8.7.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and to
day I will be reading the Smithsonian magazine date of
July August twenty twenty five. As a reminder, Radio Eye
is a reading service intended for people who are blind
or have other Disabilitiesled a search for the world's best Durian,
the divisive fruit that's prized and reviled. Devotees of the

(00:24):
crop journey to a Malaysian island to find the most
fragrant and tasty specimens by Tom Downey. Once you actually
taste and smell a ripe Durian, the Southeast Asian fruit
best known for its penetrating odor, you will understand what
all the fuss is about and why it's banned from

(00:45):
some public spaces throughout the region. You may not like
the taste, but you will appreciate the passion and revulsion
the fruit inspires. You may also marvel at the strange
ways those sentiments converge. It has something we call a hong,
a sudden smell, in this case, the aroma of bad

(01:06):
breath and butane gas, said Wang pang Ho, a Malaysian
Chinese doctor and Durian fanatic. As we shared a particularly
pungent fruit on the Malaysian island of Penang, just off
the country's west coast. You know how when you smell
butane and you know it's not good, but you want

(01:26):
to continue sniffing anyway. That's Hong later, sampling a fruit
at a remote Durian farm. Marcus Morris, a Canadian digital
nomad who moved to Penang largely based on the fruit's availability, proclaimed,
this Durian has the flavor of a penny. It's like
licking a brass door knob. He meant that as a compliment.

(01:50):
True Durian Officionados don't just accept extreme flavors, They celebrate, savor,
even exult in them. The late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain
once said of its aroma, try leaving cheese or a
dead body out in the sun, and you're in the
same neighborhood as Durian. The fruit is complex and taste

(02:13):
and smell, varied in texture and surprising in its effects.
Flavors can span sweet, bitter, acidic, fatty, and creamy, with
specific tasting notes that might include cacao, blue cheese, pumpkin,
or even bacon or chives. In texture, Durian can resemble cheese, custard,

(02:35):
ice cream, or over ripe stone fruit. Some of the
most sought after Durian boasts a rare and peculiar numbing effect,
much like mala peppers used in Seschuan louisine. The smell,
which at first can evoke garbage, raw onions, and garlic,
seems as you grow to appreciate Durian to shade into

(02:58):
more positive notes, such as whole milk, strong cheese, and
high proof rum. Almost all desirable Durian, at least in Malaysia,
has fermented to the point that it has a slight
or strong taste of alcohol. In short, Durian contains multitudes
not found in any other raw fruit or vegetable, perhaps

(03:20):
not in any other uncooked food sashimi or beef tartar
connoisseurs may disagree. No place on Earth draws more fanatics
than Penang, the world's mecca for Durian lovers. One night
last summer in Georgetown, Penang's cosmopolitan capital city, I marveled

(03:41):
at the Malaysian, Singaporean and Chinese Durian lovers thronging McAllister Road,
the city's main Durian eating strip. I strode past stalls
stacked high with pale green, prehistoric looking specimens. Durian is
a formidable, nearly impregnant bull fortress of a fruit weighing

(04:02):
between two and eight pounds and armour plated with sharp
triangular spikes that pierce the skin if you touch them
in the wrong way. Though it goes on sale at midday,
it's most popular to consume at night, likely because Malaysians
believe it is heaty, meaning it makes you feel warm
and penang is scorching during the day. When I visited,

(04:25):
locals and visitors were arranged around tables, eating, talking, laughing,
savoring the experience as they might at a cocktail ball
or Jelatia elsewhere in the world. Even here, however, on
the finest Durian eating street and the Durian capital of
the world, spectacular Durian remains elusive. No vendor will simply

(04:48):
hand you world class fruit, no matter how much research
you do or what price you pay. Great Durian, they
seem to believe, has to be earned by your selection acumen.
So to eat fantastic fruit, you first need to learn
how to choose the perfect Durian. At one stall, I
watched as the matriarch of a family engaged a fruit vender.

(05:12):
There was a short, sharp exchange in a Chinese dialect,
likely Hokien. The matriarch started smelling fruit, weighing the spiky
samples with her hands, and haggling with the cellar. At
long last she made a selection, and the vendor knocked
on the fruit with the stick usually done to assess ripeness,

(05:33):
then bracing it with a gloved hand. He masterfully inserted
a small sharp knife into just the right place and
pried open the shell to reveal the oblong edible yellow
orange pods that lay within. Following her lead, I went
through the motions, sniffing, probing, haggling for fruit, But of

(05:54):
course it was all in vain because I knew nothing.
After a few nights of aimless water during and random tasting,
I realized something important. Unlike local people who have had
Durian wisdom pass down to them by their friends and relatives,
I desperately needed a guide, some one who could help
me decipher this array of very strange fruit. In search

(06:18):
of this knowledge, I came across a distinct breed of sojourners,
fruit travelers who crisscrossed the Earth in search of just
off the tree perfectly ripe produce. I also discovered that
Penang Durian growers were in the midst of an existential
struggle over the future of this fruit. Fortunately, like virtually

(06:40):
all foreigners searching for their Durian whisperer, I had found
online Lindsey gask an American woman who for more than
a dozen years has been on a world wide quest
to eat the best Durian and to teach others some
of what she has learned. That was how a few
days after leaving Georgetown, I found myself at a small

(07:03):
farm in Balik Pulau, Penang's Durian growing heartland, with hilly
slopes rolling down to the Strait of Malacca, where Gaysic
was conducting a master class for Durian novices. I hoped
to learn to select prime Durian, open it and analyze
its taste. For Gaysic, now thirty six, it all started

(07:25):
sixteen years ago while she was working at what she
describes as a hippie festival in the northwestern United States.
She smelled something strange in the camp sites and outdoor
class rooms of the event. She asked around. She sniffed
she asked around some more. Finally, an older man told
her that she was smelling Durian, a magical fruit from

(07:47):
Southeast Asia, a superfood, the healthiest thing in the world.
If you eat it, you will get addicted to it.
He told her. It elevates your spirit, opens your chakras.
Durian will change your life. He was right about the addiction.
Gaysk finally found Durian at a local Oregon market, tasted it,

(08:09):
and loved it so much that she flew to Southeast Asia.
Since then, Durian has become her vocation and her profession,
and it remains her obsession. She started a blog called
Year of the Durian about her quest, and she has
become one of the most famous and knowledgeable foreign Durian

(08:29):
guides on the planet, with close to one hundred thousand
followers on Instagram. An a budding small business also called
Year of the Durian. That ship's high quality hands selected
frozen fruit including sempedak, mangostein Petai beans and other exotic
items from Asia to the United States. When I contacted

(08:51):
the Malaysian government in Penang in search of a local
Durian expert, I was referred to Kaysk. When I met farmers,
street side Durian cellars and knowledgeable locals, they too suggested
I meet her lindsay can find a great Durian just
by the smell of the unopened fruit, when farmer said,
I don't have a nose like that. The farm where

(09:13):
we convened for the class had a simple guest house
and restaurant made of dark wood, set in the middle
of the dense greenery of the orchard. Gathered with me
were a budding Durian farmer growing the fruit, and Costa Rica,
an Indian real estate mogul who'd flown in from Hyderabad
via Singapore, where pictures he shared seemed to suggest that

(09:35):
he'd consumed more fine Durian in one day than many
Officionados will consume in a lifetime. A Chinese Australian retiree
originally from Hong Kong who is a raw food vegan
and joins almost every Gasic Durian tour offered a few
times a year at various locations in Asia. A California

(09:57):
bartender who had before this trip only tried frozen Durian
from Costco. A Vietnamese American Durian lover who first tried
the fruit in Vietnam, and two Malaysian Chinese entrepreneurs with
the Durian store in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur
and an export business shipping the fruit to China, the

(10:18):
most lucrative Durian market in the world. Leading us were
gaisk her Swedish husband Richard Koivusalo, who first met her
in person when he was a student in one of
her classes, and TiO Schan Tat, a Chinese Malaysian guide
from Penang who is an obsessive Durian hunter and one

(10:38):
of the founders of a local historical organization Penang. Hidden gems.
After a meal composed of long fermented Durian and a
pungent curry, intensely bitter green Petai beans also known as
stink beans, and an array of raw produce and herbs,
we set out on a night time Durian hunt. Most

(11:00):
Durian fall at night and in the early morning, Gay
Sick explained, so as we walked through the orchards, you
have to be very careful. These fruits are heavy. If
you hear a slight wish sound, cover your head and
run away from it. We also needed to be very quiet,
gay Sick said, so that we could hear where the
durian had fallen and locate it. We marched carefully up

(11:25):
the hill, staying on the path as instructed, so that
we would be out of range from falling fruit. After
a few minutes, I heard the gentle thump of a
fruit hitting the net. Gay Sick led us to the
location and pointed to the fruit with her flashlight. This
one was caught by a net the farmers set to
break its fall, she said, so it didn't hit so hard.

