The Barnes & Noble Review
I don’t remember how I acquired the ability, frankly, or who taught me the secret, or how long ago, but I am proud of the fact that I can choose a proper melon, firm and sweet. A man I once knew told me he considered this talent an important feminine wile.
My melon knack made me think I understood something profound about fruit, but having just read The Fruit Hunters by Adam Leith Gollner, I concede I was almost completely ignorant of the subject. Not only did Gollner drop the names of at least three dozen fruits I had never so much as heard of -- including galangal, salak, jambu, sapote, voavanga, farkleberry, ballion, and oyster nut -- but he also introduced me to a subculture of agriculture peopled by the likes of fruitarians, fruitleggers, fruities, fruit nerds, fruit groupies, the Fruit Mafia, the Fruit Crank, and one self-appointed Fruit Detective.
I didn’t know:
- Who was the first European to eat a pineapple? (Christopher Columbus.)
- What popular soft drink doubles as a pesticide in India? (Coca-Cola.)
- Where is the Apple Capital of the World? (Wenatchee, Washington. Or at least it was; the United States is now a distant second to China in apple sales.)
- When and where did Ted Hughes taste his first peach? (1955, in London.)
- Which fruit boasts a variety called the Imperial Concubine’s Laugh? (Lychee nut.)
How many catalogued "cultivars" (cultivated varieties) of pears exist worldwide? (Five thousand.)
- Why do so many people dislike fruit? (Because most fruits are bred to ship and store well, rather than for flavor, and get eaten two to three weeks after picking, instead of instantly.)
- How do you make an all-fruit peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich? (You put peanut butter fruit -- "looks like a red olive but tastes like Skippy and even has the same texture" -- and blackberry jam fruit on breadfruit.)
Rarely have I read a book so dense with information and yet so engaging. Vast numbers of facts fill these pages, buoyed by an abundance of improbable anecdotes. At times the text has a haphazard feel, as when Gollner recounts his difficulties securing certain desired interviews (or when he quotes too heavily from those he does secure), but overall he ably imparts the essence of fruit: its diversity, versatility, appeal, and fragility.
What anchors the wide-ranging narrative is its author -- a man with a raunchy, goofy sense of humor who admits to having loved Froot Loops as a child. The older, wiser Gollner authoritatively compares Froot Loops' taste to that of the perfumed chempedak ("a long, army-green fruit the size of a rugby ball" that grows in Borneo and is filled "with honey-sweet orange chunklets"). Relating his story in the first person, Gollner is as much a memoirist as an encyclopedist, with intimate tales of exploits among juicy things. In fact, his descriptions of ecstatic sensations in the "pursuit of fruit" often sound like sexual conquests. But then, fruit is the ultimate X-food: "All fruits start as flowers. At their most basic level, flowers are the plant kingdom’s sex machines. When, in the eighteenth century, it was discovered that flowers had male and female reproductive anatomy, the public and the church reacted with outrage. Botanist Carl Linnaeus’s description of a flower as numerous women in bed with the same man was vilified as 'loathsome harlotry.'"
The book’s other anchor is Gollner’s actress girlfriend and sometimes travel companion, Liane. If he is Adam, tasting fruits like the first man, "Liane" is literally the vine of the fruit. The admiring Fruit Detective, who points out the felicity of Liane’s name, dubs her "the divine Miss Vine."
Here I’d like to mention a few more fruits with names that flow like nectar on the tongue: durian, rambutan, pulasan, duku, langsat, gungung. Except for the durian, which has gained cachet in Manhattan, you have to go to Borneo if you want to eat any of these "ultraexotics." (And also if you want fresh durian.)
"Go to Borneo" is the sort of thing Gollner does -- on a whim and a freelance magazine assignment -- as his fruit passion takes hold, and of course he takes the reader along. Accustomed as I am to traveling vicariously with intrepid, experienced adventurers, I found Gollner an amiable, often pitiable companion. "Clouds of mosquitoes trail me wherever I go," he reports from Borneo. "Although I’m taking anti-malarials, the travel clinic warned me that there’s no vaccination against insect-borne dengue fever." In Cameroon, where he stalks the miracle fruit (famed for its ability to make sour things taste sweet), "I pay off a guard to get my bags through customs. Outside, a dozen red-eyed young men immediately pounce on me, barking information and offering services ranging from hotels and taxis to relieving me of my possessions."
Turning to the dark side of fruit, Gollner recounts a brief history of United Fruit’s abuses. In a similarly serious tone he laments the dependence of fruit production on "migrant laborers who live in subhuman conditions. American fruit pickers aren’t farmers or peasants. Many are indentured workers handcuffed by sharecropping agreements. Most of these 1.3 million nomads consider themselves lucky to make minimum wage. They own next to nothing. They have shortened life expectancy rates. They live in cars, caves, and squalid camps full of cardboard tents and plastic sheets."
