A Fruity Book Review

I am a fan of those monomaniacal nonfiction books, the ones that go into great depth on one subject. In this case the subject is fruit and the book is Adam Leith Gollner's The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession. Why fruit? It hasn't really ever before been an obsession of mine. I try to eat my 5 servings a day with varying degrees of success. However, as I read the book, I became aware that I may be a little more fruit-obsessed than I thought. I like growing fruit in my yard: I've been quite successful with currants and raspberries, less so with cherries, choke cherries, and service berries. Those are fruits of the north. Gollner's book is filled with tropical fruits, more fruits than you can imagine.

"The diversity is dizzying: most of us have never heard of the araça, but Amazonian fruit authorities say there are almost as many types of araças as there are beaches in Brazil. Within the tens of thousands of edible plant species, there are hundreds of thousands of varieties – and new ones are continually evolving. Magic beans, sundrops, cannonballs, delicious monsters, zombi apples, gingerbread plums, swan egg pears, Oaxacan trees of little skulls, Congo goobers, slow-match fruits, candle fruits, bastard cherries, bignays, belimbings, bilimbis and biribas. As Hamlet might’ve said: 'There are more fruits in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' ”

Suddenly I feel fruit-deprived; of the small percentage of the world's fruits that are grown or allowed into the U.S., by the time they get to my landlocked city, they will have been on the road for days, sometimes weeks, and the flavor a mere shadow of what it should be. There are the hundreds of varieties of more familiar fruits that have been neglected in our commercial fruit monoculture, so we only ever get to eat one or two varieties of pears, strawberries, bananas, figs, avocadoes, pomegranates, etc. etc. etc. And then there are the fruits that will never make it here: the chupa chupas, bignays, sapotes, gourkas ... Sigh.

(I can't say I'm sad about the durian though. I once had the bad fortune to eat a durian-filled cookie from the Asian grocery store. I absolutely could not choke it down, ended up gagging into the garbage can, and even so, I burped up durian taste all day long. Then again, some people say they have the same reaction to cheese.)

If you ever thought that fruit was just a side dish, an afterthought, guess again. Gollner shows, in no uncertain terms, how fruit has shaped and defined life on earth in general, and human life in particular. He takes the reader to the very extreme edges of his subject: the fanatics who stop at nothing to get their hands on a fruit and the fruitarians -- people who eat nothing but fruit (and their subsets such as the "rockguacamolians" who only eat avocadoes sprinkled with asteroid dust,) and shows us the underbelly of the fruit world as well. The way that the fruit trade is linked to organized crime, for example. The creepy, underhanded treatment and marketing of "wholesome" fruit. The geopolitics of fruit. Or the fact that the idling semi-trucks that serve the huge Hunts Point Fruit Market in the Bronx are responsible for way elevated, life-shortening asthma rates (which I've read about in Jonathan Kozol's books about the work he does with schoolchildren in the South Bronx.)

Reading The Fruit Hunters has made it difficult for me to think about fruit in the same way that I did before. Shopping at my local food co-op this week, I was sorely disappointed to see that, with the exception of one small bin of local apples, virtually all the other fruit was imported from California or Mexico, including the strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries. I had a hard time buying anything!

I have been, however, deeply appreciative of every red raspberry that I have plucked off the bushes in my backyard. I'm thinking of planting a paw paw tree. I am also heading back to a serviceberry tree that I found growing on a city street a few blocks from here, dropping its sweet, delicious berries onto the sidewalk. There are a lot of fruits to forage, right here.

Oh! Am I reviewing a book? Sorry, I forgot. The Fruit Hunters: dripping with sex (yes, really!) An entertaining and enlightening read. Recommended.