(11:48):
Then her husband demonstrated how to safely grab a durian
quickly and cautiously, so that you minimize the chances of
being hit by another falling object. As he rejoined the
pack durian in hand, we heard two more buds, and
we collected those durians too. When a durian naturally detaches

(12:09):
from its tree, falling to the ground or in a net,
the impact creates tiny cracks in the shell, which begins fermentation.
The window of greatness for a durian post fall is
said to be about one to twelve hours. This initial
fall is also when the fruit's aroma is least pungent.

(12:31):
Durians don't really start to smell until they've begun to
ferment a little, Gaysic said, once we were back at
the farmhouse. When we smelled at the just fallen Durian,
there was virtually no scent, quite as sollow. Gaysic's husband elaborated,
fermentation is one way we can control and shape the

(12:52):
taste of the fruit. He said, It's a bit like
sour dough. He went on, we want a certain amount
of fermentation. But good fermentation produces the desired alcohol taste
and cuts down on the sweetness by metabolizing the sugar.
But if it over ferments, Durian tastes rotten, becomes too

(13:13):
bitter and transforms into a fibrous, hard to eat mess.
Much great food and drink relies on a similar kind
of tension. Wine needs a little volatile acidity to give
it energy and life, but with too much it begins
to taste of vinegar, dry aged beef. It's a sweet
spot after around thirty to fifty days, but some time

(13:36):
after that it becomes more redolent of socks than steak.
What's different about Durian is the range of texture and
fermentation that combines to achieve a superlative balance. This complexity
is I started to understand a big part of what
excites people so much about this fruit. Fine Durian exists

(13:59):
on a razor's edge between extraordinary and awful. The elusive
nature of this balance is clearly part of the fascination
for Durian enthusiasts. To experience prime Durian, you need to
be in a place where you can eat it shortly
after it falls. But the season when that happens between

(14:19):
May and September and Penang has become even shorter and
more unpredictable, likely as a result of climate change. Thus,
each bite feels like a cosmic, unreproducible convergence. Gaysik told
us that one of the things she loved about Durian
was knowing that a superlative fruit she experienced right now

(14:40):
would be the only time she ever tasted something exactly
like that. This unique sensory experience makes Durian meaningful to
its devotees in a way that verges on the religious.
Penang's residence have long cultivated Durian trees here are old,
many of them planted more than a century ago. Connoisseurs

(15:04):
seek out fruit from these aged flora because they impart
a desirable bitterness, produce a thin skinned specimen with more
edible flesh and yield some Durians with an elusive numbing sensation.
In Bilik Palau, sea breezes blow through the orchards, bestowing
a subtle saline taste on the fruit. Penang Durian farming

(15:27):
is mostly small scale, possibly because land here is steep
and rocky and thus challenging for industrial agriculture. There are
also a number of family owned organic and biodynamic farms,
the latter of which focuses on sustainability and holistic management.
In contrast, the monocrop farms of mainland Malaysia and Thailand,

(15:52):
a northern agricultural competitor, where the fruit is considered ripe
and ready to eat when is much firmer, are large
and vast. In fact, Gaysick explained in Thailand, most farmers
harvest durian from the tree before it has naturally fallen,
then spray it with a chemical ripening agent as they
prepare it for sale. There are other ways to accelerate

(16:16):
this process, such as intentionally tossing them on the ground
as Gaysic did with fruit she felt needed further fermentation
before eating. This makes the production much more controllable and profitable.
The farmers, not nature, get to determine exactly when they
want to pick, ripen, and sell. Most Malaysian farmers, though,

