured by large corporations willing to pay stocking fees. (The ingredient lists on these foods can be unsettling: Kraft’s guacamole contains less than 2 percent avocado. Quaker’s “Peaches & Cream” oatmeal contains dyed, desiccated apple flakes instead of peaches. Some blueberry waffles are actually blue apple waffles. Watermelon Fruit Roll-Ups contain pears, but no watermelon. Some mass-produced fruitcakes are made with turnip.) The reason there’s little or no fresh fruit in convenience stores is simple: they aren’t profitable enough. As one small greengrocer told me, “The big stores hate produce. They’d get rid of it in thirty seconds if they could. They’re not even making money on it.” In that light, it’s clear why supermarkets want to stock the cheapest, lowest quality fruits available.

  Some progressive outlets make the effort to stock local produce. Even better is shopping at a farmer’s market. In a Mediterranean climate, farmer’s markets operate year-round, which seems to be the way humans are meant to live. But some fruits are too fragile even for farmer’s markets. Visiting a farm is the only way to taste the really good stuff. As nutritionist Marion Nestle writes: “If you haven’t tasted fruits that are freshly picked, you have no idea how good they can be.”

  I’ve learned the importance of cultivating a relationship with someone working in a quality fruit store, ideally someone who sources local fruits. I make it a point to go see a gnarled, gnomelike fellow at my local market who gives me samples and tells me when to eat what and points out bruised fruits that actually have more sugars. Without someone on the inside, it’s a gamble. It’s hard to know what’s in season, so get to know your greengrocer.

  For me, summer means melons, peaches, plums and berries—I don’t touch them the rest of the year. (Contra-seasonal fruits sold in the winter from the Southern Hemisphere still aren’t tasty enough.) Apples and pears are permanently available, but they’re much better in the autumn, as are pomegranates, quinces and persimmons. The quality of citrus soars in the winter. Cherimoyas are late-winter treats, as are papayas—especially with lime and crushed almonds. Spring in Los Angeles announces itself with the arrival of loquats growing on trees all over the city. And then come mangoes, followed by cherries, apricots and fresh strawberries in the late spring. All of this, of course, should be supplemented with local fruits tasted on travels.

  PART OF THE REASON we’re confused about what to eat is that produce is one of the few areas where we aren’t bombarded with advertising. Low profit margins inhibit major campaigns, and without much marketing influence, we buy fruits based on how they look—but as we know, looks can be deceiving. Most customers demand flawlessness, so supermarkets end up wasting anything that isn’t impeccable. Twenty-five percent of harvested fruit is said to end up in the garbage. There’s a movement afoot in Europe to counter this, where imperfect fruit (what’s known as Class 2 fruit in the EU) are sold for 50 pence to a pound less per kilo. Class 2 can be blemished and have prominent defects, but taste just fine—often better than Class 1 fruits.

  Choosing fruits at the store remains an arcane science. Consumer habit reports show that the only fruits that we actually put on our shopping lists are apples, bananas, oranges and strawberries—all others are bought spontaneously. If we like the way a fruit looks and feels, we’ll buy it. The success of these impulse buys is why peaches and cherries have a better household penetration rate than kiwis or honeydews.

  We’ve evolved countless bizarre methods to supplement basic cosmetic considerations. Marketers call this selection process “supermarket hedonics”—all the squeezing, groping, sniffing, caressing and stroking. Some tests seem to work: flicking the knob off avocados gives a glimpse of its internal state. Others don’t: plucking the leaves off pineapples has no bearing on ripeness.

  Melon mavens have fine-tuned foibles. Some thump; others leave them out in the sun to sweeten. There are anecdotes of shady growers carving netting onto the surface of melons to lure shoppers. Cantaloupe freaks believe that a more accurate gauge of ripeness is the condition of the indentation where the melon was plucked off the stem. If a stem remains attached, meaning it had to be cut using a knife or scissors, the fruit was probably picked unripe and will never taste good. No stem whatsoever—known as a “full slip” or a “full moon”—is ideal. If bits of the stem are still attached, look for a crack running around the perimeter of the rim. Even if it appears perfect, however, the melon could still taste like potatoes.

