The Fruit Hunters Read online

  “I made love to that guava,” he groaned.

  Fruit, inherently erotic, have a storied heritage as sexual accessories. In the medieval era, it was considered a turn-on for a woman to peel an apple and coddle it in her armpit until infused with her body odor, at which point she’d present the love apple to her lover. Plums and prunes were de rigueur in Elizabethan brothels. “Orange wenches” used to sell their bodies and fruits at theaters under the reign of Charles II. Fruits were aphrodisiacs around the world, whether loquats in China, gumi fruits in Persia or pomegranates in Tunisia. Brazilian tribes used to increase the size of their generative organs by tapping them with phallic, bananalike aninga fruits. The Kama Sutra gives instructions on performing fellatio in the manner of sucking a mango. Fats Domino got his thrills on blueberry hill. According to anthologist of erotica Gershon Legman, “sophisticates often insert into the vagina fruits such as strawberries or cherries” (those with false teeth or a dental plate, he added, should resist the temptation).

  Figs have been used as sexual charms since Babylonian times. Today, at Montreal markets, hawkers cry out that each fig contains five grams of Viagra. Over coffee one morning, Montreal artist Billy Mavreas was telling some friends and me how he’d just returned from a trip to Greece, where he’d observed old men jostling each other to get at the first figs of the season. He could understand their ardor. “Whenever I open a fig,” he explained, “I want to fuck it.”

  Some of us freak out when touching fruits. “Haptodysphoria” refers to the unusual, almost fearful, sensation that certain people feel when handling kiwis, peaches or other fuzzy-surfaced fruits. The word botanists use for this short, downy hair is “pubescence.” The Oxford Companion to Food claims that “the peach, of all fruits, most closely approaches the quality of human flesh.”

  Others prefer soft, spongy melons. In Brazil, there is a popular proverb: “women for procreation, goats for necessity, young boys for fun and a melon for ecstasy.” A blogger named monkeymask has posted about his melon mishap. Although the cantaloupe was at first too cold for his purposes, he microwaved it to bring it to a warmer temperature. He only realized that the insides were scalding when his privates sank into molten fruit magma.

  The conflating of fruit appreciation with carnality began in the forest. Bonobos, sharing 98 percent of our DNA, are humankind’s closest living primate relative. Japanese primatologists in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have documented rampant group sex when nomadic bonobos come across trees full of fruit. These sexual free-for-alls apparently allow bonobos to blow off steam and get along together.

  Communal fruit sex was a fact of life in early agrarian societies. As with the bonobos, fruit harvests were a prime opportunity to unleash an orgy, wrote religious historian Mircea Eliade. These orgies had chaotic, holy underpinnings that Eliade described as “unbounded sexual frenzy,” where anything could happen and all decency was dispensed with. Peru’s annual Acatay Mita ritual involved men and boys getting buck naked, running amok in their orchards and violating any woman who crossed their path. Anthropologists have documented fruit-fueled group sex among tribes all over the world, including the Oraon of India and Bangladesh, the Leti and Sarmata people in islands west of New Guinea, the Baganda in Africa, the Fiji islanders and the Kana of Brazil. In Europe, harvest orgies lasted well into the Middle Ages, despite condemnations from the Council of Auxerre in 590.

  Among the most enigmatic masterpieces of Western art is Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, which features naked people frolicking with oversized berries. It seems to insinuate that the plant kingdom’s strange eroticism serves a botanical function. Afterall, every time we eat a fruit, we engage in a reproductive act.

  ALL FRUITS START as flowers. At their most basic level, flowers are the plant kingdom’s sex machines. When, in the eighteenth century, it was discovered that flowers had male and female reproductive anatomy, the public and the church reacted with outrage. Botanist Carl Linnaeus’s description of a flower as numerous women in bed with the same man was vilified as “loathsome harlotry.”

  Accordingly, the flower’s vagina became called the “style,” the penis became the “filament,” the vulva became the “stigma,” and the sperm became the “pollen.” No matter what the name, flowers are a plant’s genitalia. And whenever flowers bump uglies, they give birth to a fruit. Fruits are the result of a flower’s ovule being fertilized. Fruits, therefore, are love children, offspring of a fragrant union.

