Lyrical and well informed, exuberant and erudite and recounted with aptly ripe turns of phrase, The Fruit Hunters is the heartfelt and always fascinating story of the quest for the sweetest prizes the natural world has to offer". And what a fruitful Eden this Adam has discovered: the global underworld of rare-fruit aficionados, fruitarians, fruit smugglers and fruit detectives. Hess a writer in love with his subject, an obsessive chasing after obsessives. " - Jane and Michael Stern, authors of Roadfood "Adam Leith Gollner is the best kind of monomaniac. Oh, how we would love to suck on a miracle berry of Africa and savor a tiger-striped fig! Adam Leith Gollner's mesmerizing account of fruits that are rare or commercial, erotic or medicinal, and of the sometimes nutty characters who care about them provokes righteous indignation over how much we are denied as well as a ravenous appetite to taste it. I loved taking this culinary adventure with Gollner - anyone who brings mangost eens to parties is welcome at my table." - Amy Stewart, author of Flower Confidential "We have swooned with delight over Michigan's late-summer Bing cherries, but such moments of roadside pleasure pale in comparison to the passions that drive fruit hunters to discover and nurture exotics never found in supermarkets. Gollner' s quest for the forbidden coco-de-mer, his love affair with the chupa-chupa and his durian-induced intoxication make him as fascinating a narrator as the fruit hunters, farmers and scientists he encounters along the way. " The Fruit Hunters is a delectable journey through jungles, street markets and orchards in search of the world' s most exotic fruits. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. 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. The FDA and the often dubious activities of the international fruit trade, multinational corporations like Chiquita, come in for scrutiny, as does New York City's largest wholesale produce market, in a chapter with more information than one may want on biochemical growth inhibitors, hormone-based retardants, dyes, waxes and corrupt USDA inspectors. Equally intriguing are some of the characters he has encountered-a botanist in Borneo who spends his life studying malodorous durians fruitarians who believe that a fruit diet promotes transcendental experiences fruitleggers who bypass import laws and fruit inventors such as the fabricator of the Grapple-which looks like an apple and tastes like a grape.
He'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 peanut butter fruit, blackberry-jam fruit and coco-de-mer-a suggestively shaped coconut known as the lady fruit that grows only in the Seychelles. Journalist Gollner's debut is a rollicking account of the world of fruit and fruit fanatics. 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.Īn intrepid journalist and keen observer of nature - both human and botanical - Adam Leith Gollner has written a vivid tale of horticultural obsession. 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.
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. An expedition through the fascinating world of fruit, The Fruit Hunters is the engrossing story of some of Earth's most desired foods. Delicious, lethal, hallucinogenic and medicinal, fruits have led nations to war, fueled dictatorships and lured people into new worlds.
0 kommentar(er)