(16:38):
believe that interfering with the natural ripening process is a
grave sin against the fruit, which should only be eaten
after it falls unassisted. Still, with Durians recently fetching their
highest prices ever, with some specimens selling for more than
one hundred dollars, almost all professional Durian farmers on Penang

(17:00):
now use nets on their trees, allowing farmers to preserve
their fruit for as long as possible before it becomes
over ripe. One exception is Erik Chong of green Acre's orchard,
who lets all his Durian, including the most expensive varieties,
fall directly to the ground. I prefer the natural way,

(17:21):
he told me when I visited his farm. Durian should
start to vement when it falls. I don't sell much
to the market anyway. I want people to come here
and experience not just the fruit, but the whole farm.
For hardcore Durian lovers, Chong as a prophet who revers
and amplifies what they most love. Its ephemeral, utterly unreproducible essence.

(17:46):
For them, the greatest Durians are always on the verge
of destruction and wrought. But Kasik tells me there is
a powerful array of forces challenging this view. People in
the Durian and here often look up to Thailand's industrial
Durian farms. She said. They grow and sell much more

(18:07):
Durian there because they chemically ripen it so they can
control it. You can make the most money, or you
can grow the best fruit. You can't do both. And
with the Chinese market for Durian growing, the fruit's historic
producers Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines are facing increasing

(18:28):
pressure from upstart growers in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and southern
mainland China itself. So far, Gasik went on, most Malaysian farmers,
especially here in Penang, have chosen to grow the best
fruit and make less money. The question is whether they
will continue to do that. A few days later, I

(18:50):
drove up a windy road to nearly the top of
the mountain that separates Balik Pulao from more densely populated
areas of Penang to reach Baosheng Durian Farm. Baosheng was
one of the first biodynamic Durian farms in Malaysia, and
its owner is credited with calling attention to durian's numbing properties.

(19:14):
There was no signage and no obvious reception desk. Though
the farm is also a hotel, there was no point
of sale for its Durians. I hunted around and finally
found two foreigners slicing into avocados and downing massive quantities
of Mangoestein's, the telltale signs of raw food vegans at

(19:34):
meal time. They explained that there was no Durian for
sale here. Everything was eaten by the guests. We started talking,
and I learned that these two had traveled there separately
for the chance to volunteer for a month during Durian season.
They had to break open the shells for guests and
assist on the property. Why had they come here on

(19:56):
their own dime to work for free? Oh, it's a
no brain. Noh Stein, a Californian, said, we get to
eat all the Durian we want when we work here.
Not the prime stuff, of course, but even the damaged fruit,
and the rejects here are amazing. I'd do it every
day all year if I could. The next day, Gaysk,

(20:17):
who'd also worked at this same farm early in her
Durian career, took me to meet the most intense group
of Durian enthusiasts she knew. Kenji Tan, a Chinese Malaysian
extreme foody from Penang, Glen Chee, a Singaporean who lived
in Johar Barhu, Malaysia, Marcus Morris, the Canadian residing here

(20:39):
who'd identified the penny taste, and a group of their
friends and family. We met at a little known farm
on a steep hillside that towered over vast rows of
high rise apartment buildings in a working class part of
Penang near the airport. Tan told me that some members
of this group criss crossed the country during the dura

(21:00):
in season, hitting different farms each weekend, even flying to
Borneo in search of a unique Durian only found there
that has red colored flesh. For Tan, though nowhere beats Penang,
this is the Durian heartland, he explained. This farmer look
at the way he smells, touches, selects, and opens this fruit.

(21:22):
He's a master. He has people like us up here
every week, so he has to be through the chef
and owner of a marvelous Malaysian restaurant in San Francisco
called Azalina's. I met another Durian farmer, Tang Boon Lee
of Songhai Farms. We sampled his produce in a shaded
area of his hilltop farm, eating bitter sweet mouthfuls of Durian,

(21:46):
some of it well known varieties and some grown from
ungrafted trees known here as campong, which means village in Malay.
Tang said his father worked in the canteen of a
British Air Force base on the island and had bought
this orchard in nineteen sixty six. He'd watched him labor
for decades in the orchards, climbing up by motor bike

(22:08):
every day during harvest and then riding down with each
day's yield balanced precariously on the bike. Tang grew to
love eating Durian. Then, when his father could no longer
work the farm, he took over. Eating Durian was a
hobby for me, he said. Now it's something more important.

