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Get Breaking News on your cellExcerpt: "The Fruit Hunters," by by Adam Leith Gollner
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Here's an excerpt from The Fruit Hunters, by Adam Leith Gollner. It's reviewed today in GuideLive.
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 araças 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 filling and goes well with kangaroo meat. Existentialists might prefer camu-camus. 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 pin-cushion fruit, with its spiked cloak of white rays, is like an exploding star frozen in time. The toothbrush tree's fruits are eaten 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 pudding-like eta fruit is eaten by tilting the head back and slurping it down like an oyster. The fruits of the toad tree look like frogs and taste like carrots. The milk orange of Wen-Chou is a citrus fruit shot though with a creamy mist that, when peeled, swirls enchantingly through the air. Kids play football with the fruit of the money tree. The emu apple is eaten after being buried in soil for several days. Sword fruits call to mind dangling sabers in the moonlight; they're also called broken bones plants or midnight horrors because clumps of fallen fruit are periodically mistaken for skeletal remains. From THE FRUIT HUNTERS by Adam Leith Gollner. Copyright © 2008 by Adam Leith Gollner. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. |
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