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

by Adam Leith Gollner

• ISBN13: 9780743296946
• ISBN10: 074329694X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-05-20
• Publisher: Scribner

Summary

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 pina 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.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Blame It on Brazil	p. 1
Introduction: The Fruit Underworld	p. 5
Nature	p. 17
Wild, Ripe and Juicy: What Is a Fruit?	p. 19
Hawaiian Ultraexotics	p. 32
How Fruits Shaped Us	p. 46
The Rare Fruit Council International	p. 59
Adventure	p. 75
Into Borneo	p. 77
The Fruitarians	p. 91
The Lady Fruit	p. 108
Seedy: The Fruitleggers	p. 123
Commerce	p. 141
Marketing: From Grapples to Gojis	p. 143
Miraculin: The Story of the Miracle Fruit	p. 166
Mass Production: The Geopolitics of Sweetness	p. 180
Permanent Global Summertime	p. 198
Obsession	p. 213
Preservation: The Passion of the Fruit	p. 215
The Case of the Fruit Detective	p. 228
Making Contact with the Otherworld	p. 242
Fruition: Or the Fever of Creation	p. 254
Acknowledgments	p. 265
Further Reading	p. 266
Index	p. 272
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.