The Fruit Hunters Read online

  Trying to keep the story alive, I ask if he’d join me on a trip if the magazine pays for it. That changes everything. If they send us to Alaska to find cloudberries, he’ll gladly do the interview. He then tells me that he’s already been written about in Seventeen, but that pubescent girls haven’t yet started throwing their nighties at him. His favorite part in Lolita, he says, is when they cross the border into California and the agricultural officer asks if they have any honey. We end the conversation with him talking excitedly about cloudberry hunting. He sends me pages of notes on the fruit, a raspberry-like orange arctic fruit with a strong musky flavor that grows in places like North Pole, Alaska. According to his notes, cloudberries are often found in bogs full of insects that tear off chunks of skin with their “horrid mandibles.”

  Unfortunately, my editor squelches the Alaskan cloudberry dream. Instead, we decide to focus the story on fruit tourism, something I’m not even sure exists. My assignment is to find other people like the Fruit Detective and examine the trend of traveling for fruits.

  I start making a list of fruit tourism destinations, such as Bologna’s Garden of Lost Fruit, Yamanashi’s postmodern glass-and-steel Fruit Museum, and an island in the Nile river called Gazirat al-Mauz (“Banana Island”), where visitors can sample myriad bananas. I tell my editor that it looks like the best place to go hunting for fruits is Malaysia. “We’re not going to send you to Malaysia,” she says, rolling her eyes. They will, however, send me to Hawaii …

  LEAVING THE Big Island airport, my taxi driver starts singing “Welcome to Hawaii” into a little microphone over a backing track of slack-keyed guitars. His voice crackles through an amplifier he’s set up on the dashboard next to a hula doll in a grass skirt. As we skim along the winding road on the Kona coast, the sky and ocean merge into a blue infinity. Lush greenery bursts out of the black hardened lava. At a traffic light, a panoply of trumpet-shaped flowers perfumes the air. It’s all growing out of what is essentially a volcanic mountain island that’s still squirting out red, purple and golden streams of lava. We pull over briefly at my hotel, where I check in and snatch some of the complimentary papayas and mangoes at the buffet. They taste terrible.

  Twenty minutes later, we pull up at a dusty side street next to a rusty macadamia nut processing factory. “Many mahalos,” sings the driver into his microphone. “This is it: Napo’opo’o Road.”

  I look around. I don’t see anything besides trees and a dirt path. “Where’s the market?” I ask. “It’s down that way,” the driver says, pointing at a sign that says KONA PACIFIC FARMER’S COOPERATIVE. Walking along the path, I notice a couple of vendors have set up goods on some picnic tables. From a distance, it looks less like a market, and more like a rummage sale. A few men are carving sculptures of tiki gods from blocks of wood. I tell them I’m looking for Ken Love, president of the Hawaii Tropical Fruit Growers’ western chapter.

  “Yo, Ken, you have a customer,” shouts one of them.

  A man pops his head out from under a picnic table and waves. I walk over and shake his hand. Ken Love is unshaven, bulky and sweating in the heat. His enormous Hawaiian shirt is caked in farm grime. He takes off his floppy green hat and wipes his brow, revealing a balding pate girdled with curly graying hair. His granny glasses are smudged and a carved pipe juts out from under a bushy mustache. Despite his huge smile, there’s something kind of shifty and mischievous about him. I like him immediately.

  His stall contains dozens of different types of fruit. Each of these is displayed alongside photos and text describing the fruit’s characteristics. Ken Love calls them ultraexotics, to distinguish them from the exotic-yet-commonplace mangoes, papayas and pineapples of commerce. I taste an acerola, a bracingly tart red berry that, he says, has four thousand times more vitamin C than an orange. He shows me green thumb-shaped bilimbis, starfruit relatives that his wife, Maggie, uses to make chutneys. We slice open a dusky brown chico—it tastes like maple syrup pudding. The grape-sized wampees, he says, counteract overindulgence in lychees. In China, eating too many lychees is believed to cause nosebleeds—popping wampees apparently stops the bleeding. I eat bignays, gourkas, sapotes, mombins, langsats and jaboticabas of all shapes, sizes and colors. There are so many new fruits that I start losing track, their names blurring in my notepad. I feel like I’ve somehow ended up in Neverland.

