The Fruit Hunters Read online

  My first destination is Onomea Orchards, a tropical fruit farm belonging to Richard Johnson, a retired manager from Intel. Confident and businesslike, he is growing rambutans, mangosteens and durians for profit. He’s convinced that these fruits will soon be as popular as kiwis. Although they haven’t been allowed into the United States in the past, he says that Hawaii has invested in irradiation facilities that are now allowing ultraexotics to be exported to the mainland.

  He shows me some durian blossoms, which are hermaphroditic (meaning the flowers contain male and female parts together). They require hand pollination. A fine mist filters down through the rambutan trees. “Cicada droppings,” he says. I tell him that I’m curious about people traveling for fruits. He, like Love, is familiar with a number of fruit hunters. He tells me that Ken Love and some other Hawaiian fruit fanatics refer to themselves as “the Hawaiian Mafia.”

  “Have you heard of the fruitarians?” Johnson asks.

  “Fruitarians?”

  “You know, people who eat exclusively fruit. There’s a lot of them over in Puna [a nearby town]. We call them Punatics.” He suggests that I speak about fruitarianism with Oscar Jaitt, who lives nearby. Jaitt, he explains, has traveled all over the tropics looking for fruits and is the owner of www.fruitlovers.com, a website that sells exotic fruit seeds. He also produces a line of fruit lotions called Alohatherapy (“made with aloha”).

  Arriving at Oscar Jaitt’s address, I walk through his serene Buddhist garden and knock on the door of his hexagonal wood cabin. A very mellow man in a white beard appears, wearing billowing purple Zubaz pants that taper at the ankles. “Fruit farming is spiritually fulfilling,” he says, as we stroll over to his fruit orchard in the adjacent lot. “It allows you to see the miracle of the cycles of life.”

  I ask him if he’s a fruitarian. He laughs, and says that he isn’t quite a fruitarian, although he mainly eats fruits because he’s a raw foodist. He does confirm the existence of fruitarians, many of whom indeed live in Puna. “Fruitarians have no constipation,” he says. “They laugh at ex-lax.”

  We taste some jaboticabas. They look like oversized deep purple grapes, matching his pants. Because the fruit grows directly on the tree trunk like some sort of sweet fungus, the best way to eat one is a “jaboticaba kiss.” In Brazil, kids sneak into other people’s backyards and kiss them off the trees. Brazilian writer Monteiro Lobato describes the sound of a jaboticaba kiss as “plock, pluff, pituy.”

  Jaitt shows me a rollinia tree whose head-sized fruits taste like lemon meringue pie. Nearby are two small trees he’s especially excited about: the peanut butter fruit and the blackberry-jam fruit. “The peanut butter fruit looks like a red olive,” he says, “but tastes like Skippy and even has the same texture.” The accurately named blackberry-jam fruit has a yellow exterior and a black interior. Jaitt says he knows some people in Honolulu who’ve been serving peanut butter fruit with blackberry-jam fruit and breadfruit. Kids apparently go crazy for these all-fruit PBJ sandwiches.

  Looking up, I notice a long green fruit dangling from a branch. “Oh, hey, look at that,” says Jaitt. Walking over to get a long pair of clippers, he snips it off for me. It’s an ice cream bean, also known as the monkey tamarind. I recognize the name from a song by the psychedelic funk band Beginning of the End. The lyrics mention “a wild fruit that grows down Nassau way” but warn against eating it because it causes itchiness (presumably something you’re supposed to pantomime as you dance to their song). I’ve always been curious about this shimmy-inducing forbidden fruit.

  Jaitt hands it to me. Its exterior doesn’t look too different from a jumbo-sized string bean. As I open it, the similarities end. The ice cream bean is filled with a snowy, sweet, cotton-candylike substance with hints of vanilla cream coursing through its translucent veins. It’s like eating cloud. It’s the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted. I can see how it might make someone dance with joy.

  “The thing about fruit tourism is that wherever you go it’s always different,” Jaitt says. “Nature is amazing all over the world. There are tens of thousands of different types of fruit that we know of so far. How many are in your supermarket? Maybe twenty-five different types?”

