The Fruit Hunters Page 32

  Floyd comes over and gazes happily at the ladies fluttering about on ladders. “They’re imitating the birds and the bees,” he laughs deeply, I’m struck by his uncanny resemblance to Hugh Hefner. This isn’t a mere fruit and flower factory; I’m in the Playboy mansion of the fruit world.

  IN THE LATE eighteenth century, Goethe noticed how fruits arise as flowers “die into being.” At that time, fruits were often grown by prisoners and monks. As 1768’s The Fruit Gardener put it: “men cut off from society must have amusements.” Like other monastic shut-ins, Gregor Johann Mendel amused himself by growing plants. His particular fancy was peas. As he dabbled with them, he made a momentous realization. By mixing the pollen from one flower with the stigma of another, he was able to create all sorts of hybrids. After growing close to thirty thousand pea plants in his experimental garden in Moravia, he presented a paper called “Experiments on Plant Hybridization.” It was thoroughly ignored. Mendel died unknown and unrecognized.

  In the early twentieth century, however, his work was rediscovered. Mendel was posthumously baptized the “father of modern genetics.” His work shed light on the mysteries of heredity, paving the way to the mapping of the double helix and the pioneering research molecular geneticists are doing today with DNA—some of which has led to public outcry.

  Nine years after Mendel’s death, in 1893, a California fruit grower named Luther Burbank published a catalog called New Creations in Fruits and Flowers. It contained fruit marvels such as a strawberry-raspberry hybrid; a cross between the California dewberry and the Siberian raspberry; and a freakish apple that tasted sour on one side and sweet on the other. His hybrid of the African stubble berry and rabbit weed yielded an entirely new form; although neither of the parent plants bore edible fruits, his hybrid bore a delicious berry. Burbank was dubbed “the wizard of horticulture” because of his ability to create new fruits. Plants and fruits, he said, are like “clay in the hands of the potter or color on the artist’s canvas and can readily be molded into more beautiful forms and colors than any painter or sculptor can ever hope to bring forth.” The condition of nature, he seemed to be saying, is absolutely unfinished. Fruits are continually evolving.

  Burbank anticipated Zaiger’s efforts by breeding the Prunus salicina, a plum intended to be shipped cross-country. Zaiger got his start working with a former Burbank apprentice named Fred Anderson. Known as “the Father of the Nectarine,” Anderson bred the first commercial nectarines in America. “Fred got the breeding bug from Burbank, and I caught the dreaded disease from Fred,” says Zaiger. While working under Anderson’s tutelage, Zaiger started breeding cherry-apricot hybrids in search of trees that would be resistant to soil, climate and pests. At the outset, the trees were all sterile, but then some of them started bearing fruits. Tasting them was an epiphany that changed Zaiger’s life—and our fruits.

  Zaiger grew up during the Dust Bowl depression. “When I was a kid,” he recalls, “the apples were mostly wormy and you were lucky at Christmas if you got an orange in your sock. We didn’t eat any peaches because we couldn’t afford them.” Zaiger’s lack of fresh fruits as a child triggered his life’s work of making good fruits as widely available as possible.

  “Today, we’re breeding for the whole world,” says Zaiger, not immodestly. He has sold millions of trees, which have produced untold billions of fruits in countries like Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Egypt, China, Tunisia and South Africa. The Zaiger family’s goal is to create new fruits that work within the chains of distribution. “People in high-rises want high-quality fruits, but those fruits need to be shippable in order to reach them,” explains Gary. “Peaches all used to be so fragile that a fingerprint would bruise it. We create varieties that have similar flavor-profiles as the old varieties, but that are bigger, firmer and can ship well. They’re not just a bag of water anymore. A peach that’ll melt all over you and drip onto your shirt is great, but they can’t be sold. Some couldn’t be carried across the road without denting. If you want to grow them yourself, that’s great. We make varieties for the home gardener as well. And the best old varieties are still available as well.”

  The Zaigers are optimistic about the future. “Right now we have things that look good and ship well, but the flavor isn’t quite there yet,” acknowledges Floyd. “Within twenty years, it’ll fully be there. Flavor is the number-one criteria we push for now. The whole gist of our program is to improve the industry. In the future, there will be stone fruits that taste delicious after three weeks of shipping. I’m sure they exist. If we work hard enough, it will be possible to find them.”

