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DARK FRUIT - PART 2The Seedy Underworld of Nature’s CandyBY ADAM GOLLNERILLUSTRATIONS BY MAT BROWN  FIVE PEOPLE WHO ARE TOTALLY OBSESSED WITH FRUIT1. WILLIAM F. WHITMAN—Bill Whitman was the author of Five Decades With Tropical Fruit, a memoir of chasing ultraexotics. His obituary in the New York Times last year had the following headline: “Bill Whitman, 92, Is Dead; Scoured the Earth for Rare Fruit.” He’d take his family traveling around the tropics on unicycles, surfboards strapped to their backs. Villagers would come out to greet them, thinking the circus had come to town. He was so monomaniacal that, even when dementia started setting in, he still made fruit-hunting trips down the Amazon in a wheelchair. 2. “GRAFTIN’” CRAFTON CLIFT—An internationally known fruit votary, “Graftin’” Crafton Clift is a compulsive fruit grafter from Florida. Grafting is a means of propagating a plant by cutting a branch from one tree and sticking it onto the trunk of another tree. Wherever he goes, he grafts. Apparently, on one trip to Central America, all of his possessions were stolen, including his clothes. Undeterred, he trekked naked through forests for weeks, living on jungle fruits. His colleagues describe him as someone who “walks through the world in a completely naive wonderland of fruit.” 3. ROBERT PALTER—A scholar who was part of the Manhattan Project that developed the atom bomb, Robert Palter is the author of 2002’s The Duchess of Malfi’s Apricots, and Other Literary Fruits. His book attempts to catalogue every instance a fruit is mentioned in a book, poem, song, film, painting, or other work of art. The task proved impossible to complete, so he ended his 850-page anthology without any punctuation—as a sign of its open-endedness. Long after publication, he still couldn’t stop finding fruit episodes. As he put it in an unpublished reminiscence called My Big Fruit Book: “Involuntarily, and even against my conscious intentions, I persist in scanning for fruit in everything I encounter in the way of print and pictures.” 4. DAVID FAIRCHILD—America’s greatest fruit hunter. Self-described “fruit bat.” Responsible for bringing more than 20,000 plants into the United States, including varieties of mangos, cherries, dates, and nectarines. David Fairchild (1869-1954) embarked on a series of global fruit adventures documented in memoirs like Exploring for Plants, Garden Islands of the Great East, and The World Was My Garden. 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. 5. FRANK MEYER—Best known for his discovery of the Meyer lemon, Frank Meyer spent a good chunk of the early 20th century chasing fruits through Asian dust storms, across frozen mountains, and in virgin forests. 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; crowds would gather to watch him bathe. In some areas, natives were so afraid of the hulking foreign demon that the only way to placate them was by sitting down and eating fruit to show that he was just like them. He disappeared from the deck of a steamer crossing between Wuhan and Nanjing on the night of June 1, 1918. TO BE CONTINUED DARK FRUIT | 1 | 2 | 3 | See all articles by this contributor
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