The Fruit Hunters Read online

  There are so many examples of fruits in mythology you can spend the rest of your life documenting them; in fact, that’s kind of what happened to James George Frazer, author of The Golden Bough. He set out to explain an odd ritual involving forest-dwelling priests who attained priesthood by murdering their predecessor after plucking a certain sacred branch. This fateful branch was the eponymous Golden Bough. In his roundabout evaluation of what that ritual murder might have signified, Frazer’s work ballooned to twelve volumes. Even the abridged version is packed with examples of fruits and their roles in arcane, magico-religious ceremonies and primitive beliefs. Indeed, Frazer concludes that the Golden Bough itself was probably a sprig of berries still used ceremonially today: mistletoe.

  The fruit world is endless. There are countless subcommunities full of passionate aficionados, whether it’s plant pathologists pursuing a particular fruit disease or germplasm collectors scouring the globe for the putative progenitor of the papaya. “People are amused that I’ve picked such a narrow topic, but fruit connoisseurship is not a narrow focus,” Karp told me. “Narrow is investigating rootstock for apples. And even that’s not really narrow—that’s seminarrow.” Agrilitholigists (people who collect fruit-crate label art) pay thousands of dollars for images dating back to the 1800s. The central node in this network is Pat Jacobsen, a collector who has spent over thirty years writing hundreds of thousands of words about fruit-crate labels.

  I thought back to Robert Palter, with his never-ending literary fruit episodes, and to Ken Love, with his thousands of pages on loquats and to Graftin’ Crafton Clift’s jungle rooms and the Fruit Detective’s fruit fixation. They all seemed lost in a pursuit of the unattainable—as was I.

  This obsession with fruits is the desire to somehow know it all, to become omniscient. Perhaps after tasting the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, we might then turn to the other tree’s fruits and find everlasting life.

  But, as Genesis insinuates, attaining knowledge won’t necessarily set us free. On the contrary, it may enslave or even kill us. A duty must be paid on the beauty. The search for forever is never-ending. We might lose ourselves in the symbolism. Utopia is Greek for “nowhere,” yet, as Oscar Wilde wrote, a map without it isn’t even worth glancing at. We can always, never go there.

  The oldest written story is a forest quest for immortality. But what Gilgamesh finds instead is humanity, an understanding that the same ineluctable fate awaits us all: a return to the soil. Everything is born from the earth and dies in it; it is both womb and tomb.

  The fantasy of creating some perfect world and inhabiting it forever fuels much artistic creation. But there comes a time when every monkey must let go of its paradise nut. “Heaven,” wrote Emily Dickinson, sagely, “is what I cannot reach! The Apple on the Tree.”

  16

  Fruition: Or the Fever of Creation

  Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine—good God how fine. It went down soft pulpy, slushy, oozy—all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry. I shall certainly breed.

  —-John Keats, 1819, private correspondence

  I N THE MID-1800S, when delicious pears first appeared in America, New Englanders were smitten. “You should have seen one of the old-time pear parties,” wrote E. P. Powell in 1905, recalling smoking rooms full of Bostonians groaning in pleasure and rubbing their hands with glee as they gorged themselves on new creations. Those who didn’t experience the frenzy, said Powell, can hardly understand the thrill caused by the sudden appearance of soft, sweet, nectar-filled pears. The phenomenon, known as “pear mania,” was the fruit world’s equivalent of the British invasion in pop music.

  The Lennon and McCartney of this craze were two Belgian growers from Mons. Nicholas Hardenpont and Jean Baptiste van Mons bred beurré pears, like the Bosc and the Flemish Beauty, that had the texture of softened butter filled with dripping juice.

  Before their pioneering efforts, pears were divided into two categories: those that tasted like shampoo, and those that didn’t. Although Pliny documented forty-one varieties of pears in the first century A.D., he also explained that they were indigestible unless boiled, baked or dried. Darwin noted that pears were of very inferior quality in classical times. Dry, sandy and gritty, they were primarily used in America to make perry, a pear cider.

  Until the Renaissance, juicy pears were almost inconceivable. They were so rare that only kings had access to varieties like the Ah! Mon Dieu, which is what Louis XIV purportedly ejaculated upon tasting it. It was only in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Belgium, with the discoveries of Hardenpont and van Mons, that good pears hit the mainstream.

