The Fruit Hunters Read online

IN A SMALL Miami office crammed with books on the intricacies of fruit growing, the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden’s senior curator of tropical fruit, Richard J. Campbell, is demonstrating how a chupa-chupa is opened in Peru. Using a pocket knife, he makes five vertical incisions at equal intervals around the oblong soft-ball-sized fruit, starting at the center of the nipplelike protuberance at the top. He then peels back the slices, so that the fruit’s velvety brown-green skin blossoms open like a flower, revealing a startlingly bright orange interior. The glorious color contrast sends thrilling pulsations through my brain’s pleasure center.

  Campbell cuts five segments from the fiery orb, each of which contains a large seed. In his late thirties, Campbell has a crew cut and a frame that suggests daily workouts. He takes his kids shark fishing on weekends and has crisscrossed the globe looking for delicious new fruits that he’s hoping to make available to a wider public. “With some of these ultratropicals,” he says, handing me an orange chupa-chupa slice, “I think we can change the world.”

  Campbell demonstrates how to eat the fruit by sucking on the flesh. After all, it’s called a chupa-chupa, which means “sucky-sucky” in Spanish. I place it in my mouth and suckle on it, releasing a flood of sweet juice flavored like mangoes, peaches, cantaloupes and wildberries. It’s sensational.

  Campbell knows how mind-blowing the fruit is. He also knows that it’s a long way off from consumer acceptance. “You put that in a grocery store and who’s going to know how to do what I just did?” he asks. It’s his goal at the botanical garden to create a buzz that will eventually translate to commercial appeal. The chupa-chupa is one of a dozen or so ultraexotics that Campbell is working on bringing closer to produce sections. To that end, he has traveled down the Amazon River, from Peru through Colombia and into Brazil, trying to find the best chupa-chupas in the world. He has never, he says, been able to find any better than the one we’re eating, whose seeds were initially collected at a market in Iquitos, Peru, in 1963 by his friend and mentor, William Whitman, who has grown it in his backyard ever since.

  Whitman is the reason I’ve come to Miami. He’s responsible for introducing hundreds of exotic fruits to Florida. This week is the opening of the William F. Whitman Tropical Fruit Pavilion, a thirty-eight-foot-tall crystal greenhouse filled with the finest known varieties of durians, mangosteens, dukus, bembangans, taraps and other rare tropical fruits. Campbell and Whitman spent several years traveling together to amass the pavilion’s contents. Whitman has donated 5 million dollars to the Fairchild Botanic Garden to make the project a reality. Campbell, who is overseeing the donation, says that the knowledge gained through research in the pavilion will be a major step toward the commercial production of ultraexotics in America.

  The pavilion’s unveiling is going to be a gathering of America’s most die-hard fruit enthusiasts. As soon as I heard about the launch, I called Kurt Ossenfort, and the two of us booked tickets to Miami. We’re hoping to film William “The Banana King” Lessard, famous for growing the rarest of the rare bananas, and Maurice Kong, who has written numerous accounts of his globe-spanning adventures in search of nam-nams, candy-striped Malay apples, giant sapodillas, scarlet gac fruits, purple-fleshed guavas and Jamaican stinking toes. I’m also planning to say hello to fruit expert Bruce Livingstone, who owns www.tropfruit.com and changed his name to that of his favorite fruit: Santol. As a member of the Thai Banana Club, he treks through forests to find near-extirpated banana varieties that he then brings home to conserve. Santol achieved fruit-world notoriety for discovering the Sarttra banana in northern Thailand.

  The reason southern Florida is home to continental America’s most devout fruit hunters is because its climate can accommodate the many rare subtropical fruits found abroad. The hobbyists gathered here travel to find new fruits that they can grow at home. When it was first settled, Florida had few fruits besides the coco plum and the seagrape. Decades of exploration have filled backyards with miracle fruits, jackfruits and egg fruits, used locally to make a milk shake called “egg-fruit nog.” “The wonderful thing about tropical fruit is that there are amazing people involved,” says Campbell. “There are all these guys around the world who keep in touch and travel together and have all these crazy stories.”

  WHEN OSSENFORT AND I meet William Whitman at his split-level Bal Harbour home, he is no longer the swashbuckling young man who rip curled his way into the Surfing Hall of Fame and introduced spear hunting to the Bahamas. Wearing a sailor’s cap, the ninety-year-old zips around in a motorized scooter for seniors and gives us a tour of his garden, explaining where and how he first came across each of the different fruit trees.

