The Fruit Hunters Read online

  In the wild, wheat and barley shatter spontaneously, catapulting seeds. Early in the Neolithic revolution, we chose to cultivate nonexploding—or indehiscent—varieties. The ancestral versions of fruits like cardamoms, peas, lentils and flax dispersed themselves mechanically. Human intervention has taught them to keep their big mouths shut. Dehiscent pomegranates, once painted on the shields of ancient Persians, were the inspiration for explosive hand grenades (grenade means pomegranate in French).

  On a sunny day in early July, I stepped onto my balcony and was greeted by a sky full of cottonwood seeds pirouetting slowly through the air. Each of these floating fluff balls might possibly grow into a tree. A clump of thousands had gathered in a cotton candy pool at the base of the stairs. As I was standing in the sunshine, it hit me that I was surrounded by millions of swirling fruits. Then one landed in my eyelash, hoping to take root.

  BEING EATEN is how many plants distribute themselves. To this end, they use color and sweetness the way certain European restaurants use unctuous pitchmen to lure in hapless tourists. The fruit sacrifices itself for the seed, hoping it will take hold somewhere far away. Genetically, plants want the same thing as any other species: survival and replication. Anyone eating a fruit helps it achieve its goal of making as many copies of itself as possible.

  When birds eat small fruits, they eat the seeds as well. After passing through the birds’ digestive system, the seeds are dispersed from above (trees grown from aerial droppings are known horticulturally as “craplings”). When squirrels bury acorns, a number of forgotten nuts will become new trees. Crabs eat coconuts and tropical almonds. Many fish eat fruits. When not devouring entire cows, piranhas like guavas, berries and the fruits of the Piranhea trifoliata tree. There are even tiny fruits dispersed by ants and other minuscule insects.

  Some plants are so cunning that they developed fruits that resemble insects—in order to be eaten by that insect’s predators. The fruits of Scorpiurus subvillosa look like centipedes. Other fruits imitate worms, spiders and even horned beetles. Birds carry them off, thinking they’ve snatched a squirmalicious snack.

  All species coevolve with other species. In certain cases, a plant’s evolutionary partner may be extinct, yet their fruits have somehow lived on. More than fourteen thousand years ago, giant sloths, mastodons, mammoths, elephantine gomphotheres and Hummer-sized beavers roamed the Americas. These animals, known collectively as megafauna, ate fruits like the osage orange, a knobbly green fruit that lacks a twenty-first-century diner. The neotropical forests of Central and South America are full of bulbous fruits that aren’t being distributed in any way. These are called “anachronisms” by Dan Janzen and Paul Martin, two scientists who hypothesize that such fruits are missing their Pleistocene partners. Even avocados, prickly pears and papayas used to be gulped down whole, seeds and all, by fridge-sized armadillos called glyptodonts.

  In southern Nepal, the horned rhinoceros’s main source of food is the Trewia nudiflora fruit. The rhino eats it, and then excretes the seeds in marshy lands where they can grow into new plants. With the Indian rhino on the verge of extinction today, it’s possible that the plant will also become an anachronism. The dodo bird, before it was wiped out, is believed to have eaten tambalacoques, fruits of the dodo tree. Without its evolutionary partner, the Mauritian dodo tree was threatened with extinction in the 1970s. A tambalacoque seed apparently wouldn’t grow into a new tree without being digested and having its hard exterior abraded by a dodo. Although aspects of this phenomenon have been disputed, botanists now seem to agree that the seed can be germinated by passing it through a turkey’s gastrointestinal network, which has led to renewed dodo tree groves.

  Almonds would be nothing without their pollinators: bumblebees. Almonds are California’s largest tree crop. Six hundred million pounds of the nuts become two billion dollars annually, more than double what the state generates with wine exports. Even so, there is a shortage of the nuts. Growers can’t meet the demand, a situation compounded by Colony Collapse Disorder, the mysterious bee epidemic. Each spring, forty billion bees are brought into California, some flown in from Oceania on 747 planes. Foreign germs, parasites and other pathogens invariably commingle amid the 530,000 acres of almond trees stretching from Bakersfield to Red Bluff. Aggravating matters are evolving strains of a virus, rampant overuse of pesticides and some freaky new mites.