  Like that golden speck that fell in my lap in Hollywood, any plant part containing a seed is a fruit. In botanical parlance, a fruit is the developed ovary of a flower, alongside any other structures that ripen with it and form a unit with it. Fruits are basically plant eggs. In human terms, think of a pregnant woman: a fruit is the plant version of the amniotic bubble that contains the fetus. The baby is the seed (or seeds, as with quintuplets); the entire spherical container in which the baby floats is the fruit. A fruit is how a plant gives birth.

  Fruits are seed envelopes that contain within them the genetic coding that will further the entire plant. Their role is twofold: to protect and nourish the seeds, and also to facilitate the dispersal of the seeds. As we’ll see, it’s this second aspect that arouses libidinal forces.

  I realize this discussion is somewhat more technical than the age-old dinner-table debate over whether tomatoes and avocados are fruits or vegetables. Sweetness usually plays a pivotal part in that dispute. The sweetness issue actually went to the United States Supreme Court in 1893. They ruled that tomatoes are vegetables because they aren’t sweet. Rhubarb, which is actually a stem, was legally granted fruit status in 1947—because it’s usually baked into sweet dishes.

  Colloquially, then, and for agricultural tax purposes, a fruit has to be sweet, eaten at dessert, or at least clearly be a lemon. Scientifically, however, the definition is broader. Green peppers, avocados, cucumbers, zucchinis, pumpkins, eggplants and corn are all technically fruits because they contain the plant’s seeds. Olives are fruits. Sesame seeds come from sesame fruits. Those luffa sponges we use in the shower are fruits of the Luffa cylindrica tree. Vanilla is the fruit of a type of orchid. Roses turn into rosehips. Lilies become beadlike fruits. Poppy seeds come from fruit pods whose sap is full of morphine. We bite into and spit out the husk of sunflower fruits to get at sunflower seeds.

  My girlfriend, Liane, was dubious when I first informed her that flowers become fruits. “What about the fuchsias on our balcony?” she asked, pointing at hanging pots spilling out velvety blossoms. I predicted that they’d grow into some sort of seedpods once the flowers were fertilized by the bees buzzing around. Sure enough, a couple of months later, Liane noticed some dark maroon berries clustered amid the magenta petals. They had juicy, blueberry-like interiors. We bit into them hesitantly. They tasted insipid, like stray vegetation, but they were fruits nonetheless.

  All pea pods, beans and legumes are fruit. A peanut is a fruit that grows underground. After pollination, peanut flowers burrow into the ground like frightened ostriches, allowing the fruits to ripen in the darkness. The top six crops in the world are all technically fruits: wheat, corn, rice, barley, sorghum and soy. Even though grains are small, they too contain seeds. Africa’s savannas started producing grasslands that were full of wild cereals and grains around 14 million years ago. This allowed humans to descend from trees and evolve into bipeds.

  A nut is defined as a hard one-seeded fruit. Many things called nuts really aren’t. An almond isn’t technically a nut; it’s a seed found within a hard shell that forms inside a fruit that is actually a relative of peaches, apricots and plums. Yes, almonds grow on trees. Eating an almond is like eating the interior of a peach pit. A coconut isn’t a nut at all; it’s a fruit.

  As with all attempts at categorizing nature, exceptions abound. Those seed-containing dots on the exterior of strawberries are called achenes; each of these achenes is actually a fruit. The red flesh is merely a structure that evolved t
o help disseminate the fruit seeds. A fig is a pod containing many tiny fruits. A pineapple is an inflorescence that fuses many berrylike fruitlets into a thorn-tipped aberration. So what’s a vegetable? Any part of a plant that we eat that does not contain seeds. It can be a root (carrot), tuber (potato), stem (asparagus), leaves (cabbage), leaf stalks (celery), and flower stalks and buds (cauliflower).

  Broccoli is densely compacted flower heads that haven’t yet opened. If allowed to keep growing, the tiny green heads open to reveal pretty yellow flowers that become seed-containing fruit pods. Capers, which are flower buds, turn into large, seedy, caper berries. Spinach is the leaf of a plant whose flowers yield a minuscule, often prickly, fruit capsule. We brew tea with leaves, but tea plants reproduce themselves with fruits. Marijuana is smoked in flower form, but the pollinated fruit seeds are the way to grow a new plant.

