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Durian - King of Fruits
(but a bit of a ponker)


Text & Image: Sjon Hauser

No other fruit in Southeast Asia has a reputation that can match the fame of the durian. Its place in this region's cultures has been compared with the role of champagne in the West. The truly ambiguous quality of the durian is that it combines a rich flavour with a repugnant smell. As the Filipinos say: "The durian smells like hell but tastes likes heaven."

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.gifWhen piles of fruit, large as human skulls and heavily armoured with stout, sharp spikes are blocking the pathways, and a strange, sweet but repellent smell is wafting - now here, now gone - on the breezes, then the durian season has arrived and is here in Chiang Mai.

.gifThe appearance of this fruit - like the head of a gigantic medieval mace - along with its stench, suggests evolutionary development to protect the cream-yellow flesh within the thick shell by all means. Few of its ripe fruit, however, escape being devoured by man, not to speak of the many other kinds of animals lured to them.

.gifIn the rain forests of Borneo, probably the original home of wild durian, orangutans used to raid the durian orchards of the Dyak tribesmen. With great skill, the apes found ways to break through the armoured crusts. Elephants are also particularly fond of this fruit, but need to wait until they ripen and fall from the short twigs attaching them to trunk and branches of the 40-metre-tall trees.

.gifWhen the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace was in Borneo about 1860 to collect ‘rare specimens' for museums in his home country, he hunted orangutans relentlessly. And although they respected the red-haired ‘man of the forest', the Dyaks were content to stand by, not interfering with Wallace's holocaust, since their passion for the durian had no limit. They even composed hymns of adoration to it.

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.gifDuring his long journey through the Malay Archipelago, Wallace came to have insights now regarded as fundamental to the theory of evolution. His overseas correspondence with Charles Darwin inspired the latter to include a chapter on natural selection in his classic work, On the Origin of Species. Though natural selection is the backbone of the whole theory, Wallace is not mentioned even once by name. While Darwin was becoming one of the most famous men of his century, Wallace was suffering from malaria, the maddening bites of sand flies, and the many other discomforts of the tropics in that era. To set against all that, he had the consolation of durian, as he had become passionately fond of its creamy pulp.

.gif"To eat Durian is a new sensation," he wrote, "worth a visit to the East."

.gifMost Westerners in the Orient at that time, however, disliked the fruit. Their smell even gave Sir Stamford Raffles, founder of Singapore, headaches. Around Fort Canning, while his house was being built, all trees of this kind were felled. No aficionado of the fruit will deny for an instant it has a pungent odour: but this is simply waved aside as a minor drawback. Besides, once taste the flesh, and the smell ceases to offend. The richness of the flavour is all that counts from that moment on.

.gifThe outlandish contrast between taste and smell may be best expressed in this way: "It is as if one eats the most delicious vanilla in a public lavatory." Curiously enough, this was an official slogan (along with the previously quoted ‘Smells like hell, tastes like heaven') at an exhibition once devoted to the King of Fruits in Kuala Lumpur. Out front, visitors could sample - or gorge themselves on - a variety of durians, as also durian juice and ice cream. Meanwhile, inside, many rare varieties were on display, like the round, hairy Tutong, or the Durio Burong with its reddish brown pulp enclosing the seeds; both these from Sabah and Sarawak.

.gifWhile a local pop hit throbbed over the audio system ("Are you want durian - yeh!"), visitors clustered around displays on the cultivation of the fruit, and a section on ‘durian folklore'. It is widely believed in Malaysia and Java (as in Thailand, too) that the consumption of durian accompanied by alcohol can be fatal. At the exhibition some such claims were mentioned, but it was suggested medical opinion tends to diagnose such fatalities as more likely due to acute gastritis. The writer himself has, in fact, survived the consumption of a glorious repast of a medium-sized durian washed down with two litres of Thai lager beer, without feeling any side-effects.

.gifWhere durians are certainly dangerous is in their natural setting. Falling fruit have inflicted serious injuries, which is why orchard workers often wear helmets, along with thick leather gloves and aprons, in harvesting them.

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.gifDespite its unique flavour, little detailed information is available about the actual chemical constituents of the creamy pulp. Each 100 grammes contains about 28 gram of carbohydrates, 2.5 gram of proteins, and high levels of iron, as also of vitamins B, C, and E. The rich savour can be approximated by a shake of bananas and figs, seasoned with onions and almonds, all whipped up in thick vanilla sauce.

.gifThe most pungent part of the fruit is the thick casing that encloses it, and its stench has been compared to a melange of camembert, rotten eggs, and turpentine.

.gifFolklore, especially among the Chinese, proclaims the fruit a potent aphrodisiac; in the words of a Hong Kong durian seller, "It will turn you into a raving wanton!" Partly due to this, demand in Singapore for the local crop always outstrips supply, and in season they import large consignments from Malaysia and Thailand. In the mid-seventies, though, demand for Thai durian fell off sharply in the island republic when a series of ‘koro' epidemics swept through parts of the kingdom's Northeast.

.gifThis bizarre malady is a rare form of culturally-associated mass hysteria in which afflicted males are seized with panic, believing that their penises are shrinking and / or retracting into the abdominal cavity. One theory current was that this dread condition was effected by transmission of poison, and the Singaporeans' suspicions encurdled round the durian. In reality no food substance was involved, and some analysts later felt the mass hysteria was more likely related to, or closely connected with, the social and political climate of the day, in which fear of communists, and the Vietnamese, had escalated to paranoid proportions.

.gifDurio zibethenus, the fruit's botanical name, gives us further insight to its pungency, and its potency, since zibeth is the Latin form of civet, a scent secreted by a number of animals, and an important constituent of many perfumes. Civet belongs to the class of pheromones, biologically-emitted chemicals involved in the mating games of many creatures. Although man's sense of smell is not perhaps what it may have been in past eons, it remains acute all the same. Recent research even suggests that pheromones may still influence human physiology and behaviour, even if only on a subconscious level. So there is cause for wonder whether olfactory stimulation while digging into a durian with relish might not indeed, as folklore claims, unleash the "raving wanton" in us.

(Text & Images © Sjon Hauser 2006)

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THE FOUNDING OF CHIANG MAI

Mystery, History and More than a Dash of Magic

J.M. Cadet

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Durian - King of Fruits

(but a bit of a ponker)

Sjon Hauser

Three Days through the Northern Countryside

Mad About Mango Wood

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