(22:28):
My father can't get up here to the orchard any more.
But we have a Durian stall just in front of
where he lives. Every day he watches people who go
there to eat his Durian. He can't really talk any
more and tell us, but I could see how important
it is to him to see all of these people
enjoying what he spent his life building on. By last

(22:50):
day in Georgetown, after abstaining from Durian for a few days,
I strayed away from the mc allister road stalls in
search of a vender gaysack Rerek commended named tay Boon
Tyke or Fatty. I still hadn't learned to select a
truly amazing Durian. That's a next level skill. But I had,
at last, and at least learned a bit about what

(23:13):
I wanted. Bitter, I said, some alcohol taste numbing if
you have it old tree, intense taste. Tyke nodded. He
probed each Durian from the small group he'd selected for
me by sticking his knife blade into the fruit, then
sniffing it when it came out slick with Durian pulp.

(23:33):
This one, he said with conviction, and sliced open a
small caprive variety. I took a bite. I tasted cacow cream,
maybe mescal. It was alive, it was rotting. It was wonderful.
I thought back to what Geesik had told me about
the singular moment of each great Durian. There will never

(23:53):
be a Durian like this again. That was why this
moment and this fruit was so special. Next, a new
biography offers the most intimate portrait yete of one of
the twentieth century's greatest authors. Research into James Baldwin's archives
reveals incisive details about the writer's personal relationships, both platonic

(24:17):
and romantic, with other men. By Brandon Tensley. In nineteen fifty,
James Baldwin and his lover, the painter Lucienn Happersberger, set
out from Paris for the mountains of Switzerland, where Baldwin,
then around twenty five, hoped to climb his way out
of a creative funk. It worked. While hiking, Baldwin nearly

(24:40):
fell down a ravine, but Happersberger grabbed him, saving his life.
Out of this frightening biblical experience, writes Nicholas Boggs in
his new book Baldwin, A Love Story. That day, Baldwin
conjured the final title for his novel, Go Tell It
on the Mountain. Drawing on previous sky dollarship materials held

(25:01):
at archives such as Yale University's Baldwin Collection and decades
of interviews with Baldwin and his friends and confidants, Bogg's
book is the first major biography of the writer to
focus on his most intimate male relationships, both romantic and platonic.
Boggs shows, for instance, how Happersberger, whom Baldwin met a

(25:23):
year after moving to Paris and later called the love
of his life, gave the young writer the sense of
connection and rootedness he needed to write during a time
of tremendous uncertainty, having recently left behind his life in
New York. Boggs also writes about how Beaufort Delaney, a
black gay painter twenty years baldwin senior, whom the writer

(25:47):
called his spiritual father, helped the young writer, then struggling
with his craft and sexual identity, to see the beauty
of the world around him and to begin to see
it within himself. And the book relays a touching story
about how Delaney gave Baldwin the courage to buy a
one way ticket to Paris by promising to join him there,

(26:10):
though at the time neither of them was certain it
would happen. Previous books about Baldwin treated his relationships with men,
whether lovers or friends, as a side note, or ignored
them almost entirely by focusing on these men. Other examples
include Joran Kazakh, a French artist and sometimes lover, and

(26:33):
Engen Cizar, a Turkish actor and creative collaborator. Boggs traces
the relationships that shaped Baldwin's life and art, which in
turn has had such an indelible impact on the literary
and political landscape of the twentieth century. In Bog's hands,
Baldwin's life story feels complete. Finally, asked Smithsonian from Monica Cartwright,

(26:58):
North Wales, Pennsylvania, how does a bison carry the weight
of its large hump? The answer is from Olivia Cosby,
Great Plains Science programm Ecologist, National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute.
As you might expect, a bison's iconic hump places extra
weight over its forelimbs. However, rather than hindering its movement,

(27:20):
this feature is actually an adaptation that enhances its ability
to survive in a diverse range of North American habitats.
The hump is made of powerful muscles supported by elongated
thoracic vertebrae, and this front heavy structure makes it easier
to push through obstacles and dig through heavy snow, which

(27:40):
can be critical to foraging during winter months. This concludes
readings from the Smithsonian magazine for to day. Your reader
has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening, and have
a great day.