  Pointing at his novelty-filled fruit bowl, he asks if I know where chocolate comes from. “Cocoa beans?” I offer, tepidly. “Okay, what’s a cocoa bean?” he asks. I have to admit that I have no idea. He points at an orange football-shaped object. “That’s a cacao. It’s a fruit. All chocolate comes from the seeds of the cacao fruit. Wanna try?” He opens it up, and hands me some ice-cube-sized seeds surrounded by a white, gelatinous substance that tastes sort of like mangosteens. Just as Europeans used pepper as a currency, cacao seeds were used as money by the Aztecs. In the Middle Ages and Mesoamerica, money literally grew on trees. After I suck the flesh off, Jaitt explains how that seed is then roasted and processed to make chocolate. “People have no idea how their food grows and where it comes from,” says Jaitt. “They just buy it in the supermarket.”

  As I prepare to leave, Jaitt hands me a couple of fruit magazines. Flipping through the pages of Fruit Gardener, seeing photos of fruit hunters posing with incredible fruits in obscure destinations, I realize that an entire unexplored community of fruit fanciers is being opened to me. I want to know more about them, to understand their passion, to travel with them, to keep tasting these fruits.

  At the airport, I take out a handful of glassy purple jaboticabas, Jaitt’s going-away present. Looking at them, I can’t help thinking that fruits, so commonplace that we barely consider them, seem to be concealing some otherworldly mystery. For Joyce, the idea of the epiphany in the everyday was about “a sudden spiritual manifestation.” Beauty, or truth or God, can exist within anything, particularly in the places that are so evident that we’d never think to look.

  Foucault defined curiosity as “a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things.” I took one photo of the jaboticabas in full focus; and then another out of focus, the globules dissolving into pure geometry.

  These jaboticabas, full of promise, seemed to be pointing at revelations that I had yet to experience. Holding them, I felt like something miraculous had fallen into the palm of my hand, like the answer to a prayer I hadn’t even realized I was making.

  3

  How Fruits Shaped Us

  In the fruit trees are hidden certain of God’s secrets which only the blessed among men can perceive.

  —St. Hildegard von Bingen

  BACK AT MY HOTEL, two wealthy, middle-aged ennui-wilted Brits sitting next to me strike up a conversation. They’re here on holiday, but they haven’t done much so far. “There are four-hundred-year-old trees that are less bored than I am,” says one of them, puffing indolently on his pipe and affecting an extra-droopy countenance.

  The dissipated gentlemen are sitting with their girlfriends, pneumatic twenty something twins dressed identically in yellow jumpsuits, hoop earrings, pirate bandanas, and sideways ponytails. I ask them if they’re in the entertainment industry.

  “Yes, they sing and they dance,” explains droopy jowls.

  “Our band is called Cherry Summer,” exclaims one of the twins in a Manchester accent denser than Marmite.

  “Oh—why Cherry Summer?”

  There’s a pause. The other one rolls her eyes. “Umm … cuz we like cherries?”

  “Well,” concedes Sir Droopalot, drawing deeply from his pipe, “that pretty much says it all.”

  Having by now spent considerable time pondering the mysterious power of fruits, I wonder if it’s that simple. Ever since Brazil, I’ve known that fruits make me happy, although I’m still trying to understand why. I enjoy being around fruits, especially when I can pick them off a tree and eat them. I try to start every day by eating fruits. When one of the twins asks why I’m so interested in fruits, I blurt out the first thing that comes to mind: “Because they represent
everything that’s wonderful in the world.”

  That’s only partially true. Another reason we care about fruits is more selfish: without them, humans never would’ve happened. Tree-dwelling apelike protohumans first emerged somewhere between 5 and 9 million years ago. Fruits helped them evolve. Without the immense diversity of fruits, wrote Loren Eiseley in The Immense Journey, “man might still be a nocturnal insectivore gnawing a roach in the dark.”

  Fruits opened our eyes. Humans, alongside certain birds and primates, are part of a select group of species that can detect a difference between the colors green and red. Our 3-D photoreceptor eyesight stems from the need to notice red-ripe fruits in a sea of green leaves and foliage. Today, a red traffic light means “stop,” which is exactly what we used to do in our primeval forests. The greens and reds are now part of the asphalt jungle, but their meaning hasn’t changed much. In the same way, taste theoreticians speculate that humans first evolved a liking for sugary things as a way to distinguish between ripe and unripe fruits.