  The bounty of the region is what originally persuaded Love to move here. “I used to be a photographer in the Midwest, and I’d come out here for work. What drove me nuts was seeing all the papayas and mangoes rotting on the sides of the streets. ‘Why aren’t people doing something about them?’ I wondered.”

  As he started digging around, he kept finding more and more strange fruits. Hawaii is at the crossroads of the East and West, and every wave of immigrant always arrived with seeds in their pant cuffs, in their pockets and sewn into their shirts. “They all wanted that golden nugget from back home,” explains Love.

  Some of these seed introductions, such as Himalayan berries and the banana poke (a type of passion fruit) have taken over the island, snuffing out local plants and poisoning animals. Hawaii is considered the world capital of invasive species. Charles Elton, in The Ecology of Invasion by Animals and Plants, describes Hawaii as “quite an exchange and bazaar for species, a scrambling together of forms from the continents and islands of the world.”

  It isn’t only humans who’ve brought seeds to the islands. A number of them simply floated in on air currents, explains Alan Burdick in Out of Eden. Scientists sticking nets out of plane windows have cataloged thousands of airborne species drifting above Hawaii. Such arial plankton accounts for only 1.4 percent of the seeds that arrived before humans. According to the biologist Sherwin Carlquist, most seeds and fruits arrived either inside birds’ digestive systems or stuck to their feathers and feet. The rest washed in with the ocean current, a situation compounded in recent years by the minute life forms arriving in the bilge water of ships.

  Hawaii today is full of immigrant fruits growing buck wild. Love’s mission is to catalog, promote and sell them. Most Hawaiians don’t even realize what’s growing in their backyards, he says. They’d rather eat sub-par fruits that pass through the industrial food chain than the fresh fruits growing all around them. I think back to the unimpressive fruits at the hotel buffet and imagine them making the journey from a farm in South America or Asia all the way to Hawaii.

  People aren’t eating their local ultraexotics, Love says, because they simply don’t realize they exist. His goal at the farmer’s market isn’t so much to sell fruits, it’s to educate people about the vast array of fruits on their doorsteps. When a family arrives at the co-op, he starts telling them all about the different fruits. They purchase a bunch of tropical apricots, mountain apples and Surinam cherries. I ask two kids what they think of the market. “Our parents said that we had to do something educational today,” says one tween fingering a bignay. “This is educational but it’s not too bad. It’s fun, actually.”

  Two cougars in pearl necklaces scamper about while paraphrasing Love’s descriptions. “I learned something today,” says the one in purple Yves St. Laurent heels, picking up a bunch of “heavenly” rambutans. Covered with hairy tendrils, somewhat like a sea urchin, rambutans contain a delicious white lycheelike interior. As Love’s data sheet explains, the fruit’s name is derived from “rambut,” the Malay word for “hair.” The women titter about the rambutans’ resemblance to hairy testicles.

  Tugging on his pipe, Love explains that fruits have a transformative power on people. “Have you ever seen a Russian guy taste a jaboticaba for the first time?” he asks, referring to a fruit that “looks like an alien embryo and tastes totally out of this world.” A few weeks ago, some Vietnamese women began crying when they saw his otaheite gooseberries. “Their mom’s otaheite tree in Saigon got chopped down when they were children, and they hadn’t seen the fruit since they were little kids.”

  Throughout the day, I keep on tasting the dif
ferent fruits, amazed at the diversity. At one point, Love hands me an oblong berry, the size of a pinkie tip. I pop it in my mouth and bite. A pleasant spurt of juice coats my tongue. Love instructs me to spit out the seed. He then hands me a lime and asks me to taste it. It’s sensationally sweet. I ask him if it’s some sort of sweet lime. No, he says, laughing. I’m merely experiencing the aftereffects of the miracle fruit. Through some quirk of biochemistry, this small red berry has a miraculous effect on the palate: it makes all acidic foods taste sweet. It coats taste buds in a liquid that, for approximately one hour, alters our perception of all sour foods. After eating a miracle fruit, pickles taste like honey. A bologna and mustard sandwich tastes like cake. Vinegar tastes like cream soda. It’s nature’s NutraSweet.

  As I sit there in a blissed-out miracle-fruit trance, hours fly by. At closing time, I help Love pack up the ultraexotics. He offers to give me a tour around the island the next day.