  One of the tightest mutualisms known in nature is that between figs and wasps. Certain types of wasps spend most of their lives inside figs: they are born, grow up and mate inside the self-contained fig universe. When the female wasp has been impregnated by a male, she flies out, bearing pollen on her body. She then squeezes into another fig’s tiny orifice, losing her wings in the process, and pollinates the flowers. After giving birth to her spawn, she dies.

  At the Greek harvest ceremony called Thargelia, men and women used to beat their genitalia with wild fig branches thinking that would help fertilize fig trees. When crops were meager, humans wearing garlands of figs would be burned alive on fig-wood pyres to ensure abundant harvests. If only they knew they needed wasps. Unbeknownst to most of us today, some of the figs that we eat, such as the Calimyrna or the Smyrna, may contain wasp remains, although these insect husks are usually broken down by an enzyme called ficin. Most of the figs that are grown commercially, however, are self-pollinating varieties. This means that the wasps aren’t needed to transport the pollen because the flowers can develop fruits without being fertilized. The term for such a fruit is parthenocarpic, meaning virgin fruit.

  In the past, all figs needed wasps. It wasn’t until parthenocarpic figs materialized that humans took the reins. Plantings of self-pollinating figs dating back to 11,400 B.C. were recently uncovered in the Jordan Valley. Archaeobotanists now consider this to be the earliest evidence of agriculture, coming approximately a thousand years before the domestication of other early crops like wheat and barley.

  Despite their branding, many seedless fruits actually contain small, sterile seeds. If you look closely into seedless grapes, you’ll see little aborted embryos, minuscule enough to not interfere with the fruits’ texture. Seedless watermelons invariably contain white seed ghosts. Some parthenocarpic fruits, such as stoneless mangoes, plums and avocados, can be pretty unusual.

  But then parthenocarpy is itself an unusual bargain. The plant says, “Fine, I’ll stop producing seeds so that you’ll eat me happily but in return, you’ll spread my DNA far and wide by propagating orchards full of my clones.” Seedless fruits haven’t therefore lost their raisin d’être. Seeds used to be the way plants made copies of themselves. Today, humans can help them multiply more efficiently, mainly because we oversee most arable land. Plants evolved parthenocarpy to ensure their continued existence. Or we selected them; whichever you prefer.

  NASA’s freeze-dried peaches marked fruits’ entrée into space. Now astronauts are growing fresh strawberries “in spacecraft-like conditions” for upcoming Mars voyages. Chinese seed satellites are orbiting Earth in order to see whether cosmic radiation and microgravity will lead to increased fruit yields. In Canada, Tomatosphere is the name of a program teaching students to plant and observe tomatoes whose seeds have spent months in space shuttles. Fruits are along for the ride: stuck in truck tires, ballast water and loading containers, they accompany us wherever we go.

  Just as we enjoy them for their taste and nutrients, fruits have successfully enlisted us to extend their reach. In this sense, we’re being manipulated by fruits. Our payoff is a healthy snack; their payoff is countless hectares of orchards tended all over the galaxy. Next time you eat a raspberry, pay attention. The berries look and taste so delicious that you probably don’t even notice that those seeds are passing through your digestive system intact, ready to return to the earth and blossom anew.

  As my guava-groping friend knows, fruits are arousing. Many are named for their ribald aspects: sodom apples, tit of Venus peaches, women’s breast apples and maiden’s flesh pears. The udder
-shaped nipple fruit, also known as the titty fruit, is an egg-sized orange freakazoid covered in nipplelike nobules. The conquistadores named the vainilla bean after the Latin word for vagina. Buttocks, nipples, bosoms, thighs and fingers have long been employed as names for different cultivars. (A cultivar is a cultivated variety that has desirable attributes that are distinct from other cultivars.)

  Humans have always delighted in the similarities between fruits and our erogenous zones. An Egyptian papyrus from more than three thousand years ago equated pomegranates to breasts. Plums, peaches, cherries, apricots, have all had their exteriors compared to posteriors. The quest for the callipygian ideal seemed to find its grail in melons, whether it was Apollinaire comparing women’s bottoms to melons grown in the midnight sun or James Joyce almost rapping in Ulysses about Leopold kissing the “plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melon-smellonous osculation.”

