DARK FRUIT - PART 1

The Seedy Underworld of Nature's Candy

BY ADAM GOLLNER
ILLUSTRATIONS BY MAT BROWN

How far would you go for a banana? Probably not farther than the grocery store. But that’s because you’ve never tasted a blue ice-cream banana, or an orange-fleshed Haa Haa, or even a Popoulou (its bubblegum-pink interior has a distinct apple flavor). There are tens of thousands of fruits that never make it to our supermarkets. There’s also a subculture of devoted fruit enthusiasts who’ve spent their lives traveling around the globe in search of undiscovered delicacies. And then there are the drug smugglers who do shit like fill juice boxes with liquid heroin and try to ship them through the Port of Miami.

Here are just 15 fruity tidbits about fruits...


FIVE AMAZING FRUITS YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF

1. THE PARADISE NUT—The paradise nut, or sapucaia, is a Brazilian fruit pod that looks just like a bran muffin. It’s brown and woody and feels like it was baked in a buttered tray at 350 degrees for two hours too long. In season, the muffins grow packed with a half-dozen seeds shaped like orange segments. At ripeness, these burst through the base, scattering on the ground. Impatient young monkeys sometimes punch into an unripe muffin and wrap their fingers around a fistful of nuts. Because their cognitive faculties are not developed enough to understand that extracting their paws requires letting go of the nuts, they end up dragging their sapucaia handcuffs around for miles.

2. THE LADY FRUIT—The coco-de-mer, or lady fruit, is easily the sexiest fruit in the plant kingdom. Its risqué shell is a life-size simulacrum of the female reproductive region, including hips, an exposed midriff, two thighs, and a pudendal cleft—complete with a tuft of alarmingly lifelike hair on the mons pubis. From the back, it bears a striking resemblance to a woman’s derrière. Visitors to the Seychelles call it the pubic fruit, the lewd fruit, or the butt nut. The immature fruit contains a luscious custard-like flesh beneath its salacious exterior. Until the 1970s, distinguished visitors were sometimes honored with a taste of the coco-de-mer’s transluscent jelly, then known as “the billionaire’s fruit.” These days, the fruit is endangered, making it even harder to taste. The only legal way to sample it is to find someone who will share it with you, because buying it could cost you two years in prison. It’s literally a forbidden fruit.

3. THE BUSH MANGO OF CAMEROON—Cameroonians consume medicinal plants the way Westerners use Advil or Nyquil. The majaimainjombe, or blood-of-an-animal plant, is used as a pain reliever. The oil palm counteracts everything from measles to hernias. The bush mango is said to produce Y chromosomes, so members of the Ebu and Bayangi tribes eat it before procreating in order to have male children. When I was at the Limbe Botanical Gardens, my guide, Benjamin, and his wife, Doris, had three children—all girls. Hadn’t he used bush mango? “Traditions differ,” he explained. “We don’t eat it where I come from.” In a strange twist, British scientists recently determined that what a woman eats at the time of conception can affect the sex of her child. Women who skip morning-after breakfasts have lower glucose levels, heightening the chance of a female baby. So if you want a boy, eat fruits—ideally Cameroonian bush mangos.

4. THE NIPPLE FRUIT—Many fruits are named for their ribald aspects: tit-of-Venus peaches, women’s-breast apples, and maiden’s-flesh pears. Buttocks, balls, bosoms, thighs, fingers, and other body parts have long been employed as names for different cultivars. The udder-shaped nipple fruit, also known as the titty fruit, is an egg-size orange freakazoid covered in nipple-like nobules. Its Latin binomial is Solanum mammosum, but it’s also sometimes called the Apple of Sodom. It’s poisonous, so don’t eat it unless you are a shaman. I thought you could only find them in South American rain forests, but I recently saw some nipple fruits for sale in mixed bouquets at a florist’s in Montreal.

5. THE MIRACLE FRUIT—A small red berry the size of a pinkie tip or a small olive, the miracle fruit 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. Lemons become deliriously, ecstatically sweet. Vinegar tastes like cream soda. It’s nature’s NutraSweet. Its active ingredient is called “miraculin,” and it was banned by the FDA in the 1970s. When I first tasted miracle fruit six years ago, I knew there was a book to be written. They were totally unavailable then, except in a couple of fruit freaks’ backyards. In the intervening years, a former postman in Florida named Curtis “Miracle Fruit Man” Mozie found a way to ship the berries overnight, and now miracle fruits are a “flavor-tripping” trend sweeping the nation. Unknown fruits can hit the big time, but only if the right people get fixated on them.


TO BE CONTINUED
DARK FRUIT | 1 | 2 | 3 |

SEE ALL ARTICLES BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR