The Book of Difficult Fruit by Kate Lebo

Source of book: borrowed from a friend.

 

This Thanksgiving, as we did the last few years, we decided to take a trip. In this case, we visited my wife’s family in northern California, and then drove all the way up to Vancouver Washington, to spend the holiday with some friends. 

 

Since one of the things we share with these friends, who unfortunately (for us) moved out of state, is a love of books, we ended up talking about books we had recently read. 

 

The Book of Difficult Fruit came up, because they had read it recently, and it had a local connection - the author grew up in Vancouver. 

 

The book is a bit unusual, not really fitting into a specific genre. The author discusses one “fruit” for each letter of the alphabet - these are mostly true fruits, but there are some not-fruits such as rhubarb and sugar cane, as well as some borderline cases such as wheat. 

 

Each chapter talks a bit about the fruit, its history, uses, or other facts. But many of the chapters also have personal stories, with varying degrees of connection to fruits in question. For example, for huckleberries (an underrated treat that has defied attempts to grow them commercially), she talks about her experiences picking them in the wilds of Washington. 

 

These stories are fun and interesting. A few other stories talk about her bizarre extended family situation. Apparently, at some point, her paternal grandparents adopted two girls, but nobody talked about them, and she never met them. Finally, she meets one of her aunts, and learns more of the story, but pieces are still forever missing because her grandparents are dead. 

 

It appears that the two girls, as teens, snuck out to a Fleetwood Mac concert, and came back to find their possessions on the lawn - they had to fend for themselves at age 16 and 18, and were essentially kicked out of the family. 

 

Leaving aside the obvious fact that if you are going to sneak out for a concert, Fleetwood Mac at their peak is all kinds of awesome, what sort of parent does this? Even with all of the difficulties I have had with my parents as an adult, and the unnecessary conflict when I was a teen, I can’t imagine that they would have forever disowned me for a teenage incident like that. 

 

So that story was fascinating, even if it was incomplete after the passage of time. 

 

The less interesting personal story was that of the author’s dysfunctional relationship with her ex-boyfriend. Yawn. Sorry, I’m sure other readers may find it more interesting than I did, but just nope for me. 

 

About the only part of this that resonated was when the ex went gluten and dairy free, she mentioned that she felt like her world had gone grey. 

 

Even those of us with a fairly good knowledge of plants will find something interesting and new in this book. 

 

At first (in the chapter on Aronia), I was worried that the book was going to go too much in a “woo” direction. Fortunately, the author turns out to be more science-based than the first part of the chapter indicated. Here is her comment on her rather difficult mother, who, like my own, believes a lot of snake oil. 

 

Sometimes I think she’s trying to cure herself with diets because diets are impossible to follow perfectly, so when she slips up she can rest the blame for her illness on herself. Not God. Not science. Compliance. The regimen that will restore her health. The argument she makes to a body that won’t listen. 

 

This is very much my mom too. And not just about medical things, but about relational, psychological, and spiritual things. Pick an impossible formula, then blame yourself (or your kids) for not following it. That eliminates the messiness of real life, of real relationships, of real bodies. And never question the formula, of course. 

 

There are a number of fun literary references in the book. On the chapter on medlars - a really difficult fruit, which has to rot before it becomes edible, and looks a bit like it has an anus on one end - she notes all of the dirty jokes that Mercutio makes about the fruit when teasing Romeo. (Who, to be fair, totally deserves it.) 

 

The pomegranate, naturally, gets a mention of Persephone and other Greek myths. And also this great line about modern woo marketing. 

 

Modern marketing bypasses the Doctrine of Signatures and mines Greek myth instead, selling pomegranate juice as an elixir of youth, with anti-oxidant promises that fall just shy of raising the dead. 

 

So yes, a good bit of snark in this book. Another example is her account of a discussion about Burning man with her partner, Sam. 

 

Regardless, we do not share the same feelings about transcendent group experiences or psychedelic drugs. 

“It’s stupid,” I say, as he expected me to say.

“But why?” he says.

I tell him it’s a church with no judgment and no stakes, like astrology. I can see why such routes to transcendence would appeal, but, even having left the Catholic Church, I’m still Catholic. I still raise my eyebrows at religious (or religious-adjacent) experiences that don’t engage with the possibility of punishment. 

 

As an ex-evangelical, I know exactly what she is talking about. There is a lot of religion-adjacent crap with, as she puts it, no stakes. But that isn’t life, which has real stakes for a lot of vulnerable people. The problem with white evangelicalism isn’t primarily that it is judgmental, but that it is judgmental about all the wrong things: policing bodies and sex and genitals, grinding the faces of the poor, excluding people of color and women from equality, and so on. But it utterly refuses to judge what the rich do to exploit others, or expect members to have any responsibility to their fellow humans. Which, well, as I keep saying, that’s the opposite of Christ, isn’t it? He hung with prostitutes, but called the rich and powerful “brood of vipers.” 

 

One of the interesting facts in this book can be found in the chapter on vanilla. Which, despite its reputation, is actually a complex and costly flavor. But, did you know that its name has its roots in the Latin word that also spawned our word “vagina”? The little sheath…

 

Also from the chapter on vanilla: all commercial vanilla needs to be pollinated by hand. The technique for this, which is still used today, was invented/discovered by an enslave child, Edmond Albius. Naturally, a white French dude tried to steal credit, and Albius died in poverty. This story has been repeated so many times throughout history, with white dudes stealing credit for discoveries and inventions made by women and people of color. 

 

I should also mention that each chapter has recipes at the end. I skimmed these, since most of them aren’t things I would make, other than the jams, which do sound good. 

 

I enjoyed this book in the way it was probably intended. I read a bit at a time, fitting in a chapter or two after more heavy reading. If this sort of book is your thing, it is enjoyable.