Book Review - The Fruit Hunters

It was with a mixture of joy, surprise and growing interest, and occasional anger, that I read Adam Leith Gollner's book "The Fruit Hunters". Joy because I enjoy fruit, and have some wonderful experiences eating fruit, climbing a peach tree as a teenager and eating a sun-warmed large juicy peach, the best I've eaten; picking wild blueberries in early August along the rail tracks north-east of Espanola, Ontario, they tasted tart and sweet; canoeing across Cuttle Lake near Fort Frances to again pick wild blueberries. Suprise because I found out about different varieties of fruit available, different heirloom apples with amazing tastes, red and white durians, the miracle fruit (eat it and sour things taste sweet) and its story of intrigue and big business, the lady fruit (looks like a lady's, er, private parts). Growing interest, because I have a desire to taste the fruits I have read about, where they are grown at the time they ripen, rather than waiting for the few picked-too-early-and-not-properly-ripe, crunchy or crisp rather than juicy, fruits we can only buy in supermarkets, and the hundreds of vastly superior in taste varieties of fruit available around the world. And occasional anger, at the bureaucracy that decides which fruits we can and can not have, the banning by the Government of imports of certain fruits for what I can see is little or no good reason, the decision to allow fake chemical potentially-cancer-causing sweeteners to be sold rather than natural alternatives like miraculin (what makes miracle fruit so interesting). Read this book if you are interested in fruit in any way, it will open your eyes to the world of tasty fruit and the activity of fruit hunters, who search the world for exotic and interesting and tasty fruits before they are lost. Fascinating. Intoxicating. Delicious.