  Buying fruits at the supermarket is basically a crapshoot because they usually aren’t ripe. Fruits are often picked when mature—meaning ready to ship—but they haven’t undergone the transformations necessary to reach their ripeness potential. Commercial fruits are picked long before the volatile ethers, converted sugars, softened cells and finely tuned acids have hit their stride.

  Citrus, grapes, cherries, strawberries, raspberries, pineapples and watermelon are “nonclimacteric” fruits; they don’t continue ripening once they’ve been picked. They’re at their best the minute they’re picked, and they go downhill from there. Eat them asap.

  Fruits that do continue ripening off the tree are called climacteric. There are gray areas within this category. Apricots, peaches, nectarines, blueberries, plums and certain melons can become softer and juicier off the tree, but their flavor and sweetness doesn’t improve once they’ve been picked. Apples, kiwis, mangoes, papayas and certain other tropical fruits do get sweeter once they’ve been picked. They convert their inner starch into sugars and actually start breathing heavily as they ripen, giving off all sorts of gases. A banana covered in brown spots is the botanical equivalent of a hyperventilating mother giving birth.

  Certain climacteric fruits, such as bananas, avocados and pears, actually need to ripen off the tree—although they still must be picked at the right time. And if they aren’t treated properly, they’ll never taste right. Bananas turn gray from stints in frigid warehouses and produce sections. Pears are picked using precision calibrated ripeness gauges called penetrometers or potentiometers. After harvest, they then need to be cooled and stored until the optimum moment of edibility. Supermarket pears sit under moldy mist jets for ten weeks in a row, making it hard to find the optimum eating moment. Try buying a dozen pears and eating one a day. If you’re lucky, one of the pears will be totally gushing with nectar. “There is only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson.

  Penultimate ripeness, when the finicky ethers reach organoleptic gold, when acids and sugars reach the ague of their imbroglio, is fleeting. To recognize this moment requires experience and luck. “The instant of perfection with figs,” wrote Colette, is when, “swollen with nocturnal dew, a single tear of delicious gum cries out of its eye.” With gooseberries, whether white swans, red champagnes or early green hairys, Bunyard wrote, “the moment of moments and the day of days is on the return from church at 12:30 on a warm July day when the fruit is distinctly warm.” All fruits have a peak of deliciousness, but finding that perfection is next to impossible, unless we join the ranks of the fruit hunters.

  PART 4

  OBSESSION

  13

  Preservation:

  The Passion of
the Fruit

  Fruit tree, fruit tree, No one knows you but the rain and the air. Don’t you worry, they’ll stand and stare When you’re gone.

  —Nick Drake, Fruit Tree

  AT POVERTY LANE ORCHARDS in New Hampshire, the rainy air is spiced with the wholesome, sour tang of fallen apples. At the back of the farm stand, past the jellies and the syrups, past a counter of unpasteurized, preprohibition-style ciders, sits a display of strange apples billed as “oddball varieties.” Passersby are encouraged to sample them.

  The rough russet exterior of Ashmead’s Kernel, an apple dating back to 1700, conceals a nutmeg-wine flavor. The Calville Blanc d’Hiver, ribbed with lobes like an acorn squash, is a sixteenth-century cooking apple that also tastes superb out of hand. Thomas Jefferson’s favorite, the Esopus Spitzenberg is, to my inexperienced palate, the quintessence of appledom. Biting into these apples is like being transported back in time; they’re the flavor of life as a Renaissance courtier or a wealthy Virginia landowner.

  Self-assured and strong-jawed, Poverty Lane’s Stephen Wood credits these oddball heirlooms with keeping his farm operational. From 1965 until the early 1990s, Wood grew McIntoshes and Cortlands—which brought him to the same brink as all apple farmers. “For reasons beyond our control, mainly the global overplanting of apples, it became overwhelmingly clear that the whole industry was circling the drain,” sighs Wood, echoing what Gary Snyder told me.