  These new fruits found their most receptive audience in the New World, writes Ian Jackson in his unpublished History of the Massachusetts Pear Mania of 1825–1875. High-society tasting parties led besotted investors to throw capital into speculative orchards, many of which flopped. “There has been more money lost than made, for I could enumerate five persons who have utterly failed to every one who has made pear culture profitable,” wrote P. T. Quinn in 1869’s Pear Culture for Profit.

  The Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s autumn fruit shows were riotous affairs. There was fierce competition over novelties such as the Anjou, the Sheldon and the Clairgeau. The possibility of tasting these pears, and getting rich growing them, galvanized legions of American amateurs to experiment with their own varieties. Everyone from orchard-owning factory bosses to workers with suburban plots of land suddenly got involved in pears. In a letter to Massachusetts growers, van Mons explained that the best was yet to come: “If you bravely persevere at raising seedlings you will end up with better than mine.” His method was simple: plant out the seeds of juicy pears and hope for even juicier fruits to arise.

  Unfortunately, most pear trees grown from seed bore unpalatable fruits. Ninety-nine out of a hundred trees can be tossed, cautioned A. J. Downing in his 1845 book The Fruits and Fruit Trees of America. Still, to anyone curious about fruit, he wrote, “nothing in the circle of culture can give more lively and unmixed pleasure than to produce and create—for it is a sort of creation—an entirely new sort.”

  Well before Darwin published his theories, fruit growers were using artificial selection to create superior fruits. In the wild, fruits need merely be healthy enough to ensure that the seeds reproduce. Fine eating fruits all stem from human cultivation. The pioneers behind the varieties we enjoy today are usually anonymous. As Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre wrote, “The names of these public benefactors are chiefly unknown, whilst their benefits pass from generation to generation; whereas those of the destroyers of the human race are handed down to us on every page.” The North American Fruit Explorers proudly describe themselves as the spiritual heirs to the fruit experimenters of yesteryear: “men and women, both known and unknown, who—in every age, the world over—have labored to discover, to adapt, and to improve the Best in Fruit.”

  Darwin, in The Origin of Species, acknowledged the role our ancestors played in ameliorating our fruits, noting how they produced splendid results from poor materials. “The art, I cannot doubt, has been simple. It has consisted in always cultivating the best known variety, sowing its seeds, and, when a slightly better variety has chanced to appear, selecting it, and so onwards.”

  The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert once composed a prayer that read, in part: “Lord, Help us to invent a fruit / A pure image of sweetness.” Lamentably, the twentieth century’s emphasis on aesthetics and quantity led to many inferior tasting fruits. Huge, hard fruits with prolonged shelf lives were just fine for the shippers, wholesalers and retailers—but now breeding is being done with customers in mind. Flavor is just one of numerous variables that is taken into account when fruits are selected for breeding. Others include appearance, durability, shelf life, yield, size, shape, color, resistance to pests, flowering date and amount of bloom, crop volume and
the ability to harvest before maturity. Most fruits aim for some degree of tastiness, but achieving it alongside the jolt-proof requirements of mass transportation has proven elusive—thus far.

  BREEDERS AROUND THE WORLD, whether governmental agencies, university research labs or private companies, are all working on natural ways to develop better fruits. New Zealand’s biochemistry firm Hort-Research will be making a fortune in coming years as their red-fleshed apple—a revamped heirloom—hits the mainstream. The company’s star fruit breeder, Allan White, a self-styled “fruit fashion designer,” has also created a non-GMO Bartlett pear and Asian pear hybrid that he says tastes so good it’ll blow people’s socks off.

  Quebec government fruit breeder Shahrokh Khanizadeh recently found a type of apple that doesn’t turn brown after being sliced open. The fruit wasn’t produced through genetic engineering; it was an all-natural mutation that just happened to turn up in his orchard one day. The Eden maintains its whiteness, freshness and flavor for a week after being sliced. Everyone from McDonald’s to major supermarket suppliers have been flying in to investigate his discovery. It could become an all-natural alternative to preservative-coated apple slices.