  As our knuckle-dragging ancestors straightened into upright postures and banged out some crude tools, fruits were consistently part of prehistoric man’s diet. Creeping out of the trees, we started eating berries and grains growing in the grasslands. Little by little, we made our prehensile way out of Africa and around the world. Until about thirteen thousand years ago, we were all hunter-gatherers devouring whatever we could get our opposable thumbs around—mainly acorns (the fruit of the oak tree). Humans are estimated to have eaten more acorns than wheat or any other fruit.

  Figs, wheat, barley, peas and beans were the earliest crops domesticated at the beginning of the Neolithic revolution. By 4000 B.C., inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent were growing olives, dates, pomegranates and grapes. Land-owning Sumerians, Egyptians and Greeks enjoyed a slim selection of hard-to-grow fruits, which were widely cultivated during the Roman empire. Caesars returned from overseas victories bearing never-before-seen fruits as talismans. Planting throughout the empire, Romans brought seeds wherever they roamed. We tend to think of the apple as British, or even American, but it was spread by Rome, via the Caucasus.

  At that point, many fruits were eaten dried or cooked because they were smaller, tougher and more sour than what we’re familiar with today. Olives were brined and pressed to make oil. Grapes, occasionally eaten fresh, were primarily used for making wine. Figs, enjoyed straight off the tree in season, were also baked or preserved. Other fruits, if eaten, were usually processed before being consumed. Civilization was turning away from wilderness. The advent of food preparation, wrote Lévi-Strauss in The Raw and the Cooked, “marks the transition from nature to culture.”

  Only through human cultivation were fruits improved and selected for desirable characteristics: smaller seeds, increased flesh and refined eating quality. This discredits the assumption that wild fruits are tastiest—in truth, uncultivated varieties are often inedible. The wild peach is an acrid pea-sized pellet. Feral bananas are filled with tooth-shattering seeds. Untamed pineapples are full of gritty pebbles. Sweet oranges only arrived in the Mediterranean basin in the late 1400s. Corn is believed to have evolved from a minuscule grain called teosinte, slightly bigger than an earwig. It took thousands of years of human selection for teosinte to become the size of a human finger, then thousands more years to become the thick cobs we slather with butter today.

  Not surprisingly, many fresh fruits were considered unhealthy by classical medical authorities. Pliny said that all pears are indigestible unless boiled or dried. Columella warned that peaches reek with “malevolent poison.” Doctors counseled that apricots were to be eaten and then voided by vomiting repeatedly.

  The physician Galen, whose second-century teachings prevailed for close to 1,500 years, cautioned against eating fruits, claiming they were troublesome in every way: they caused headaches, gullet distress, bad corruption, fevers and even premature deaths. The merit of raw fruit was as a digestive aid—more for purging than for enjoying, and best kept near the vomitorium. Galen believed fruits were, at their best, laxative. “We never need them for food, but only as a medication,” he wrote. Galen used to make house calls and feed constipated patients pears and unripe pomegranates. He noted, with satisfaction, the remarkable fashion in which their bowels would soon evacuate. The Western belief that fruits served only a medicinal purpose lasted until the Renaissance.

  The nomadic tribes that sacked Rome saw no need for agriculture, so they uprooted trees. Barrenness descended upon Europe. “It would not lift until forty medieval generations had suffered, wrought their pathetic destinies, and passed on,” writes historian William Manchester.

  In Asia, fruit culture burgeoned during the prosperous golden age of the Tang dynasty from the seventh to the tenth centuries, with the best fruits being grown in imperial gardens for the emperor and his intimates. During the Song dynasty, there was a widespread cult devoted to creating art about flowering plums. Fruits such as citrus, bananas, cherries, apricots and peaches all came from the Far East, by boat over the Indian Ocean, or by caravan over the Silk Road connecting China and Persia. Many others were endemic to the Middle East.

  South of the Mediterranean Sea, fruits spread with the rise of Islam. As the caliphates expanded through North Africa, a number of new Asian fruits followed suit. Because Muslim doctrine forbade alcohol, vineyards were torn up and replaced with tree fruits. Europeans are indebted to Arabic civilization not only for nautical charts that helped them find their way around Africa and to the New World, but for a numerical system that gave birth to modern capitalism. Alongside calculus, they pioneered geology, astronomy and archaeology. They also taught Europeans to start enjoying fruits.

