Illustration by Radio 21Tip By Malia Wollana couple to make cocktails with — a
common usage for the fruit in its native
South America — and marveled at its
remarkable redolence, which perfumed
my whole kitchen for days. Part pine-
apple limeade, part rhubarb-fl avored
gummy, it’s a scent so neon I’d rather
believe it was plucked from a food sci-
entist’s imagination than accept that
this unicorn fruit just happens to grow
in some people’s backyards.
Or take the Oro Blanco (‘‘white gold’’)
grapefruit, a product of the Citrus Exper-
iment Station at the University of Cali-
fornia, Riverside. Developed as a hybrid
between a pomelo and a grapefruit, the
Oro Blanco inherits the juiciness of grape-
fruit without that bitter edge, and the fl o-
ral sweetness of pomelo without its thick,
woolly pith. Encountering an Oro Blanco
for the fi rst time made me marvel at the
ingenuity of the human species. (And,
in equal measure, our hubris.) The one I
sampled was ambrosial and diametrically
opposed to the anemic citruses I’m used
to, which tend to be picked before their
time and left to ripen slowly under gro-
cery-store fl uorescents. It had a sweetness
I wasn’t sure I’d earned.
There’s a line in a Jack Gilbert poem
that has inhabited a nook in my brain since
I was a teenager. ‘‘What lasted is what the
soul ate,’’ he wrote in ‘‘The Spirit and the
Soul.’’ ‘‘The way a child knows the world
by putting it/part by part into his mouth.’’
I think of these lines often when I prepare
to eat a new fruit. Each tasting is a chance
to be reunited with my inner child, to be
rendered wide-eyed and wordless as I get
to know it, part by part. Those tasked with
naming these fruits appear to be equally
under a spell, producing monikers as sim-
plistic as they are charming. Cotton candy
grapes. Ice cream bean. Dragonfruit. Tell
me these names aren’t the work of a cap-
tivated 6-year-old.
Some astronauts report experiencing
the ‘‘overview eff ect,’’ a sense of mental
clarity and connectedness to human-
kind that overcomes them when they
look down at Earth from space. I feel
that on a cellular level when I pick up a
mangosteen, a celestial-purple orb with
a fl ower-stem hat. It looks as if it were
conceived for a Miyazaki fi lm, its pro-
portions so cutesy that it demands to be
anthropomorphized. Inside are pillowy
white segments, oneiric in texture and
taste, with notes of pineapple, strawberry,
lychee and your most carefree memory
of childhood. The experience is no less
expansive than seeing the ocean or hear-
ing a Chopin nocturne for the fi rst time.
You catch yourself wondering what else
this world has been hiding, what stagger-
ing beauty it’s capable of.
Most fruits I try only a couple of times,
because I am an incorrigible neophile.
But there’s one I keep returning to: the
soursop, a member of the Annonaceae
family and relative of the cherimoya and
pawpaw. From the outside, it looks like
a spiny reptile curled into itself or some
sort of prehistoric football. It splits like
fl esh — with a hand on each half you feel
violent, as though you’re tearing through
ligaments — but spoons like custard. At
optimal ripeness, the soursop tastes
like the platonic ideal of tropical fruit: abeguiling combination of citrus, banana,
pineapple, strawberry and papaya. Wait
just a day too long, though, and it starts to
brown, emitting a pungency that registers
more as feet than fruit.
This rapid decaying comforts me,
inexplicably. It’s not as if we’re short on
reminders of mortality these days. Yet
watching a beloved fruit transform from
unripe starches to mushy pulp feels like
being witness to an act of living. The
plant, after all, sacrifi ces fruit in hopes of
disseminating its seed; life was always the
point. A looming expiration date is only
encouragement to devour these tangible
joys as they come and not attempt their
preservation. We, too, will soon wake up
and fi nd our bodies softened and bruised,
smelling a little cheesy. Will we have let
our sweetest days go to waste?How to Appreciate
Spiders‘‘Very few spiders are dangerous,’’ says
Fritz Vollrath, emeritus professor of zool-
ogy at the University of Oxford, who has
studied spiders and their webs since the
early 1970s. A vast majority of the world’s
nearly 50,000 known spider species are
harmless. Vollrath’s favorite is the golden
orb spider, which spins liquid protein into
a saff ron-hued silk it weaves into intricate,
spiraling webs as large as a door. ‘‘The
females are big and colorful and elegant
with long legs and strong webs,’’ Vollrath
says. ‘‘The males are teensy.’’
Less than 4 percent of humans suff er
from arachnophobia, but general unease
is much more common. If you’re strug-
gling to appreciate spiders, start outside,
preferably in the early morning whendew hangs on the webs. ‘‘Walk toward
the rising sun so that the web is illumi-
nated from behind,’’ Vollrath says. Once
you spot a web, take a minute to observe
its geometry and then approach at your
own pace. (Don’t worry, the spider will
not leap on you.) ‘‘You control your fear,’’
Vollrath says. Spiders use their incredi-
bly strong and complex silk as a kind of
extension of their sensory organs, gath-
ering information about the world, and
their prey, through vibration. ‘‘If you want
to see some real action, throw a fl y in,’’
Vollrath says.
It might be harder to see the splendor of
spiders in your home. But, Vollrath says, if
you have a lot of them, then you should be
very glad: They eat mosquitoes, fl ies and
even cockroaches. Still, unless your home
is full of reproducing bugs, the spider will
eventually go hungry. ‘‘The kind thing is to
usher them out,’’ says Vollrath, who does
so with his bare hands. If you’d prefer not
to feel eight legs scurrying in your palm,
place a jar on top and slide a piece of paper
under the jar’s opening.
You don’t need to be in the country-
side to admire spiders. They’re plentiful
in cities, too. To get a quick sense of what
species might be around, fi nd an outdoor
light fi xture where arachnids gather to eat
moths attracted by the light. Don’t ste-
reotype spiders based on one interaction.
‘‘They’re quite individualistic,’’ Vollrath
says. ‘‘Some are relaxed, and some run
off and hide.’’The soursop
splits like
flesh but spoons
like custard.Tra cy Wa n
is a writer and brand
strategist in Toronto.