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

Delicious, lethal, hallucinogenic, and medicinal, fruits have led nations to war, fueled dictatorships, and lured people into new worlds. In lustrous prose, Adam Leith Gollner draws readers into a Willy Wonka-like world—mangoes that taste like piña coladas, peanut butter fruits, and the miracle fruit that turns everything sour to sweet—and brilliantly weaves together business, science, travel, and food into a riveting narrative.

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. Peopled with a cast of characters as varied and bizarre as the fruit it discussess—smugglers, inventors, explorers, and epicures—this extraordinary book can “fill a thousand and one summer nights with delightful reading” (The Miami Herald).