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Looking beyond the familiar fruits Adam Gollner enters the underworld of inaccessible, obscure, even forbidden fruits. In this Willy Wonka-like world of mangos that taste like pina colados, ice cream beans, peanut butter fruits and the miracle fruit that makes sour taste sweet we meet a cast of bizarre characters - fruitarians who believe that a fruit diet is instrumental in achieving enlightenment, fruit smugglers, obsessed horticulturalists and the fanatical fruit detective who has turned himself orange because he has eaten so many apricots.
Revealing the extraordinary universe of fruit - from the jungles of Borneo to the forests of Bali and vast fruit warehouses in New York - Gollner explains the scientific, economic and aesthetic reasons why we eat particular fruits. Fruit has held as powerful a sway over man as gold or myrrh. Fruit has led nations into war, inspired religious worship and fuelled dictatorships. It has been the motive behind exploration. Although nature contains hundreds of thousands of varieties of exotic fruits, only a few dozen varieties are available in supermarkets. Gollner describes the political and economic interests behind the mass-produced fruits we all eat.
