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

by Gollner, Adam Leith

• ISBN13: 9780385662680
• ISBN10: 0385662688
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-03-31
• Publisher: Renouf Pub Co Ltd

Summary

Tasty, lethal, hallucinogenic, and medicinal – fruits have led nations into wars, fueled dictatorships, and even lured us into new worlds. Adam Leith Gollner weaves business, science, and travel into a riveting narrative about one of earth’s most desired foods.

Readers will discover why even though countless exotic fruits exist in nature, only several dozen varieties are vailable in supermarkets. Gollner explores the political machinations of multinational fruit corporations, exposing the hidden alliances between agribusiness and government and what that means for public health. He traces the life of mass-produced fruits – how they are created, grown, and marketed, and he explores the underworld of fruits that are inaccessible, ignored, and even forbidden in the Western world.

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 sweet, making lemons taste like lemonade. Peopled with a varied and bizarre cast of characters – from smugglers to explorers to inventors – this extraordinary book unveils the hidden universe of fruit.

Author Biography

Adam Leith Gollner has traveled around the globe to report on the fruit underworld. He’s written for The New York Times, Gourmet, Bon Appetit, and Good Magazine. The former editor of Vice Magazine, he is also a musician. The Fruit Hunters is his first book. He lives in Montreal and Los Angeles.


From the Hardcover edition.

Table of Contents

Prologue  Blame It on Brazil
Introduction  The Fruit Underworld

Part 1 Nature
1Wild, Ripe and Juicy: What Is a Fruit?
2Hawaiian Ultraexotics
3How Fruits Shaped Us
4The Rare Fruit Council International

Part 2 Adventure
5Into Borneo
6The Fruitarians
7The Lady Fruit
8Seedy: The Fruitleggers

Part 3 Commerce
9Marketing: From Grapples to Gojis
10 Miraculin: The Story of the Miracle Fruit
11 Mass Production: The Geopolitics of Sweetness
12 Permanent Global Summertime

Part 4 Obsession
13 Preservation: The Passion of the Fruit
14 The Case of the Fruit Detective
15 Making Contact with the Otherworld
16 Fruition: Or the Fever of Creation

Acknowledgments
Further Reading 
Index