All the while Gollner was seeking out strange fruits, he was also satisfying a hunger for literary allusions to them. Some of these excerpts appear as epigraphs, such as T. S. Eliot’s question "Do I dare to eat a peach?" from "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock," which heads Chapter 11. Other quotations are folded into the text at opportune moments, as when the Chapter 12 discussion of determining the ripeness of pears winds up with an observation by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "There is only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat." Goethe gets credit for noticing "how fruits arise as flowers 'die into being.' "
Every now and then Gollner makes a questionable claim that jeopardizes his credibility, as when he mentions that NASA astronauts are growing fresh strawberries on board flights to Mars. But no NASA astronauts, or astronauts from any other space agencies, are currently en route to Mars. No doubt when they do go, they will grow fresh strawberries -- and these will be a great improvement over the freeze-dried ones served up on previous missions.
Elsewhere he credits Apollo of Greek myth with inventing the first musical instrument, a lute -- by carving it out of a melon slice. But it was a tortoise shell, wasn’t it? And although he says, "Cashew nuts are highly toxic till roasted," raw cashews are a staple of my diet.
The book’s overriding message is that nature produces an almost limitless variety of fruit -- a fruit for every taste and for every purpose (nutritional, medicinal, or recreational). The great pity is, you’ll probably never see even a fraction of this bounty, let alone taste it. The best you can do is read about it. --
Dava Sobel
Dava Sobel is the author of Longitude, Galileo's Daughter,
and The Planets.
Her writings on the history of science have earned her awards from the National Science Board and the Boston Museum of Science, among others.
From the Publisher
Adam Leith Gollner weaves business, science, and travel into a riveting narrative about one of earth's most desired foods: fruit.
The New York Times -
Mary Roach
Adam Leith Gollner possesses a talent as rare and exotic as a coconut pearl. I opened this book, Gollner's first, expecting the standard nutmeat of competent nonfiction and found instead something lustrous and exhilarating. Gollner's is not the sort of talent one can develop. It is genetic, physical—an exquisite sensitivity of tongue, nose and eye…At one point early in the book, the author explains how it's possible to graft branches of different, say, citrus species onto one plant. A Chilean farmer, he writes, recently made headlines with a tree that bears plums, peaches, cherries, apricots, almonds and nectarines. It's how I see Gollner: the talents of a food writer, investigative journalist, poet, travel writer and humorist grafted onto one unusual specimen. Long may he thrive.
Publishers Weekly
Journalist Gollner's debut is a rollicking account of the world of fruit and fruit fanatics. He's traveled to many countries in search of exotic fruits, and he describes in sensuous detail some of the hundreds of varieties he's sampled, among them peanut butter fruit, blackberry-jam fruit and coco-de-mer-a suggestively shaped coconut known as the "lady fruit" that grows only in the Seychelles. Equally intriguing are some of the characters he has encountered-a botanist in Borneo who spends his life studying malodorous durians; fruitarians who believe that a fruit diet promotes transcendental experiences; fruitleggers who bypass import laws; and fruit inventors such as the fabricator of the Grapple-which looks like an apple and tastes like a grape. The FDA and the often dubious activities of the international fruit trade, multinational corporations like Chiquita, come in for scrutiny, as does New York City's largest wholesale produce market, in a chapter with more information than one may want on biochemical growth inhibitors, hormone-based retardants, dyes, waxes and corrupt USDA inspectors. Gollner's passion for fruit is infectious, and his fascinating book is a testament to the fact that there is much more to the world of fruit than the bland varieties on our supermarket shelves. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Reviews
Admitting that he has gone "off the deep end trying to get to the core," Gourmet and Bon Appetit contributor Gollner offers an informative, enlightening account of fruits and their role in human life. Fruits are produced by as many as 500,000 plant species, all intent on dispersing their seeds, notes the author. A staple of prehistoric diets, they were regarded as delicacies in 16th-century European courts, provided the only safe drink (fruit booze) in early America and were part of Einstein's formula for joy: "A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin." Drawing on interviews and travels from Hawaii to Brazil to Asia, Gollner explores a mind-boggling array of fruits-including Rudolph Hass's avocadoes, Ah Bing's cherries and the foreign-weirdo-turned-megafruit kiwi-and the way people use them. He brings us into the worlds of growers, wholesalers, marketers, agricultural officials, smugglers and branders (the "Delicious" apple), as well as fruit hunters who seek out rare fruits worldwide-one monomaniacal and semi-demented adventurer still makes trips down the Amazon in a wheelchair-and fruitarians who report transcendental experiences and regular bowel movements. "Every time we eat a fruit, we're tasting forgotten histories," he writes, recounting how fruits have fueled wars, inspired religious worship, led to group sex and caused such public sensations as the frenzy among aristocrats when pineapples first arrived in Britain and the outbreak of pear mania in 19th-century America. Gollner's narrative tends to ramble, but it's quite pleasant. He notes that fruits today are taken for granted, always available and mediocre. Supermarkets offer few varieties and sell low-grade fruits (waxedto a high sheen for longer shelf life) year round at little or no profit. But big-store produce sections will improve in the future, he believes, as innovative growers focus on flavor and shoppers pay more attention to seasonality. A fresh, juicy and highly satisfying treat. Agent: Michelle Tessler/Tessler Literary Agency
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