  He pats the trunk of a breadfruit tree. Whitman’s love of fruits goes back to 1949 when he first tasted breadfruit in Tahiti. He recalls how, the morning after sleeping with a beautiful Polynesian girl, he opened his eyes to find his thatched hut filled with villagers silently gazing at him. Upon his return, after managing to grow a fruiting breadfruit tree in his own yard, he became a founding member of the Rare Fruit Council International, a Miami organization devoted to the study of unusual fruits. “I was primarily interested in uncovering new fruits that people had never seen or heard of and exploiting their potentials,” he explains, reaching up from his wheelchair to pluck a bright yellow egg-sized charichuela. “The first time I found it, I thought, ‘Gee, another curious-looking fruit.’” He hands it to me and tells me to take a bite. It tastes like lemonade-infused cotton candy. “And then I tasted it and went, ‘Wow!’ It was so delicious, I went cuckoo.”

  Independently wealthy (his father was a successful Chicago industrialist and his family owns Bal Harbour Shops, ranked “the #1 most productive shopping center in the U.S.”), Whitman has spent his adult life embarking on countless tropical adventures and growing his fruit introductions on this estate in Bal Harbour.

  We come to the largest miracle-berry shrub outside of Africa. I pocket some of the small red fruits for later on, where a taste test confirms that they’re identical to the ones I tasted in Hawaii with Ken Love. Whitman, the first person to grow a miracle-fruit tree in North America, tells us that he no longer uses sugar, only miracle fruit. His wife, Angela, plucks him one every morning before breakfast. Whitman explains that the seeds were brought back from Cameroon in 1927 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s fruit hunter, David Fairchild. He says this is one of the few places on the mainland that I’ll be able to taste it: after being perceived as a threat to the sugar industry, commercial production of the fruit was banned by the Food and Drug Administration in the 1960s.

  Nearby is a thorny cactus covered in dragon fruits. A little farther down the path is a fruit that he describes as a pet project: the keppel. Initially discovered at the deserted Water Palace of Indonesia, an erstwhile harem, the keppel was once used as an aphrodisiac by the sultans and their odalisques. It was also rumored to make excrement and urine smell like violets. Whitman decided to test this hypothesis: “I got paper cups and every hour I’d do a little thing in a paper cup and smell it—hell, it never smelled like perfume the way they say. To read their versions, they say that if you eat a couple of keppel apples, every time you pee you can fill up a couple of perfume bottles—well, it ain’t so.” An opportunity to confirm his findings unfortunately presented itself when I went to wash my hands after our fruit tour and found an unflushed stool in the toilet.

  To facilitate his experiments, Whitman had his alkaline beach sandlot dug up and replaced with six hundred truckloads of black, loamy, acidic soil. He is galvanized by the challenge of finding and growing plants no Floridian ever has before. One of the only Americans to ever successfully grow mangosteens, he’s also a member of the illustrious Explorer’s Club. His many fruit accomplishments are documented in a large coffee-table book called Five Decades with Tropical Fruit. When he gives me a copy, he signs it with a trembling hand, “Good luck to you, Adam, in your new interest in tropical fruit.”

  “His single-minded obsession is truly unus
ual,” says Richard Campbell. “He has a passion for fruit that no one else that I’ve ever worked with has. He wouldn’t do anything else or dream about anything else, until he found that fruit he was looking for.” Others describe him as “monomaniacal about tropical fruits.” Even in recent years, when dementia started setting in, he still made trips down the Amazon in a wheelchair.

  When he was younger, he’d bring his whole family on treks through jungle islands. “I can remember traveling with my dad and my mom, and we would travel with five surfboards and four unicycles and we would go exploring for exotic fruits,” his son Chris recalls in an on-camera interview at the Whitmans’ private museum atop Bal Harbour Shops. “A lot of times people would ask us if we were part of a circus or something.” His kids loved growing up with a fruit-freak father. They assumed everybody had chupas-chupas in their backyards. Friends would clamor for a taste of the ultraexotics in Chris’s lunch box, despite parents’ and teachers’ concerns the fruits might be poisonous.