  Floyd shows me a diagram for one of the hybrids they’ve been working on. It’s an agglomeration of dozens of different fruits. The separate varieties combine together in a rhizomatic scheme until the result, a Dinosaur Egg or Dapple Dandy, comes out at the end. He explains how it’s important to break up linkages between genes, and how some genes may actually exist in fruits but may not be expressing themselves and how different DNA must be lined together in order to make hidden traits come to life.

  “I think I understand,” I say.

  “I wish I did!” he answers. “The further you go the more you realize how little you really know. The wealth of information is ever-expanding. Learning about fruits is like entering a funnel from the bottom—as you get into it, it keeps getting wider and wider.”

  He then opens a drawer on his desk and pulls out an envelope. He hands it to me, saying, “I look at this whenever I get discouraged.”

  Inside is a letter, dated August 18, 2005, from a fan in Boise, Idaho: “I have recently become addicted to Pluots … My sincerest thanks to all of you for making these fruits available to me and my family. With such yummy fruit it’s easy to get our five servings of fruits and vegetables per day—some days it’s five pluots. We hope the vegetables forgive us.”

  LEAVING THE ZAIGERS’, I point the rental car back toward San Francisco. The thought of Zaiger’s funnel is strangely comforting.

  It reminds me of something Stephen Wood, who grows heirloom apples at Poverty Lane Orchards, told me as we were munching Esopus Spitzengergs that autumn day. Despite working with apples for decades, he said that all he’d learned was how to grow a few apple varieties in his climate. “The more you know about fruits,” he explained, “the more you realize how little you know.”

  It was Kierkegaard who noted how “there comes a critical moment where everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more and more that there is something which cannot be understood.” Fruits bring us to the brink of the eternal unknowable. Beyond it, the natural collapses into the supernatural.

  I think I’ve learned enough. Enough to know that I can never know enough. Enough to remain awed by their infinitude. Enough to accept that I might never make it to Australia’s outback to sample bush fruits like the red quandong, which is considered a gourmet treat, or the blue quandong, which looks like an ostrich egg painted metallic blue with a glitter gun, or even the silver quandong, which is so far ahead of its time that fruities will only be eating them in the distant future. Although part of me still wants to visit the North American Fruit Explorers Annual Fruit Showcase in a few months, if only to hear their tales of “Exploring the Caucasus Mountains for Wild Fruits,” I already know what it will be like: endlessly fascinating.

  I pull out a stick of peppermint chewing gum, and at that precise moment notice that I’m crossing a street called Blue Gum Drive. As I turn onto the freeway, my field of vision fills with orchards. There is no end. Rows upon rows of trees stretch to the horizon, like upturned souls frozen in the afterlife. Their angular, leafless branches palpitate with blossoms. Renewal! The flowers are as bright and white as shards of ice in the winter sun. Soon the fruits will be ripening.

  Acknowledgments

  THIS BOOK could not have come to fruition without Kurt Ossenfort, David Karp, Mireille Silcoff, Taras Grescoe, Jocelyn Zuckerman, William Sertl, Charles Levin, Cat Macpherson, Anna deVries
, Martha Leonard, Kathleen Rizzo, Amber Husbands, Ian Jackson and Miska Gollner. Thank you to all the fruit growers, preservers, lovers, scholars and sellers for taking the time to meet and speak with me. The Canada Council for the Arts provided early support. Michelle Tessler, my fantastic literary agent, also helped shape the narrative. Sarah Rainone and Amy Black at Doubleday provided invaluable structural insights. Nan Graham, Susan Moldow and Sarah McGrath at Scribner believed in this book and made it all possible. I am incredibly fortunate to have Alexis Gargagliano as my editor. My deepest gratitude to Liane Balaban and my family.

  Further Reading

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  Anderson, Edgar. Plants, Man and Life. Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1952.

  Ardrey, Robert. African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man. New York: Atheneum, 1961.

  Armstrong, Karen. In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

  A Short History of Myth. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005.

  Asbury, Herbert. The French Quarter. New York: Garden City, 1938.

  Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

  Barlow, Connie. The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruits, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms. New York: Basic Books, 2000.

  Barrie, James Matthew. Peter Pan: The Complete and Unabridged Text. New York: Viking Press, 1991.

  Beauman, Fran. The Pineapple: King of Fruits. London: Chatto & Windus, 2005

  Behr, Edward. The Artful Eater: A Gourmet Investigates the Ingredients of Great Food. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1992.

  Borges, Jorge Luis. The Book of Imaginary Beings. London: Vintage, 1957.

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