  That evening, in the hotel lobby, the miracle fruit is still making my soda water taste slightly sweet. As I’m going over my notes, the singer of the lounge band sits down next to me. She has just finished a flamboyant rendering of Roberta Flack’s “Feel Like Making Love.” Her name is Priscilla. She is a transsexual.

  “So whatcha doing in Hawaii?” she asks, in a husky baritone.

  “I’m a journalist,” I answer. “I’m working on an article about exotic fruit.”

  “I’m an exotic fruit,” she purrs. “Write about me!”

  As she sashays back to the stage, I head up to my room. Walking down the hallway, with its green shag carpeting, green fern wallpaper, and green ceiling, I feel as though I’m hurtling headfirst through a green tunnel into some sort of magical plant realm.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Love picks me up in his pickup truck. He has brought a flat crate of yellow apricot-like Japanese fruits called loquats. “I’m quite loquacious about loquats,” boasts Love, explaining that he has amassed more than five thousand pages of notes on the fruit. His fixation began in Japan, where a former lover reached up and pulled one out of a tree. “Loquats were forbidden to common people in China because of a legend about a carp swimming upstream who turned into a dragon by eating loquats. The emperor said, ‘Hey, I don’t want the common people to eat loquats and become strong like dragons and kick me out of office,’ so they were banned.”

  Loquats are just the tip of his obsessiveness. Love is an Asiaphile who has been on many expeditions to the Far East. He once passed out in Singapore after eating sashimi of dog brain filet. He recently wrote an Internet guide to 1,530 Japanese restaurants in the United States. (“I actually went to three hundred of them.”) He loves taking photographs of geometry, and, as we drive, he points out the Euclidian forms in the palm trees, in the steering wheel and in the fruits we’re eating. His bylines in magazine pieces state that he “has been involved in agriculture since he was first spanked for tearing up the front yard to plant beans to bring to his new kindergarten teacher.”

  Our first stop is his farm. After driving up a boulder-strewn path, he shows me a coffee bush, covered in red berries. It never occurred to me that coffee came from a fruit.

  Getting out of the car, Love explains that the hardened lava coating the island makes it exceedingly difficult to plant trees. To demonstrate, Love suggests we plant a lychee tree. The black volcanic soil is so hard that I need a pickax, not a shovel, to make a dent. Still, planting the tree is a wonderful experience—and also a prime fruit tourism activity. A lychee tree named Adam is growing on that farm at this very moment.

  En route to our next destination, Love talks about the dozens of enthusiasts he knows who travel around the world looking for fruit. The idea of a community of amateurs trekking across the globe and into rain forests to find rare fruits fascinates me. We keep passing fruit trees lining the sides of the roads. “Here you don’t stop to smell the roses, you stop to eat the fruit,” says Love, as we jump out to check on some rare grumichamas, sort of like Brazilian cherries, blossoming in the back of a Chevron gas station. With their slightly resinous undertones, they taste like cherry cola. In a nearby ditch, pineapple crowns jut out from spiky bushes. I somehow imagined that pineapples grow on trees, yet here they are bursting out of knee-high plants.

  At lunchtime, we pick up Ken’s plump, bespectacled sixteen-year-old daughter Jennifer and head to their favorite Chinese restaurant. We pore over a coffee table book by a Miami fruit hunter named William Whitman. It’s full of odd photographs of the author holding monkeys and glowing red fruits. Love starts reminiscing about John Stermer, an eccentric fruit experimenter, who used to walk through his Hawaiian orchards in the nude. As he is raving about Asian fruits, Jennifer looks at me and says, “Welcome to the agony of my reality.”

  Our next destination is Lion’s Gate B&B, a fruit-centric inn with an orchard full of pomelos, jaboticabas, Surinam cherries and rambutans. The owner talks about his “hot years” as a young lieutenant in Asia. “In Japanese folklore, the tanuki is the badger of excess. Sculptures depict him with money in one hand and sake in the other, going to town with a hard-on. I was called Tanuki when I was in Japan.”

  We then visit a vacant lot Love bills as a fruit tourism destination under construction. It belongs to Carey Lindenbaum, a sinewy Californian lawyer who moved here to grow fruits. “It’ll be a B&B with all sorts of organic tropical fruit that you can pick yourself,” says Lindenbaum, pointing at a weedy, rocky patch of land. Nestled between the limbs of a nearby tree is her home, a small wooden tree house. As she describes the future orchard, her pet donkey keeps pushing me away with its nose. “She’s really jealous and possessive,” says Lindenbaum. “She likes to invade personal space.”