  Lest we think fruits are exclusively feminine, consider the banana. The candlestick salad, a popular dish in the 1950s, featured an upright banana shaft rocketing out of a pineapple ring crowned with molten whipped cream. “Fruits” were an aristocratic code word for sperm, as evinced by a French poem about two cousins going plum picking: “She brought back many fruits / but these fruits weren’t plums.” Avocados for the Aztecs, figs for Berber nomads, apples for Servius: all were called testicles. Mangosteens are said to resemble the interior of scrotums. Lychees are “naked balls,” wrote Georges Bataille. A variety of fig from Naples called pope’s testes has an almost transparent strawberry-pink flesh.

  Fruits intentionally send out attraction signals. No wonder we go bananas for them; they’ve programmed us. Fruits reproduce themselves by making us want them.

  Humans are willing to go all the way—perhaps without even realizing it—for fruits. Like us, they are alive: they pant, perspire, and pop open. They even possess a form of intelligence: bananas and oranges connected to lie-detecting polygraphs have been shown to respond to mathematics questions in experiments by Dr. Ken Hashimoto and Cleve Backster. Asked how much two plus two is, the plants emit a hum that forms into four peaks when translated into ink tracings. In recent years, molecular geneticists have deepened their understanding of plant perception. By decrypting plant signaling, we’ve learned that flora have the sensory capacity to compute everything from temperature to light, pulsating with electrical receptors when under threat and flooding areas under attack with toxins. Jeremy Narby, in Intelligence in Nature, explains how plant cells communicate information using RNA transcripts and protein links. In this way, “plants learn, remember, and decide, without brains.” The Japanese have a word for the “knowingness” of the natural world: chi-sei.

  It’s clear that both sides have evolved the ability to influence the other. And what fruits want from us is the same thing we want from them: survival.

  2

  Hawaiian Ultraexotics

  With an apple, I will astonish Paris.

  —Paul Cézanne

  KICKING THE FEBRUARY slush from their boots, friends are pouring into my apartment for a cocktail party. Montreal’s minus forty-degree winters may inspire indie-pop odes, but they aren’t exactly conducive to a thriving fruit culture. Still, wondering what might turn up, I asked each guest to bring a fruit they’ve never tasted before. But no one seems to have brought any fruits at all.

  Then, shortly after midnight, the doorbell rings. I open the door, and my shivering friend Karl hands me a bright pink orb. The size of an ostrich egg, it’s winged with flaming orange-green flaps and topped with a mane of dead flower petals. It’s a dragon fruit, Karl says, from Vietnam. He just picked it up in Chinatown. It looks like an emissary from Mars.

  An excited crowd watches as I cut it open, revealing crisp white flesh dotted with small black seeds, like a solidified Oreo milk shake. Karl hands out sections that, with their shocking pink rinds and black-and-white interiors, resemble slices of zebra meat. The texture is akin to watermelon, the seeds as inconspicuous as a kiwi’s. The delicate flavor is vaguely reminiscent of strawberries and concord grapes. Some people say they find the taste too subtle, but there’s something about the flavor’s very restraint that perfectly complements the dazzling exterior.

  Hunting for other fruits that can match the excitement of dragon fruits, I start making regular treks down to Chinatown. The more outrageous, the better. I find heart-shaped lychees that gush sugary nectar. Grape-sized longans, beneath their dusty beige peel, are filled with gelatinous interiors. Their sweet-tart bursts of juice taste gently spiced with nutmeg, cloves and cardamom. I love the way you can eat kumquats, like mini tangerines, peel and all. Pepinos are purple-flecked cucumber-melons that, unfortunately, look better than they taste. The same is true of the kiwano, a Day-Glo orange spiky lump that could be mistaken for a radioactive horned toad. Containing barely palatable slimy green seeds, its sole purpose appears to be visual appreciation.

