The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession - Couverture rigide

Adam Leith Gollner

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 038566267X ISBN 13 : 9780385662673

Editeur : Scribner Book Company, 2008

Synopsis

Delicious, lethal, hallucinogenic and medicinal, fruits have led nations to war, fueled dictatorships and lured people into new worlds. An expedition through the fascinating world of fruit, The Fruit Hunters is the engrossing story of some of Earth's most desired foods. In lustrous prose, Adam Leith Gollner draws readers into a Willy Wonka-like world with mangoes that taste like piña coladas, orange cloudberries, peanut butter fruits and the miracle fruit that turns everything sour to sweet, making lemons taste like lemonade. Peopled with a cast of characters as varied and bizarre as the fruit -- smugglers, inventors, explorers and epicures -- this extraordinary book unveils the mysterious universe of fruit, from the jungles of Borneo to the prized orchards of Florida's fruit hunters to American supermarkets. Gollner examines the fruits we eat and explains why we eat them (the scientific, economic and aesthetic reasons); traces the life of mass-produced fruits (how they are created, grown and marketed) and explores the underworld of fruits that are inaccessible, ignored and even forbidden in the Western world. An intrepid journalist and keen observer of nature -- both human and botanical -- Adam Leith Gollner has written a vivid tale of horticultural obsession.

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Prologue
Blame It on Brazil

It is here that we harvest the miraculous fruits your heart hungers for;
come and intoxicate yourself on the strange sweetness.
–Charles Baudelaire, The Voyage

Wiping sand from my eyes, I stumble off a bus outside the Rio de Janeiro botanical garden and pass under the Ionic columns at the entrance. A dirt road leads to the greenery. Royal palms line the way, cathedral pillars vaulting into a canopy.

A fuzzy, neon-green hot dog slithers across my path. I start taking photographs of the creature–a giant millipede–as it undulates toward a plastic orange trash can warping in the heat. Getting deeper into the garden, I come upon the bust of some forgotten botanist, a droplet of tree sap trickling down his forehead like a misplaced tear.

I rest on a bench near a lagoon strewn with lily pads. The silhouette of Cristo Redentor looms down from the summit of Mount Corcovado. Rio isn’t quite the fantasyland of Bossa Nova melodies and paradisiacal seascapes I had envisioned. Homeless kids sleep facedown on Ipanema’s wavy mosaic boardwalks. Blue smoke curls over rivulets of shantytown sewage. The only good photograph I’ve taken is of a black dog lying on the beach at dusk, an ominous canine stain surrounded by white sand, turquoise water and a purple-pink twilight.

I try to not think about home. My grandfather just died. My parents’ marriage is dissolving. A loved one’s manic depression is spiraling into a gruesome battle with addiction. My best friend, recovering from a suicide attempt, has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. To top it all off, my girlfriend of eight years is spending New Year’s in Europe with her new lover, a French soldier.

I hear a mocking cackle in the foliage above, and spy a couple of toucans kissing each other’s Technicolor beaks. Suddenly, a nearby tree shakes with commotion. Two ring-tailed, white-whiskered monkeys are playing tag. After a momentary stare-down, one of the monkeys plunges through the air into another tree. Zooming in through my viewfinder, I notice something odd: the branches appear to be sprouting bran muffins.

I pick one of the muffins off the ground. It’s brown and woody. It feels like it was baked in a buttered tray at 350 degrees for two hours too long. Not only is the muffin rock hard, it’s also hollowed out, as though someone had flipped it over and scooped out its insides. The shell’s interior bears scratch marks and a couple of fibrous veins. I wonder what was once inside these empty confections.

A plaque identifies the tree as a sapucaia. In season, the cupcakes 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.
In English, these sapucaias are called paradise nuts, an appellation dating back to the European discovery of the New World, then considered the site of heaven. In the sixteenth century, France’s Jean de Lery became convinced that he had found Eden in a Brazilian pineapple patch. In 1560, Portuguese explorer Rui Pereira announced that Brazil was officially paradise on earth.

If I can’t find paradise in Brazil, maybe I can find some paradise nuts instead. I head to a small grocery market outside the park. Any sapucaias? The cashier shakes his head, but offers me a Brazil nut, which he says is similar. Biting into it, I’m amazed at how creamy and coconutty it is compared to those impossible-to-open monstrosities that lurked in childhood Christmas nut bowls.

Oversized pineapples, melons and clusters of bananas hang from the ceiling in mesh netting. I pick up a cashew apple, which looks a lot like an angry red pepper capped with a crescent-shaped nut. The green cambucis resemble miniature B-movie flying saucers. The billiard-ball-sized guavas are so fragrant that the ones I buy perfume my hotel room for the rest of my stay.
Heading toward the beach, I eat my way through a shopping bag full of the salesman’s untranslatable recommendations. Sinking my teeth into one of the scarlet pearlike jambos makes me think of crunching on refreshingly sweet Styrofoam. The transparent gummy flesh of a lemon-shaped abiu tastes like a cross between wine gums and the crème caramels served in French bistros back home. A machete-toting coconut vendor, noticing my tentative nibbling of a maracujá’s bitter skin, slices the orb in half and shows me how to slurp up the lavender-fruit-punch viscera.