  Wrapping up the interview, we take the elevator down to the mall’s ground floor, a retail palace filled with haute couture by the likes of Valentino, Chanel and Oscar de la Renta. Even in its early days, when U.S. shopping centers averaged one hundred dollars in revenue per square foot, Bal Harbour Shops brought in ten times that amount. William’s brother Dudley suggests we head to lunch together. While he tries to interest Ossenfort in purchasing some film footage the Whitman brothers shot in Hawaii after World War II, Bill’s pixielike sixtysome-thing wife, Angela, takes me aside and presses a twenty-dollar bill into my hand. I try to hand it back, but she insists. “You remind me of my son,” she says, smoothing a hand over her coiffed platinum hair. “I know how hard it can be when you’re starting out.”

  Angela chauffeurs us to the Whitmans’ gated community in her white Cadillac. “We buy a new one every year or two,” she says. I’m not sure if she’s referring to the car, their house or gated communities in general. She mentions something about owning the streets we’re driving on. I peer into her frosted sunglasses through the rearview mirror.

  When we arrive at their country club, Ossenfort and I help Whitman out of the car. He struggles to stand up, his whole body shaking from the exertion. Over cheeseburgers, Chris explains how the family’s favorite place to go fruit hunting is Borneo. “There’s more tropical fruit per acre in Borneo than any other place in the world,” asserts Whitman. He speaks fondly of the pitabu, which tastes like orange sherbet with hints of almond and raspberry. He’s also a big fan of red-fleshed and red-shelled durians, and says the island is home to the world’s finest mangosteens. As I explain how I’d like to travel around to document these fruits and the community of people who appreciate them, Whitman waves his quivering hand dismissively. “It can’t be done.”

  IN 1898, a twenty-eight-year-old named David Fairchild oversaw the creation of America’s first department of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction. He spent his life on a series of fruit adventures spanning the world, and is responsible for bringing more than twenty thousand plants into the United States, including varieties of mangoes, cherries, dates and nectarines. He was an early champion of the mangosteen, predicting that it, and many other tropical fruits, would soon be available on suburban American tables. Campbell and Whitman, with their pavilion, are hoping to finally make that vision a reality.

  Fairchild described himself as a “fruit bat.” As batty as he was affable, his childhood preoccupation with nature kept him too busy to get into any mischief. He loved gazing at plant particles under microscopes, and once wrote that “a man could spend his life and not exhaust the forms or problems contained in one plate of manure.” But it was a pair of pajamas that changed the course of his life.

  Those fateful pajamas belonged to a fabulously rich globe-trotter named Barbour Lathrop. Giving his home address as San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, Lathrop lived his days in exotic ports of call spending his vast family fortune. One morning in November 1893, aboard the steamer Fulda, the twenty-four-year-old Fairchild saw him decked out in pajamas and stared at him in openmouthed astonishment. (Pajamas, from Japan, were only then starting to replace nightshirts as the dominant form of sleepwear, and Fairchild, going abroad for the first time to study, had never seen any before.) Charmed by the young man’s unquenchable inquisitiveness, Lathrop decided to fund his botanical trips to the Far East.

  The two men ended up traveling the world together for the next four years. Fairchild called him Uncle Barbour. Lathrop called his protégé Fairy. After setting up the Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction for the USDA, Fairy spent the next four decades hunting useful plants—especially fruits—around the world.

  Whether having to drink water contaminated with dysentery or getting lost in impenetrable fever-infested forests, his misadventures were legion. Fairchild’s junk caught fire in the South Seas. He “frequented most of the filthy places to be found in the world.” When shipwrecked in Celebes, he came across one of fruitdom’s great rarities: a hardened coco-pearl formed inside a coconut the way pearls form inside oysters. He ate dates in the souks of Fez and the oases of Algiers. The last descendent of the kings of Kandy taught him how to eat watermelon-sized honey jacks (far superior than regular jackfruit).

  In 1905, he married Alexander Graham Bell’s daughter Marian. Together they traveled, finding yellow raspberries in Padang and the square, angular fruits of the Barringtonia speciosa in Mozambique. In Siaoe, dozens of softly singing children followed the newlyweds around the entire island.

