Dr. Seuss Fruit

Something that surprised me in March and fascinates me on this visit is the existence of fruits and vegetables that I’d never seen or heard about. This picture gives two examples. The larger, magenta-yellow-green spikey ones are called “chum-chum” (rhymes with zoom-zoom, and the spikes are actually quite soft and flexible. They’re about the size of an extra-large egg in US grocery stores. You open it by placing the fruit between your thumb and first finger on one hand – like a lobster cracker – and then squeezing them together with your other hand until the shell breaks in the middle, then you lift off the top and get to the white, juicy pulp. It is the consistency of a peeled grape, and tastes somewhere between green grapes and melons and mangoes. Delicious, and less messy than it sounds. And you’re left with these funny little hedgehog-like shells!

The small, round, green ones are lychees. You peel them and get a similar grape-like center, with a small pit. They are only in season for one month a year, and we’re in it.

For sale on the street are giant things that look like football-sized pears. And others that are like pineapples with BIG spikes.

I guess what grips me so much – in addition to meeting my lower-level Maslovian need for sustenance – is that these are entirely new to me. Globalization has brought bananas and coconuts and apples and citrus fruit year round, ripe, to my local market, but these fruits haven’t made it yet. It’s not like it’s a culturally specific preparation of familiar food (say, a way of cooking meat or fish, or particular spice combinations), which is what I experience at the dinner table here. It’s the wonderment of “discovering” tasty - and frankly, amusing looking - food I haven’t previously encountered. That and the lip-smacking taste of a lychee in season.