  The next stop is George Schattauer’s private orchard. Love is the custodian of Schattauer’s rare trees. In exchange for tending the coppice, Love can sell excess fruits at his farmer’s market. It’s a beautiful garden, filled with wonders such as the egg fruit, a golden, mango-sized fruit shaped like a teardrop. Near the entrance is the noni: a lumpy, gnomish fruit that smells like dirty socks. It’s also called the vomit fruit, says Love, but some people think it cures cancer. It can’t be eaten raw because it’s too tough; but in juice form, it became the locus of a health craze that swept through the diet-obsessed 1990s.

  A dog follows us through the orchard, eating fallen mangoes. At the house, Schattauer points out a large orange tree. It’s the first orange tree in Hawaii, he says, brought here by Captain Vancouver from Valencia in the eighteenth century. Before leaving, we walk under the drooping branches of a jackfruit tree. Near the trunk, there’s a cavelike grotto formed by the surrounding foliage. Under the branches, a number of massive jackfruits shine like carbuncles in the darkness. (One of Schattauer’s fruits, weighing more than seventy-six pounds, won the Guinness world record for biggest jackfruit.) Love squeezes them to test for ripeness, and then uses garden shears to cut off one the size of a fat six-year-old. It looks like one of those alien pods in Cocoon. He hands it to me. It is exuding a sticky, milky-white goo.

  We sit down in the driveway and open it up, unleashing its sulfuric essences. It stinks. Naturalist Gerald Durrell describes its fearsome aroma as “a cross between an open grave and a sewer.” He exaggerates, but only slightly. Inside are amber, honey-drenched segments. I’m mesmerized, but also scared. The jackfruit’s stench is primal, uncomfortably animalistic. It’s nature: unshaven, bulky, and secreting discharge. Love moans with pleasure as he eats it, wiping his nectar-sodden hands on his pants. I take a timid bite. Love offers me another sopping handful. I can’t eat anymore, I explain. Love shrugs, taking another mouthful. I want to like the fruit as much as he does, but its aroma is too penetrating, too terrifying. As Love wraps up the fibrous parts to make jackfruit jerky, I feel disappointed in myself. My palate isn’t yet ready for the gustatory delights of the exotic fruit kingdom.

  As the sun sets, we head to a pizzeria to meet Kent Fleming, a tall professor at the University of Hawaii and the author
of Agtourism Comes of Age in Hawaii. “There’s tourism for everything,” he says, citing disaster tourism and food tourism. Fruit tourism, according to Fleming, consists of the sort of farm and agricultural (“ag”) visits I’m experiencing on this trip. “Agtourism is an ed-venture,” he quips. Alongside creating an awareness of the countless varieties of fruit available, fruit tourism is a hybrid of educational and adventurous ecotourism that is concerned with developing models of sustainability in rural areas. It’s a way for traditional family farms to create a new market in the face of corporate farming and for newfound fruit visionaries—like the people I’ve been meeting—to create viable business opportunities.

  He explains that he’s hoping to convert the orchard at the nearby university into a model fruit tourism destination. “It will be a central resource for travelers and farmers. We’ll have a shop where you can buy fruits and books or find out about fruit tourism. You’ll be able to have a local coffee and white pineapples. We’ll have a hundred types of weird fruit and tons of different types of avocado—but not the Hass avocados you get on the mainland. We don’t even let the pigs eat those.” Hawaii, he says, is the one place where you can travel to taste the world’s most exotic fruits without facing exotic dangers such as having insects lay eggs in your back that hatch into squirming worms. After a few beers, Fleming starts telling ribald jokes. At one point, he asks me if I’ve ever heard of a Father Nelson. He then puts me in a full-Nelson headlock and starts humping me from behind.

  AFTER SAYING GOOD-BYE to Love, I board a plane to Hilo, on the other side of the Big Island, the following morning. The woman sitting next to me starts talking about “emissaries of light” while making a figure eight with her fingers. She explains how she made an imaginary contract between her and all the citizens of planet Earth, wrote “void” on it in red ink, shrunk it to the size of a postage stamp, and then burned it in a violet flame as the ashes dissipated into the light above.