For me premium durian is like creamy bitter sweet chocolate pudding with nutty and sulfuric undertones that will leave your taste buds in bliss and the rest of your mouth with a pleasant sensation of slight numbness provided you’re lucky enough to get one that’s just taken a hard fall from a good tree. Depending on the species, cultivar, and age of the tree there’s a wide variety of durian scents and flavors not to mention textures, colors, shapes, and sizes. There’s also a wide range of quality much of which depends on whether a durian was cut from a tree unripe and consumed days or weeks after harvest and if ripening chemicals were used, or whether it dropped from the tree naturally and fully ripe and was consumed within minutes or hours after harvest.

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Once while transporting some plantains a middle-aged lady that I often bought fruit from thought it was crazy that I was going to eat them raw. So I asked her “You’ve lived here your entire life and have been around these things for many years yet you’ve never thought to try and eat one of them ripe and raw? Nope, not once! I am writing this for people like her and people who only just heard about plantains in order to say: Yes you can eat plantains raw and they’re quite good so ignore those who say things like a plantain needs to be “cooked before serving as it is unsuitable raw”… not surprisingly this was said by a company that sells processed plantain chips, go figure.

While writing this post I remembered an email I sent to the Chiquita Banana Company regarding the information on their plantain website a few years ago so I just went to it to see if it had been updated. It hasn’t been so one of the main companies importing these bananas into the U.S. is still unaware that plantains can, and I would argue should be, eaten raw. Instead they tell people to cook their bananas and provide recipes so people can eat them with bacon, cheese, slave caught shrimp, and factory farmed chicken. I grabbed the following screen shot from their website which out of all the plantain recipes and information does not say anywhere that plantains can be eaten raw, in fact it specifically says ” Eaten cooked (not raw)”.
I haven’t had any plantains in a long time as they’re hard to come by in my area however I was fortunate enough to encounter a bunch that was in my opinion harvested way too early considering it was going to be consumed locally and didn’t need to be shipped across an ocean. However after sitting in my room for a week a few ripened to the point I could start eating them. Today is day 14 and the five that remain are fully ripe. Note that when I bought this bunch of unripe bananas I did not cut them from the stem and instead let them drain the once thick and heavy green stem like Cell drained Piccolos arm. The result is a shriveled stem and some really good bananas despite having been harvested a bit too early. Here are some photos I’ve taken over the past two weeks.

Sugar apple, custard apple, water apple, star apple, velvet apple… None of these fruits taste like or resemble an apple so lets stop calling them apples. There’s no need to be so primitive in our use of language that we must always combine two familiar words to name something as some things are worthy of their own names. To me these apple-ending names are as ridiculous as fuzzy apple for peaches and baby apple for cherries so here are some better names for English speakers to use and links to photos:

sugar apple = sweetsop (there’s also a soursop)
custard apple = cherimoya (related to the above two along with atemoya and a rollinia)

water apple, wax apple, rose apple, java apple = bellfruit (there are many different types and closely related fruits)

star apple = cainito (related to sapodilla, canistel, and abiu)

velvet apple = mabolo (related to persimmon and black sapote aka chocolate pudding fruit)

I’ve been fortunate enough to have tried them all however there are even more, many more, delicious and nutritious fruits that I haven’t tried and I hope they don’t go extinct due to humanities love of meat, palm oil, and burning fossil fuels all of which are responsible for the deforestation and climate change that is killing off much of the biodiversity on this planet.

Noni, also known as “vomit fruit” is without question the most disgusting whole plant food I have ever come across. In fact I can’t even think of another whole plant food that could be placed in the same leg weakening gag inducing category as noni. It really is that bad, not something you can get used to and even learn to enjoy but just plain bad. Normally when out for a walk if I come across a fruit tree with some tree-ripened freshly fallen fruit on the ground next to it I’m pretty excited but not the other night, however I did grab one and got noni juice on my hand and my knife in order to take this photo.

P.S. I just returned from the supermarket and on my way to the vegetable section as nasty as noni is, and it is nasty, I passed by something much worse, smelt like rotting mammal flesh… oh wait it was rotting mammal flesh. Whoever buys that stuff is going to need a lot of heat, salt, sugar, oil, and spices to make it edible. Right now you’re probably thinking I’m sure glad I eat a vegan diet or an ethical, sustainable, and healthy near-vegan diet; or perhaps you’re thinking well I don’t eat rotten flesh or flesh from any abused animal they didn’t have to kill in order to butcher and to that I reply sure you don’t.

Tamarind is a sweet and sour tropical fruit with date like flesh which comes wrapped around a string of black seeds that are enclosed in a thin brown brittle shell. I came across a tree in the park yesterday and climbed up and helped myself. I also helped those below who weren’t keen on climbing but were into some free fruit by knocking down quite a few from the top since the low hanging ones had already been knocked down with a long pole over the past few weeks.

This is just another way we benefit from a stable climate which doesn’t bounce from extreme heat to extreme cold and from extreme drought to extreme rain and enables the fruit trees to consistently produce life supporting fruit without any assistance from us all while taking carbon out of the atmosphere and adding oxygen. Wow, if fruit trees are that awesome why are we cutting so many of them down including those which produce delicious and endangered fruits?

If you want to help curb deforestation eat more or all plants and less or no animals because a primary cause of deforestation is meat production as it takes a lot more land and fresh water, not to mention pesticides and chemical fertilizers, to grow enough plants to feed livestock to produce meat than it does to feed people directly. Also if you use any products which contain palm oil, which you do, please take a minute to contact the manufacturers of these products and demand that they purchase their palm oil from sustainable sources.

Whenever I have the chance I try to teach people how to eat fruit… when it’s ripe, however I must say I do benefit from the fruit ignorance of the average person because it often gets me awesome discounts on premium ripe fruit. Today’s discounted fruit was Namwa bananas, probably my favorite type of banana. Saying these things put Cavendish bananas to shame is an understatement. Today I got a 66% discount and last week on some that were slightly riper than these I got a 100% discount however I still gave a tip to show my appreciation.

In today’s case these bananas weren’t even on display, they were behind the sellers table in a crate as the seller had already decided to compost them because she said no one would buy bananas like these and felt it wasn’t even worth displaying them next to the 70 and 80% ripe ones. I said get them bananas on this table and give’em a chance! Who knows maybe another oddball like me who eats ripe bananas will be happy to buy some at a 66% discount. She did put them on the table but I doubt she sold any because the average person would rather eat yellow/green bananas than yellow/brown or yellow/black ones.

Anyway I just wanted to remind you to keep your eyes open for discarded fruit and encourage you, when practical, to feed yourself with cheap, healthy, and delicious things that would have otherwise gone to the trash can or compost pile.