  There are an estimated 240,000 to 500,000 different plant species that bear fruits. Perhaps 70,000 to 80,000 of these species are edible; most of our food comes from only twenty crops. Pomology is about the fruits we eat; carpology studies the fruits that all flowering plants bear, whether eaten or not. Botanical fruits are stored in a place called a “carpotheque” (which sounds like the place taxonomists go to let loose).

  A number of foods that we call spices actually consist of, or derive from, dried fruits: pepper, cardamom, nutmeg, paprika, anise, caraway, allspice, cumin, fenugreek, cayenne, currants and juniper. Mace is the lacy arillus of the nutmeg fruit. Cloves are actually dried flowers, although when pollinated, they do develop purplish fruits.

  Until recently, spices were items of utmost luxury. Islands were ravaged and populations decimated for their spice bounty. In Europe, whole nutmegs and peppercorns served on golden platters used to be eaten straight up as dessert. As gifts, spices were comparable to the Patek Philippe watches or Swarovski swans given today.

  The discovery of the New World itself was precipitated by a desire to find a faster route to the Orient for a dried berry that was worth its weight in gold. Pepper was so valuable that individual grains were used as currency. Lodgers used to pay their rent in pepper. Rome staved off invasion by paying Alaric the Visi goth and Attila the Hun annual ransoms of pepper.

  Cinnamon is the bark of a tree, but when explorers found South America, they thought it was a fruit. The historian Garcilaso de la Vega wrote of “bunches of small fruit growing in husks like acorns. And though the tree and its leaves, roots, and bark all smell and taste of cinnamon, these husks are the true spice.” Under the command of Gonzalo Pizarro, two thousand soldiers ventured into the jungles of Ecuador, searching for these fruit treasures. After over two years lost in the forest, only eighty naked, hysterical stragglers made it back to Quito—without any cinnamon fruits.

  SPECIATION, or the emergence of new life-forms, thrives in isolation. Over time, species separated geographically end up evolving into novel forms. Hundreds of millions of years ago, there were two supercontinents, Laurasia (North America, Europe and Asia) and Gondwana (everything else). Many fruits originated before these landmasses started fracturing and drifting apart, which is why certain wild fruits can be found in multiple parts of the world. For example, it’s been proposed that apples first appeared on Laurasia. After the supercontinent broke apart, the fruit evolved differently ways based on where it ended up. In North America, the Proto-Apples evolved into crab apples; in Central Asia, bears spent millennia grazing on increasingly larger and sweeter fruits, leading to the domesticated apple we enjoy today.

  In 1882, Swiss phytogeographist Alphonse Pyrame de Candolle published Origin of Cultivated Plants, revealing for the first time the distinct places of origin for many fruits. Using a multichanneled approach combining linguistics, philology, paleontology, archaeology and ethnobiology, de Candolle was able to ascertain where the greatest variation in a species was found.

  Peaches, apricots, cherries and plums all came from Central Asia; the banana and the mango had ancestral links to India; pears originated in the Transcaucasus; wild grapes first grew east of the Black Sea; untamed quinces and mulberries cavorted near the Caspian; the watermelon emerged in tropical Africa. In some cases, pinpointing the spot was clear: citrus had more varieties and parasites in South China than anywhere else, so its home was not disputed. In other cases, such as coconuts or dates, it proved impossible to find a fruit’s birth spot. The center of origin might be too diffuse, or covered by a city, or perhaps the forest was destroyed for lumber. Eons-old changes in climate may also have eradicated many clues.

  Going back even further, researchers have been probing the fossil record for evidence of the prototypical fruit. Life began billions of years ago with single-cell organisms underwater. Some of the earliest plants to emerge from the depths some 450 million years ago were ferns and mosses. And then, about 130 million years ago, the first fruits and flowers turned up in or near water. Darwin, whose theory of evolution struggled to explain the suddenness of their appearance and the speed with which they overtook the planet, called their rise an “abominable mystery.” The playwright Edward Albee has characterized this moment as “that heartbreaking second when it all got together: the sugars and the acids and the ultraviolets, and the next thing you knew there were tangerines and string quartets.”