  Around the time he realized that buying apples is cheaper than growing them, Wood decided to try something new: old apples. Grafting antique varieties onto his McIntosh trees, he was blown away by some of the flavors he discovered. “It was the picky ones that appealed to me—the ones that can knock your socks off,” he says. “Among these very odd varieties, we found some that grew to stunningly high standards.” Focusing on a dozen main selections, he then set about trying to create a market for them. Packaging them in handsome boxes, he started shipping them to upscale urban markets, where demand is starting to soar. He sells bins of Pomme Grise apples—a variety enjoyed by Louis XIV—for five times the amount his McIntoshes fetch.

  “The jury’s still out on whether this was wise or not,” says Wood, who studied medieval history at Harvard. “It’s a wicked risk, but it’s better than waiting for a dying industry to revive. I’ll tell you in ten years’ time whether this was just a little too clever. But it’s hopeful and it’s given us a chance to grow some really peculiar stuff that might not otherwise be available.”

  Wood is part of a larger trend. In a market glutted with low-grade fruits, small farmers have had to develop novel and imaginative concepts in order to compete. Those growing unusual, rare and specialty varieties—and willing to make an effort to market them—are realizing that they can command a premium price for their fruits.

  “For a farmer, sustainability means breaking even,” says Jeff Rieger of Penryn Orchard Specialties, a farm located in northern California. “It means making enough to pay taxes and keep the farm going for another year.” Rieger’s approach has been to focus on a variety of heirlooms: Arkansas Black apples, greengage plums and Charentais melons. He also makes a traditional form of Japanese dried persimmons called hoshi gaki. The fruits are dried and hand-massaged over a period of several weeks, pureeing the interior. As a result, the fruits become sumptuously tender and the exterior gets coated with natural powdery fructose. Rieger sells them for thirty-three dollars a pound at the Santa Monica farmer’s market in Los Angeles and to superstar chefs like Thomas Keller. His entire 2006 crop sold out within weeks.

  Jim Churchill and Lisa Brenneis run Churchill Orchard. They call it a “rebel brand.” They grow the best mandarins I have ever tasted: small, sweet and tart beauties called kishus, an ancient Japanese variety. They got the idea to grow kishus by visiting the citrus variety collection at the University of California at Riverside, which grows more than nine hundred cultivars, including citrangequats, megalolos, orangelos, tangos, citremons, citranges, citrumelos, lemandarins, blood limes, violet-fleshed tangelos and striped green-yellow lemons with pink flesh. “We asked the grad students what they eat because they’re out there in those orchards all day long,” says Brenneis. The students were unanimous: kishus. Churchill Orchard’s kishu harvest gets snapped up at the California farmer’s markets and by mail order. Chez Panisse sells them, plain, as dessert. Some of their other fruits are just as unique, like a low-acid vaniglia blood orange that tastes like vanilla cream.

  The strangest orange I’ve ever tasted was on an Ojai farm near Churchill Orchard. It was a nameless mutant that happened to taste precisely like chicken noodle soup. All the components were there: bits of dark meat, white meat, chicken stock and even noodles. But no citrus, in my opinion, can match the deliciousness of the Churchill’s kishu. Regulars at the Hollywood farmer’s market freak out when they learn that the season is over. “People really into kishus have kishu issues,” laughs Brenneis.

  For the most part, farmers grow trees bred to produce efficiently and abundantly, rather than the delicious, forgotten anomalies of yesteryear. Those willing to grow fine fruits often care deeply about their crops. Passion is essential: the technical and artistic challenges of a fickle fruit are infinitely complex. It’s more lucrative to simply sell one’s farmland. Unless, of course, there’s nothing else you’d rather be doing.

  FOR THE ZEBROFF FAMILY, living off the land requires around-the-clock participation from the whole family, including children, grandchildren, nephews and other relatives. “Farming isn’t easy, but we don’t consider farming work,” says George Zebroff. “We don’t work here. We live here.”