  As he grew older, Fairchild started dispatching other fruit hunters to still unexplored regions. He sent Wilson Popenoe to Latin America, where he found billiard-ball-sized blackberries. (One of the largest berries known to man, a single Colombian blackberry requires several mouthfuls.) Another of Fairchild’s emissaries, Joseph J. Rock, was posted to the Orient to find the kalaw, a semimythical fruit thought to cure leprosy. Never before documented scientifically, Rock sought it throughout India, Thailand and over the mountains of Burma, fending off leopards, tigers and venomous serpents. In the Gulf of Mataban, he found one tree, but it was merely a cousin species to the kalaw. Finally, in a decrepit encampment near the upper Chindwin, he stumbled upon wild kalaws just as a rampaging elephant and a typhoon simultaneously ravaged the village, stomping tents and washing away trees.

  For his Asian envoy, Fairchild was looking for a peripatetic type “who could tolerate all sorts of physical discomforts and walk thousands of miles where no roads existed.” Frank Meyer’s Herculean physique and reputation as a long-distance hiker got him an interview, but the twenty-nine-year-old was so nervous that his profuse perspiration caused the colors on his striped shirt to run together. Still, Fairchild took a shine to the sweaty man, and from 1905 to 1918, Meyer chased fruits through dust storms and across frozen mountains. He finessed donkeys over precarious bamboo bridges spanning chasms; he was attacked by murderous brigands; and he trekked over Siberian glaciers so cold that milk froze in his cup before he could drink it.

  He visited many places that had never seen a white man, let alone such a large, strapping beefcake. He was often asked to ripple his muscles and crowds would gather to watch him bathe. In the pear-growing district of Tongchangdi, villagers scrambled onto rooftops to catch a glimpse of him. In other areas, natives were so afraid of the hulking foreign demon that he could only placate them by sitting down and eating fruit to show that he was just like them.

  In photographs, Meyer is bearded and tempestuous, with a gnarled walking stick and puffy leather knee pads. But beneath his sheepskin coat, he wore pinstriped three-piece suits. He probably slept with his monocle on. “Work is to me what medicine is for sick people,” he wrote. “I withdraw from humanity and try to find relaxation in plants.”

  He brought back seedless persimmons and melting quinces from Tianjin, red blackberries from Korea, famed pound peaches from Feicheng, paradise apples from Elizavetpol, kiwis from Ichang. In Feng-tai, he stumbled upon his ticket to immortality: M
eyer lemons. While his lemons are more available than ever before, Meyer himself disappeared from the deck of a steamer crossing between Wuhan and Nanjing on the night of June 1, 1918.

  David Fairchild spent his final years in Miami, and his legacy lives on at the botanical garden named in his honor. For today’s fruit hunters, who congregate at this luxuriant plant sanctuary, Fairchild’s books are sacred texts. “His books put a wanderlust in me that was almost uncontrollable,” explains Campbell. William Whitman says he found Fairchild’s books so interesting that he decided to do the same thing with his life: discover fruits and bring them home. In his autobiography, Whitman claims that he has introduced more fruits to the U.S. mainland than any experimenter since Fairchild.

  ON THE MORNING of Whitman’s ribbon-cutting opening, a buzzing crowd between the ages of forty-five and ninety-five has assembled in front of the greenhouse. Tables piled high with artfully arranged tropical fruits are off to a side. Smiling people are drinking coffee, wondering aloud whether we’ll be getting any liquid sunshine, and discussing rare fruits. I overhear a passionate debate over the merits of the black sapote, a fruit that one attendee describes as tasting like chocolate pudding. His detractors compare it to axel grease, cow patties and wet turds.

  Another topic is an upcoming group trip to Asia to be led by Chris Rollins, the director of Homestead’s Fruit and Spice Park. I ask Richard Wilson, owner of Excalibur Nurseries, what motivates his fruit excursions. “Knowing that there are fruit out there that nobody has brought home and if you can, you’ll be another Bill Whitman.” He’s such a beloved figure that every June 7 is Bill Whitman Day in Miami.

  In his floppy white sun hat, Murray Corman of the Garden of Earthly Delights Nursery looks like an older Gilligan from Gilligan’s Island. Corman explains that Whitman has exposed him to “unotherworldly” flavors. The strangest thing he’s eaten, Corman says, is the Bromelia penguin, a wild orange pineapple relative used as a meat tenderizer, something that only dawned on him when his taste buds started dissolving. He describes the sun sapote as having a wonderful flavor reminiscent of cooked sweet potato and the texture of a scrub brush. “It’s quite delightful,” he adds. “Literally you have to rip the fruit from the fibers to enjoy it.”