From Iron Wills, Stone Fruit

By Warren Rojas

“The Perfect Fruit: Good Breeding, Bad Seeds and the Hunt for the Elusive Pluot.” Chip Brantley. Bloomsbury, 240 pgs., $25.

“I felt compelled to know everything about pluots. They were my Thing,” author Chip Brantley raves in “The Perfect Fruit”—his eye-opening account of commercial fruit breeding.

Even as the syrupy-sweet juices drenched his chin, Brantley’s mind raced to catalog the flavors and wonderment the manmade produce had loosed with just a single bite.

Along the way, Brantley samples designer fruits with pluot inventor Floyd Zaiger (“We were raising our expectations of what plums could be in a way that we wouldn’t be able to satisfy again, and this thought was breaking my sugar-ringed, pit-burned, stem-cracked heart”) and traces stone fruit migration from Asia to our shores (Virginians George Washington, George Mason and Thomas Jefferson all raised plums on their respective estates).

Although wonky in parts, Brantley manages to pepper his narrative with enough color commentary (“‘Disease’ is the best word to describe what causes someone to become a private fruit breeder”) and keen insight (“They weren’t altered using any system more sophisticated than the ones bees had used for as long as bees had been around,” he argues to dispel any genetically-modified food fears) to keep the story moving for the non-fruit barons among us.

Meanwhile, Brantley says he plans to delve into the “geopolitics of pistachios” for his next book. Is this guy a food nut or what?

(October 2009)