  As we’ve seen, edible fruits are human artifacts. They will certainly continue to improve—if we want them to. To think otherwise is to misinterpret evolution. Some people think that heirloom fruits are invariably better; others believe that the hubbub over ancient varieties is sentimentality. “I’m not turned on by old apples like the Esopus Spitzenberg or the Ribston Pippin—they all have faults,” says Phil Forsline, curator of the USDA’s apple germplasm repository in Geneva, New York. He is surrounded by thousands of the best apples known to mankind, yet his favorite apple is the Honeycrisp, a new variety created by the University of Minnesota. It’s large, juicy, has a satisfying crisp texture, lasts forever and tastes excellent.

  The best raspberry I’ve ever tasted, the Tulameen, is an enormous gem that was bred in the 1980s by Hugh Daubeny at Canada’s agricultural department. Mikeal Roose of the University of California at Riverside has created new seedless mandarins like the Yosemite, which tastes as sweet as Kool-Aid. And one of the finest strawberries available today was only developed in France in 1990. The Mara des Bois, as it is called, is the result of a quest to create a well-sized strawberry with the aroma and flavor of tiny wild strawberries. It is a blend of four cultivated varieties—Gento, Ostara, Red Gauntlet and Korona—none of which are wild, but all of which have prominent flavor characteristics.

  One Southern Californian strawberry grower has ambitious plans to replace the rubbery strawberries we eat today. “The first time I tasted a Mara des Bois,” says David Chelf, “I was really taken back by the perfume that explodes when you bite into it. It just penetrates your sinus cavity, your olfactory glands—wow. I loved strawberries as a child, but this exceeded my memory of the best strawberry I’d ever had as a kid.”

  Having tasted a box of his Mara des Bois, I can only say that I agree. They’re a major leap from what most of us have access to currently. Chelf’s company, Wicked Wilds, hopes to make flavorful strawberries widely available. “To let the cat out of the bag, I’ve set up a technique that can be reproduced around the world,” he says. “Whether you’re in New York or in London, it is now possible to grow organic strawberries year-round that actually have flavor.”

  His plan involves a patented greenhouse that uses simple aluminized mylar reflectors to intensify the light and runs about a quarter of the cost of a traditional greenhouse. This structure could be set up easily in the environs of any urban center, making local strawberries growable even in otherwise unhospitable environments. He is also fine-tuning a simple solar-powered version for use in developing nations. Additionally, these berries are all organic, because the greenhouse eliminates most pest concerns. “We had an aphid infestation recently, so I dumped five dollars worth of ladybugs in the greenhouse. They ate all the aphids within a couple of days. Even low-risk chemicals should be avoided. Let’s use lady-bugs!”

  Another young maverick, Cornell researcher Jocelyn K. C. Rose, is developing new ways to increase the shelf life of fruits. “Pretty much all the fruits we eat are picked at the green stage,” explains Rose. “They haven’t had time to ripen properly, which is why they taste like biting into mothballs.” He is attempting to find ways of growing fruits that have all the flavor components we associate with ripeness—minus the softness that keeps fruits out of the distribution cold chain. “If we are successful,” he says, “it will be the holy grail of postharvest fruit biology.”

  Previous research has focused on the cell walls inside fruits. Unfortunately, those cell walls are critical to flavor and texture; strengthening cell walls usually leads to mealy, insipid fruits. Rose thinks there’s another solution: strengthen the fruit’s skin.

  Rose has found a naturally occurring European tomato that stays ripe and firm and keeps its shape for six months. If he can understand how the proteins in the tomato’s skin function, Rose believes he’ll have found a way for the beneficial traits we associate with heirloom fruits—high acids, high sugars, great flavor, all the important nutrients—to withstand the rigors of commercial packing.

  While Rose investigates tough skin, another breeder has been doing ambitious, long-term research that is already significantly enhancing the flavor of our fruits. Floyd Zaiger invented the pluot, that delicious—and immensely successful—plum-apricot hybrid. The most important fruit hybridizer of modern times, Zaiger has spent decades creating flavorful stone fruit intended to survive the cold-chain paradigm.

  To find out where our fruits are headed, I visit the laboratories of “The Family Organized to Improve Fruit Worldwide.”