  In the 1100s, the Crusades exposed Europeans to thriving fruitgrowing regions abroad. Marco Polo’s account of his travels in the Orient, filled with descriptions of magnificent pears, apricots and bananas, generated much excitement. “They have no fruit the same as ours,” he wrote. At that time, it was thought that fruits and spices literally came from Paradise, believed to be located somewhere in the East. With the discovery of the Americas, conquistadores brought back mirabilia such as the pineapple, the papaya and the potato. Columbus made diary entries about his fruit finds: “There are trees of a thousand kinds all producing their own kind of fruit, and all wonderfully aromatic; I am the saddest man in the world at not recognizing them, because I am certain that they are all of value.”

  But among the majority of Europeans, Galen’s legacy persisted, and raw fruits were avoided. They caused “crude and windie moisture.” They aggravated melancholy. They affected the humors adversely. They were responsible for the tidal waves of deaths caused by infantile diarrhea. In the fourteenth century, France’s Eustache Deschamps blamed fruits for causing the plague and cautioned readers to avoid “fruits both old and fresh if you want to live a long life.”

  Unsurprisingly, colonialists stigmatized local crops wherever they settled, relegating once vital plants to oblivion. They also wiped out local populations, losing accumulated knowledge about indigenous flora.

  The consumption of fresh fruits was minimal until the 1860s, reports Paul Freedman in Food: The History of Taste, noting that “raw fruits were regarded as dangerous in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, even if (or perhaps because) delectable.” Sixteenth-century royalty were among the first Europeans to consider raw fruits as delicacies. Going against his doctor’s cautions, Louis XIV boldly ate fraises de bois. Russian tsars used to send estafettes to gather wild strawberries in Lapland. Greengage plums were among the sunken treasures found in Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose, submerged in 1545. Frederick the Winter king of Bohemia heated stoves year-round to produce fruiting orange trees in his castle at Heidelberg. King Charles II commissioned an artist to paint his portrait with a pineapple, the ultimate status symbol of his time. Father Athanasius Kircher, in 1667, noted that pineapples have “such an excellent taste that the nobility of China and India prefer it to anything else.”


  Following the monarchs’ lead, fruits became an aristocratic indulgence. In 1698, Francis Misson de Valbourg wrote that, “Fruit is brought only to the Tables of the Great, and of the small Number even among them.” Fruits were a demarcation between the upper classes and the lumpen proles. Haughty gentry used to carry around perfumed and spiced fruits called pomanders as a way of warding off nasty street odors. When assailed by the miasma, they’d stuff their noses into pomanders and escape into sweetness.

  At that point, most fruits were still smaller and less juicy than they are today. Humankind had learned how to domesticate and propagate fruits, but we were only starting to understand how to breed them for desired traits. As fruit gardens were established, variety collecting became a high-society hobby. Orchards were emblems of wealth staffed by servants and full-time gardeners. They represented taste, refinement, even power. By selecting superior fruit, and growing these cultivars, eating quality improved. The Enlightenment’s inquiries into the natural world yielded numerous treatises on fruit growing. Cabinets of curiosity, including Ulisse Aldrovandi’s celebrated Wunderkammern and Francesco Calzo-lari’s Museum Calceolarium, featured fruits amid myriad other naturalia.

  By the late Renaissance, writes historian Ken Albala, “Italians were clearly crazy about fruit in any form.” Soon enough, European medics started suggesting that fruits might actually be healthy. In 1776, doctors described raw fruits as “the lightest most wholesome food we can eat.”

  The impoverished masses still ate whatever they could scrounge up. A common peasant fruit was the medlar, a now-forgotten brown fruit that must be dried (called bletting) before being eaten. It was nicknamed “open-arse.” Besides that, most people’s dietary options were restricted to gruels, porridges, turnips, cabbage, the rare salted meat and a little bread. Until the early nineteenth century, with the exception of a few landowners and noblemen, everybody around the world was dirt poor. Life expectancy hovered around forty years.