  Scientists believe that water lilies, whose fruits germinate underwater, and star anise, with its woody pentagram fruits, are among the world’s oldest. The Annonaceae family, containing cherimoyas, soursops and custard apples, is another primordial cluster. The recent discovery of a 125-million-year-old fossil of an aquatic plant called Archaefructus sinensis (“the old fruit of China”) has led to suggestions that it is the first fruit in history.

  Plants started to produce fruit in order to disperse their seeds. One hundred million years before the emergence of fruit-bearing flowering plants (called “angiosperms”), there were other plants called gymnosperms. Conifers and cycads, like all gymnosperms, have seeds that aren’t fully enclosed in fruits. Gymno- means naked; sperm means seed. Think of a pinecone: the seeds are contained in woody bracts, but the bracts are slightly open. A gymnosperm’s seeds drop near the base of the parent tree whereas an angiosperm’s enclosed seeds can be distributed much farther. The earliest forms of plant life didn’t even have flowers. They oozed around, shedding spores into the sludge.

  After dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago, mammals and birds rose to prominence. Fruits were there to feed them, and in turn, be disseminated. Soon enough, the world was covered by plants producing a multicolored array of seed boxes. The angiosperms thrived because they devised ways to have their offspring carried far away. By 45 million years ago, rain forests covered much of the globe. Fossilized remains of tropical fruits have been found everywhere from London to Anchorage.

  AS SEED DISPERSAL mechanisms, fruits have myriad methods of roaming the world. Certain fruits cast their fate to the winds. Seeds with parachutes, helicopter propellers or featherdown attachments can be carried miles away from the parent plant on currents of air. Think of a summer day, with dandelions, cottonwoods and milkweeds wafting along a gentle breeze. One liana fruit from Borneo is a long-distance glider that floats through the air, pushed along by upward air currents and equatorial zephyrs, until it settles, with its seed, far away from the mother tree.

  Other fruits can swim. They float like lifeboats across bodies of water and sprout on distant shores. The coconut, which bobs for months along oceanic currents, is an example of aquatic dispersal. The palm fronds flirting on every brochure for white-sand beach resorts testify to its success.

  The burrs that stick to clothes after a hike in the countryside are also fruits. Burdocks, cockleburs and sticktights intentionally attach themselves to the fur of any animal who brushes up against the plant, the idea being that by the time the clinger falls off, the seeds will have traveled quite a distance. Devil’s claws are fruits shaped like vicious clamps designed to latch on to the hoofs of passing mammals. One of the most extreme exampl
es of a hitchhiker fruit is the Sumatran bird-catching tree. Its fruits are covered with tiny barbed hooks and a sticky gum that glues itself to birds’ feathers. Certain birds carry the fruit to other islands; less fortunate ones get their wings jammed by it, and they end up dying at the tree base, becoming fertilizer.

  Other fruits scatter their seeds by bursting open with a dramatic explosion. Touch-me-knots and Virginia knotwoods open elastically and hurl their seeds into the air. Witch hazel fruits are like small AK-47s that fire the seeds yards away. Many decorative flowers, like violets or impatiens, morph into ballistic fruits. When a fruit pod pops off the squirting cucumber, seeds ejaculate through the air with rocket propulsion. Sesame fruits pop open at maturity; hence the command “Open Sesame.” The Clusia grandiflora is a kind of dangling claw fruit that opens when ripe like the jaws of a mechanized “win-a-plush-toy” arcade game. Pistachio shells “laugh” themselves ajar when ready.

  The botanist Loren Eiseley was woken up one night by an unidentified bang. It was, he wrote, “Not a small sound—not a creaking timber or a mouse’s scurry—but a sharp, rending explosion as though an unwary foot had been put down upon a wineglass. I had come instantly out of sleep and lay tense, unbreathing. I listened for another step. There was none.” After looking around, he noticed a small button on the floor. It was the seed of a wistaria fruit he had brought into his home earlier. “The wistaria pods had chosen midnight to explode and distribute their multiplying fund of life down the length of the room.”