  WHEN I ARRIVE at Zaiger Genetics’ research facility in Modesto, California, the front door is nudged open by a friendly leopard-print dog with a furry black back, a gray wolf neck, auburn thighs, a Dalmatian’s flank and terrier ears. “He’s a real Heinz 57,” chuckles Floyd Zaiger, a smiling man in his eighties wearing a baseball cap and overalls. Inside the office, which is more like a forest ranger’s cabin than a breeding laboratory, I meet Zaiger’s grown-up sons, Gary and Grant, and his daughter, Leith. Floyd explains that his late wife had liked the name Keith and modified it for his daughter.

  Floyd’s fascination with unexpected juxtapositions goes back to his childhood, when his favorite food was tinned salmon with bananas. “You could buy a bunch of bananas and two salmon tins for a quarter,” he says. “I loved eating them together.”

  Pluots contain more plum that apricot, but the Zaigers have also bred a series of interspecifics that are more apricot than plum, called apriums. He’s also created peach-plums, spicy nectaplums and peacharines. The nectacotum is a nectarine, apricot, plum mix that sounds like a Norwegian black metal band. His peacotum, a blend of peach, apricot and plum tastes like fruit punch. “It can go kiwi,” says one Zaiger salesman, suggesting it could possibly hit the big time.

  Zaiger is also the reason we’re able to buy white-fleshed peaches and nectarines. Until Zaiger figured out how to make them transport-ready delicious white stone fruits were too soft to withstand any sort of shipping. Today, close to a third of peaches and nectarines sold are white-fleshed. When harvested at the right time, Zaiger-developed white-fleshed stone fruit are superlative.

  The family’s next big thing will be cherries crossed with plums. (Chums?) These aren’t the small cherry-plum hybrids that occur in nature, like the feral myrobalan: Zaiger is talking about Bing cherries the size of a large plum.

  Such mutations aren’t genetically engineered using DNA splicing; they are bred naturally. Hybrid fruits are made by dusting pollen from the stamen of one flower onto the pistil of another and then growing out the resultant seed. This approach is limited: only flowers from related species can pollinate each other. A peach blossom can interact with another peach blossom to create a nectarine; but pineapple pollen, say, won’t have any effect on the stigma of a kumquat.

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nbsp; Wild hybrids arise when the seed of a cross-pollinated fruit grows into a new tree. The loganberry, a hybrid of a blackberry and raspberry, just appeared one day in the backyard of a Judge J. H. Logan of Santa Cruz. Prunus fruits like plums, apricots, peaches and cherries all have an ancestral proto-parent that originated somewhere in Central Asia, meaning that whenever their flowers commingle, they yield interspecific hybrids. Melon flowers hybridize freely among themselves. One haphazard fusion of cantaloupes, honeydews and banana melons is called the “Cantabananadew.”

  What can’t a banana do? Hybridize with a melon, unless transgenic engineering is used. Zaiger, who does no DNA splicing whatsoever, has devoted his life to crossbreeding Prunus flowers. He takes male pollen from as many different flowers as possible and mixes them with the female stigmas of as many other flowers as possible, and then plants the seeds to see how the hybrid expresses itself. Every year, he plants fifty thousand crosses, hoping to yield a handful of successes like pluots, speckled dinosaur eggs or apriums.

  As Floyd wraps up a meeting, Gary walks me out of the office and into a large greenhouse full of trees in bloom. It smells like sweet perfume. Festive mariachi music is playing in the background. The floor is cushioned with petals. A dozen or so women are up in the trees, decorticating blossoms. Gary, whose hair is covered in flower parts, holds up a plum flower to show me its stamens. Yanking them off, he explains that the team works with Zaiger-designed tweezers to pluck and remove the male parts of every flower. This flower emasculation is done in order to expose the pistil. The castrated stamens are then snipped up with scissors. To collect the pollen, which looks like golden dust, the diced anthers are sifted through tea strainers. The pollen is then delicately dabbed onto the naked pistils of other fruit trees by women on ladders using Walgreen’s eye-shadow brushes. “You have to be very patient to do this work,” says a woman in a bright pink floral shirt. “Men can’t do it.”