The fruits of this life...

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Hello Fruit Nuts! Can you share something of your unique heritage, traditions and culture here? I'm of a mindset that the Earth was once way different to what it is now. We know that the spread of humanity, with its wars and industry, has pretty much trashed the joint over the limited span of recorded history. Just since Roman times, over half the world's forest cover has been wiped out. Goodness only knows how much longer the rest of it, including the oceans, will last. But what I'm talking about here goes beyond all that - beyond the limits of accepted paleontology and archeology. I'm talking about two things here - the world before the Great Flood, and what we've got now. There's just a little bit of speculation on my part here. It seems on the one hand that the human palate has the capacity to appreciate an enormous variety of flavors and textures, a veritable galaxy of them in fact. Yet on the other hand, our internal makeup seems to be tailored specifically to use of fruit as our main source of nutrition. It's not that we CAN'T eat other things beside fruit and still survive, it's just that our bodies are ravaged progressively by degenerative diseases and our lifespans commensurately shortened in proportion to our departure from fruit as our primary food source. And a comparison of the human organs with other animals reveals the closest match with Orangutans - which are what one might call natural Fruitarians, to the extent that they are able. So if we're really meant to eat just fruit, why should our taste buds be equipped to distinguish and enjoy so many more flavors than can be provided just by the fruits that are available to us? I have my suspicions. They were aroused a few years back when I tasted a Black Sapote, which is marketed in Australia as the "Chocolate Pudding Fruit". The crazy thing is - that is EXACTLY what it tasted like, and even the texture was the same. And there's a huge variety of fruits which seem to provide close approximations to other popular foods - Spaghetti Fruit, Sherbet Fruit, you name it, there seems to be a fruit out there which mimics it to some extent. But which is the author, and which is the mimic? I have a pet conviction that, sometime in our history, a long long time ago, in a magical place paleontologists fear to go, the variety of fruits on this Earth was a thousand times more abundant than it is now. An unimaginable kaleidoscope of fruits of all possible sizes, shapes, colors and flavors. You want a Big Mac? There's a fruit that tastes even better! Sweet & sour stir-fried pork? Just bite into the stir-fried fruit (pork variety)! Fish & chips, anyone? Here's the fish & chips fruit... Drooling for egg & curry mutaba? It's all in the fruit! What a place. What a life. What a world. Imagine the garden you could grow with all those fruits in it! But that was in better times, before the Great Flood wiped the Earth clean, and the Human Race had to contend with hardship and scarcity. Just about everyone around the world knows something about the flood - especially those that haven't forgotten what their ancestors told them about it. And mainly thanks to the efforts of humankind, things have been getting worse ever since. The Unicorn died out sometime after the flood, and innumerable species have followed the same path to extinction. Ditto the plants. With all the rainforest slashing going on now, we're wiping out countless plant and animal species before most of us even knew they existed. And if we're not wiping them out, multinational pharmaceutical cartels are trying to hijack them for profit. But that's how we've got to where we are now. What I'd really like to know is this. What fruits do you know about, in your local experience and culture, that the rest of us probably haven't experienced. What sort of plants make them, and what flavors and benefits do they bring? How hard are they to grow, and how are they used? I'd heard about the infamous Durian, but wasn't game to try it when I had the opportunity. But the Durian is just one fruit. I really want to know about all the others - at least, as many as myLot members are willing to tell.