I enter a suco bar, one of the countless juice stalls brightening Rio’s crumbling street corners, wondering if I can recognize any of the fruits. The purple açai berries on the menu look like the marbles we called “nightmares” in grade two. Across the counter sits a crate full of eyeballs. The owner hands me one of the red-rimmed ocular globules, and out dangles an optic nerve attached to a pitch-black iris and a leering white sclera. It’s a guaraná fruit, he says, a natural stimulant that’s processed to make energy-boosting shakes and soft drinks. I stare at it staring back at me.

Hypnotized, I copy the list of fruits on the stand’s menu into my notebook.

By now, the sun is setting into the pastel horizon. Clouds of confetti swirl through the air, paving the ground with tropical snow. I nearly forgot that it’s New Year’s Eve. The beach has filled with revelers dressed in white. Many have come to the ocean from hillside slums, bearing statues of Macumba saints. They light candles and arrange bits of ribbon around sacrificial flower petals for Iemanjá, the shape-shifting spirit of the waters. As their prayers crash against the waves, the surface of the sea dances with offerings.

I look down at my list of fruits and recite the names under my breath, syncing into the rhythms of nearby batucada drummers. Softly chanting, I close my eyes, and feel a sense of peace. For a moment, I forget everything. I forget my name. I forget why I came here. All I know is abacaxí, açai, ameixa, cupuaçu, graviola, maracujá, taperebá, uva, umbu.
Introduction
The Fruit Underworld

Man, you know Adam enjoyed things that kings and queens will never have and things kings and queens ­can’t never get and they ­don’t even know about.

–Howlin’ Wolf, Going Down Slow

There is a theory that explains humankind’s communion with fruits: biophilia, or the “love of life.” Psychologist Erich Fromm coined the term in 1964 as a way of describing the innate attraction to processes of life and growth. The hypothesis suggests that organisms facing death can preserve themselves through contact with living systems. Biologists then adopted the term, noting a tendency for humans to feel a spiritually transformative connectedness with nature. “Our existence depends on this propensity,” wrote Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson. Citing evidence of quicker rates of recovery for patients exposed to images of green spaces, scientists speculate that biophilia is an evolutionary mechanism ensuring the survival of interdependent life-forms.

In Brazil, fruits seemed to be calling out to me. I returned the call. From then on, I ­couldn’t seem to shake them.

As mundane as they may appear, fruits are also deeply alluring. To begin with, there’s something unusual about their very omnipresence. Fruits are everywhere, perspiring on street corners, chilling in hotel lobbies and on teachers’ desks, coagulating in yogurts and drinks, adorning laptops and museum walls.

Although a select few species dominate international trade, our whole planet is brimming with fruits that are inaccessible, ignored and even forbidden. There are mangoes that taste like piña coladas. Orange cloudberries. White blueberries. Blue apricots. Red lemons. Golden raspberries. Pink cherimoyas. Willy Wonka’s got nothing on Mother Nature.

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 this ­yellow-green guava relative 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.”

Among the fruit world’s most euphonious offerings, the clove lilly pilly tastes like pumpkin pie and goes well with kangaroo meat. Existentialists might prefer camu-camus, which are purple drops of sour deliciousness. The yum-yum tree sprouts what appear to be fluffy yellow dusters. Certain Pacific islands have yang-yang trees up the yin yang. Other fruity two-twos include far-fars, lab-labs, num-nums, jum-lums and lovi-lovis.

Many botanically documented plants, like the looking-glass tree, appear to have somehow escaped from a Lewis Carroll laudanum reverie. The pincushion fruit, with its spiked cloak of white rays, is like an exploding star frozen in time. The toothbrush tree’s fruits are eaten before bed in the Punjab and the fruits of the toothache tree are used in Virginia to alleviate dental malaise. Succulent umbrella fruits are cherished in the Congo. The glistening puddinglike eta fruit is eaten by tilting the head back and slurpi...

Revue de presse :

"A rollicking account of the world of fruit and fruit fanatics. [Gollner'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 the peanut butter fruit, blackberry-jam fruit and coco-de-mer.... 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."
—Publishers' Weekly, starred review

"An informative, enlightening account of fruits and their role in human life...[Gollner] explores a mind-boggling array of fruits — including Rudolph Hass's avocadoes, Ah Bing's cherries and the foreign-weirdo-turned-megafruit kiwi... He brings us into the worlds of growers, wholesalers, marketers, agricultural officials, smugglers and branders. '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 sensations [such as] the outbreak of pear mania in 19th-century America."
—Kirkus

"A beautiful and evocative book...Adam Leith Gollner is a crazy good writer. I've got the fruit bug." –Feist

"Gollner possesses a talent as rare and exotic as a coconut pearl....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." –The New York Times

"Highly entertaining." –Toronto Star

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Scribner Book Company
• Date d'édition: 2008
• ISBN 10: 038566267X
• ISBN 13: 9780385662673
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 288