  When I arrive at his farm in British Columbia’s Similkameen Valley, in August 2006, his wife, Anna, meets me at the gate. She looks like a grown-up Pippi Longstocking. Adjusting her kerchief as we head into the barn, she offers me a cup of fresh milk with a spoonful of honey. It’s symbolic, and delicious: the honey melts into the milk, still warm from the cow. George is busy with a cauldron full of peach jam, so we amble around the rugged land, which seems to be sprouting vegetables, flowers, herbs and fruit trees from every pocket of soil. Their backyard is a sheer mountainside, which creates a perfect microclimate. Chickens wander about—fertilizing the apple trees, says Anna. “Other farms look like Versailles. Here we have weeds around the trees—we leave them be. Our farm is about animals, plants and insects all together.” As she speaks, a fly lands on her eyelid and rests there. She’s so in tune with nature that she doesn’t even seem to notice it.

  When he finishes with the jam, George Zebroff comes out to greet us. At first, he’s taciturn, almost stern. His wild gray hair is matched by a gnarled beard. He’s very tall. Shaking hands with him is like greeting the Colossus of Rhodes. He regards me with suspicion, and asks me again what my book is about. After a brief and pointed inquisition, he approves my topic and becomes quite gregarious, speaking eruditely and with a formal eloquence.

  Echoing Wood’s assertion that it’s actually cheaper to buy food than to produce it, he says that farming used to be highly valued. “Now farmers are viewed as shit disturbers asking for subsidies,” he says. “The bottom line is ingrained in our system. The corporate model is predicated on that creed. The malfeasances of corporations are well documented. They are the lifeblood of the world they created for themselves.”

  As we taste some of their grapes, George sees a sparrow ensnared in some netting on his vines. Gently removing the bird, he launches it into the air. The Zebroffs, unlike many farmers, don’t kill any stray animals. Even the snakes that come down over the mountain are trapped and then set free. They bear and share the cost, rather than passing it on to the land, he explains. Their goal was to create harmony instead of making money. The way they did it was to grow many things together. They eat the best, and sell the rest.

  He invites me to do the former. Giddily plucking some perfect greengages straight off a tree, I taste them, and can’t help noticing a feeling of surrender. What a blessing it is to be alive! The
ir peaches are sensational. Ecstatically juicy mulberries stain my fingers. “What we’re really after is unstandardized, unhomogenized fruits,” explains George. “The integrity of quality is to be seen in their different shapes, textures, flavors, sensations and nutritional values. No two fruits are identical—nor should they be identical.”

  They planted a wide variety of different trees in different years in order to ensure that they’d have some fruits every year. “Biannual fruit is natural with most trees,” he says. “They shouldn’t bear every year, so we let them be. Other people force them. They need to take a break. They just knock off and you have to expect it. That in itself is one good reason to grow more than one thing.”

  Zebroff, whose farm is totally chemical-free, speaks disparagingly about other large organic farmers. He believes that organic should be about diversity—not monocrop farms that still use sprays. The Zebroffs rarely buy anything other than farm equipment, gas and other essentials. They do sometimes shop for food, but only for items they cannot produce themselves. Anna admits to periodically indulging in bananas, but only because they don’t grow in this climate.

  The Zebroffs say they have no idea if others are living like them; they’re too busy looking after the farm to go find out. When I ask if it’s still possible for people to live off the land, George answers, “Certainly. If they’re willing to do the work. Can anybody do it? Sure they can, but they need to buck a lot of indoctrination. Have you seen the film City Slicker?”

  “With Billy Crystal?”

  “Yes,” he says. “Do you know the scene with Jack Palance, where he talks about the secret of life? At one point, Jack Palance lifts up one finger and says: ‘The secret is to do only one thing, to have one occupation, to focus and specialize in one thing.’ Well, you know what? That’s not the secret. That’s cultural inculcation.” Later, at the end of our interview, when I ask him why this way of farming has been disappearing. Zebroff points upward and reiterates: “Jack Palance’s finger.”