Fruits and his labor

By JIM LANDERS

Author Adam Leith Gollner hunts for what can’t be found in the produce aisle

“The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession” by Adam Leith Gollner (Scribner, $25)

When you read Adam Leith Gollner’s “The Fruit Hunters,” you think you’ve stumbled into a particularly lucky Google search. From the first page, exotic facts about fruit lead to hairpin turns into more exotic facts about fruit. The book is a loosely organized series of surprises, made delicious by a writer’s skill.

In Borneo, Gollner samples the large fruit of a tarap tree and writes: “The juicy white cubes of flesh fuse a custard sorbet’s richness with a cakelike powderiness. The whole thing seems topped with vanilla-spruce frosting.”

“The Fruit Hunters” suggests a work on how fruit, like steel or germs or salt, changed the world, and I picked it up thinking it would lead into a stern examination of banana diplomacy and global agribusiness.

Wrong.

“The Fruit Hunters” is a history, all right, but it fuses with a personal mission. Its author joins ranks across time with fruit hunters on a quest for edible rapture. “There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Gollner tries to be there for those 10 minutes.

The quest takes him to several candidates for fruit paradise. The book’s prologue is set in Rio de Janeiro, where Gollner works through a rough patch in his life by eating his way through a shopping bag full of a fruit vendor’s recommendations. In Borneo, he climbs trees to pick fresh mangosteens and that luscious tarap. In Cameroon, he eats a miracle fruit that leaves behind sensors on the taste buds. Eating a lemon after a miracle fruit transforms the sour into a dining experience “so deliriously sweet that it’s almost frightening.”

In the Seychelles, he finds the coco-de-mer, whose large shell strangely imitates the pelvic region of human female anatomy. The suggestive husk is compounded by other evocative parts of the coco-de-mer palm. This is forbidden fruit, not because of its salacious shapes, but because its popularity has made it endangered. Fewer than 25,000 of the coco-de-mer palm trees remain, producing less than 1,800 fruits a year.

After much intrigue, Gollner tracks down a restaurant owner who has coco-de-mers growing on his own land, and arranges a taste. “I bite into the gelatinous flesh. It has a mild citruslike quality, refreshing and sweet with earthy, spunky notes. It tastes like coconut flesh, only sexier.”

Fruit hunters can find more varieties at supermarkets as global trade expands, but the taste experience is less than adequate. Shoppers unskilled in the qualities of fruit seek out unblemished, shiny and familiar bananas, apples, strawberries and grapes, and get mediocre taste in the bargain.

As many as half a million different plant species bear fruits, and maybe 70,000 to 80,000 of those are edible. But most supermarkets are stocked with fruits that come from just 30 of the most durable and dependable species.

This is partly by design. More variety leads to discriminating shoppers who start demanding quality. Ultimately, that leads to reduced sales.

Gollner, who lives in Montreal, shows a Canadian’s sense of equanimity about this. He urges educated consumers to seek out organically grown local fruits and local markets without urging a ban on genetic modification or mass cultivation.

Gollner’s one transgression in the book is his vinegar treatment of David Karp, a Californian known as the fruit detective. The book describes Gollner’s efforts to profile Karp, only to see his effort scooped by someone else writing for The New Yorker. Gollner can’t seem to shake his disappointment.

XLanders writes for The Dallas Morning News.