The case of the mixed-up fruit

If you read my entry below on the durian, you'll know I've been wanting to dedicate a lot of poems to this mysterious yellow fruit I've been eating every day. After googling "Vietnamese fruit" to identify it, I decided it had to be the durian. That's when I also discovered the extreme opinions people have about the controversial food, which seems to unfailingly inspire passionate outbursts of either devotion or distress.

But Lena told me this morning I had misidentified the fruit! The yellow thing I liked so much is the humble jackfruit, which elicits no emotional response whatsoever, as far as I can tell. (I believe the jackfruit and durian might be related, though.)

You pull these plump, buttery morsels of sweetness from the jackfruit rind and chew them, making sure to slip the big seed out first.

Mystified now by the durian, however, I hunted one down today, finding a batch for sale by the side of a major road in District Three. The vendor, who was smoking a cigarette and drinking a coffee, gladly sold me one for more tha $4. Expensive -- the price of four bowls of pho.

As soon as she cut the thorny rind open, I smelled the infamous odor that reportedly can cause people to gag several meters away. The durian is outlawed on public buses, I think, for this reason. I grew worried; the smell wafting my way reminded me of an old musty cushion peed on some days earlier by a bad cat.


The lady placed in front of me a lump of yellow mush that looked like an omelet made with some exotic animal's mashed-up brains. A thin layer of mucous glistened over the solid gelatinous mass. Despite my forebodings, I launched in and ate a bite. Oh the vile thing! It was too much! It was like eating something that had been ripped out of a dead cow's intestines and regurgitated by a vulture. It had the consistency of a slug, and I had to rip long shreds of it off, like decomposing tentacles, to properly finish the thing. But the woman was watching me and smiling and I ate as much as I could. (Sorry about all the references to dead or slimy creatures -- I am completely overcome!)

I thought I would vomit. The fruit in Vietnamese is called "one's sorrows" -- quite fitting.

Here's what those naysayers had to say about this hideous fruit (snatched from Wikipedia). I had disregarded them as desensitized Westerners prior to sampling the horrible durian.

British novelist Anthony Burgess writes that eating durian is "like eating sweet raspberry blancmange in the lavatory."

Chef Andrew Zimmern compares the taste to "completely rotten, mushy onions."

Anthony Bourdain, while a lover of durian, relates his encounter with the fruit as thus: "Its taste can only be described as...indescribable, something you will either love or despise. ...Your breath will smell as if you'd been French-kissing your dead grandmother."

Travel and food writer Richard Sterling says: "Its odor is best described as pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock."

I will stick with the jackfruit, which is really so delicious. Like a crunchy banana candy, truly the pinnacle of evolution.