  There are a lot of options, which might explain why Quebeckers eat more fruits than other Canadians. The most flavorful fruit I come across, the mangosteen, isn’t flashy at all. Known as the queen of fruits in Southeast Asia, its hard, purplish and ocher shell, crowned by a woody flower cap, is sliced around its circumference and then twisted open. The interior of the fruit is fitted with a half dozen ivory-white fruit sections that look like garlic cloves and taste refreshingly majestic. Each self-contained section is just firm enough to suspend the incomparable juice in a perfect degree of tension. I could say that it tastes like minty raspberry-apricot sorbet, but the only way to truly know a mangosteen is to try one. Philosophers have discussed the impossibility of conveying the flavor of a fruit to someone who has never tasted it. As David Hume put it: “we cannot form to ourselves a just idea of the taste of a pineapple, without having actually tasted it.”

  I start bringing mangosteens to parties. Some people are as impressed as I am. Others wonder if its name means it’s somehow related to mangoes, or if the “-steen” makes it Jewish. I also start noticing that some people aren’t at all interested in trying the fruit-queen. “I had one of these removed last year,” a disgusted friend tells me. “From my back.”

  On a trip down to Manhattan, Liane and I pick up a bunch of Chinatown fruits as a gift for our friend Kurt Ossenfort, in whose guest room we always stay. An artist who used to tie paintbrushes to trees so that oaks could do paintings in the wind, Ossenfort always seems to be involved in glamorous “giglets” such as videotaping photo shoots for Teen Vogue, filming documentaries about Thai elephant orchestras or designing penthouse suites for lawyers representing the World Trade Center. We arrive at his Fifth Avenue apartment and present him with the mango steens, dragon fruits, sapodillas, dukus and longans. He’s appreciative, but also a tad concerned about how we got them over the border. Mangosteens and dragon fruit, he says, are illegal in the United States. I’m stunned—why can you get them in Montreal, but not in New York? It has something to do with bringing pests into America, explains Ossenfort. Eating them, we laugh off the inadvertent smuggling.

  Ossenfort’s own fruit bowl is full of red plums dappled with yellow splotches. Their little stickers say that they’re pluots: hybrids of plums and apricots. They taste like the juiciest, sweetest plum imaginable, with a hint of apricot flavor. Tasting them conjures images, remembered or dreamed, of a dusty summer afternoon, somewhere in Croatia, of the first photograph I’d ever taken: it was of a fruit tree. Its fruits tasted something like these pluots.

  I ask Ossenfort where on earth he got them. You can get pluots anywhere, he says. But he happened to know these ones were especially good because the Fruit Detective had tipped him off.

  “The Fruit Detective?” I ask.

  “His real name is David Karp,” explains Ossenfort. “And he knows everything about fruits.” Ossenfort shows me footage he filmed of the Fruit Detective jumping around in foliage and stalking pineapples. Karp was
wearing a pith helmet and had a lazy eye. He used all sorts of esoteric paraphernalia, such as a refractometer to gauge the sweetness of fruits and a knife identical to those used by members of Shanghai’s Green Gang to shiv enemies.

  The Fruit Detective, I’m amazed to learn, is the son of an inconceivably wealthy copper magnate. Renowned in certain Upper East Side circles for having published translations of sixth-century Latin poets at the age of twenty as well as for getting near-perfect scores on his SATs while tripping on LSD, Karp’s career as a high-powered stockbroker crumbled as he became addicted to heroin. At one point, he was flying regularly by Concorde from Paris to New York to score drugs. He even became a dealer. After going through recovery, he reinvented himself as a fruit connoisseur to impress a girl he was in love with. Although he didn’t get the girl, he did become a fruit junky. He even calls eating fruits “a fruit fix.”

  He’s a shining light. His compassion for unknown fruits, even if the affinity verges on the compulsive, is inspiring. I’m convinced he’s the hero of a story not yet written.

  BACK IN MONTREAL, I head for Chinatown and pick out the most extravagant dragon fruit in the city. It’s a gift for an editor at Air Canada’s in-flight magazine. Describing the pluots, and David Karp, and the bounty of fruit in Brazil, I pitch a story about exploring for fruits. She is blown away by the dragon fruit, and serves it to colleagues at their editorial meeting. A few days later, I get a call. They’ve commissioned a feature story asking me to follow the Fruit Detective on a fruit escapade.

  When I call David Karp to tell him about the story, he informs me that he is going to be profiled by The New Yorker. One of their staff writers has asked to spend a week with him later that summer. He says I can only interview him after that piece appears.