The Man Who Ate Everything (9 page)

I took out a book about saliva from the library and read it with fascination. Did you know that each of us produces three
cups of saliva a day? Saliva contains about six hundred parts of sodium chloride—common table salt—for every million parts of liquid. By my calculations, this is about one-eighth as salty as chicken soup. I hurriedly added the right amount of table salt to distilled water and tasted it. After only a month of work I had managed to create … mildly salty water. Saliva is not an Alpine
spring.

Then what is? Most scientific research about the composition
of drinking water looks for the impurities that can make it harmful or unpleasant—not those that make really fine water taste that way—and bottled-water companies are secretive about which of the natural minerals in their products give them a delicious taste. I had heard that Pepsi-Cola is extremely careful about the composition of the water it uses, but the people in its research lab in Valhalla, New York, were completely lacking in the Pepsi Spirit when I asked them to share their findings. Table salt is not found in very many bottled still waters, but other substances are. I’ve found mineral waters containing gold and silver, platinum and copper, chromium and tin. But I was more interested in the mineral salts that water collects as it trickles and bubbles through the rocks and hollows of the earth. Some of these—calcium, potassium, magnesium, chlorides, and bicarbonates—are also found in saliva. Could it be that saliva minus the table salt equals
an Alpine spring?

I turned to the few articles that have been published in scientific journals. A team of Japanese scientists writing in the
Journal of Fermentation Technology
concluded that calcium and small amounts of potassium are indispensable to the good taste of water, but that magnesium tastes rough and bitter. They also found that the silica picked up by water as it runs through
clay
is more important than other researchers had thought. Another study suggested that water with more than five hundred parts per million of minerals tastes salty, alkaline, earthy, bitter, or brackish. (By conventional definition, mineral water has more than five hundred parts per million.) Volvic and New York City tap contain about a third of this, and they, I found after extensive
tasting, are the most pleasing to my taste. Evian and saliva are near the upper limit of mineral content and acceptability.

These taste judgments were roughly confirmed by a company in Massachusetts called Ionics, which sells water-purification equipment to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Santa Barbara. Once Ionics has completely purified the best available local water, it adds mineral salts to make the water taste fresh and clean and balanced. After working with taste panels, Ionics has decided on 45 parts per million of calcium, 61 of bicarbonates, 45 of chloride, 2 of sulfates, and 1.8 of sodium. I have doubts about the chloride.

Now I was ready to create my own water. I drew up a shopping list, got out the yellow pages, and found that one of the largest chemical supply houses in Manhattan is located a few blocks from my apartment. At its offices, I presented my list and tried to interest the two employees in my spellbinding project. Chemicals come in all degrees of purity, and I specified the “ingestion grade” whenever possible.

Out of the blue, one of them said that I was crazy. I quoted,, from
Hamlet
with Mel Gibson and Glenn Close, “Though this be I
madness, yet there is method in i
t
,” but the chemical people were
apparently fearful of the lawsuits that would follow upon my death from ingesting their ingestion-grade chemicals. I offered to sign a piece of paper guaranteeing that I would not eat anything they sold me. This trick has worked for me in the past, but not this time.

So I promised to test all concoctions only on my puppy. (I don’t have a puppy.) Until then, these two employees had been heavy lidded and lethargic. But the mention of a puppy brought them to life, making them unaccountably but vividly angry. I was about to quote from Horace,
“Ira furor brevis est”
(“Anger is a passing madness”), when they threw me out of their shabby quarters. Threw me out!

From a telephone on the corner I called my wife for moral support, got some, then walked over to my local pharmacist, who was happy to help. We pored over his chemical catalog and
ordered sixteen mineral salts. The first step was to dilute each of these to a few parts per million, the equivalent of a minuscule pinch in a bathtub of distilled water. Lacking that much distilled water and that many bathtubs, I dissolved a half teaspoon of each salt in a quart of water, took a half teaspoon of that solution, and mixed it into a fresh quart of water. Voila, seven parts per million, ready for blending and tasting.

Somewhere among my sixteen bottles, jars, vases, and pitchers of water flows my pristine Alpine spring. When I discover where it is, I will let you know. Until then, some bottled waters come extremely close: Naya, Volvic, Connoisseur, Bourassa, Quibell, Fiuggi, Lora, Poland Spring, St. Michel, St. Jean, and
Clairval.

One Star for Water

Sometimes Los Angeles reminds me of Arrakis, the planet known as Dune. One restaurant puts a note at the bottom of the menu announcing that its water is treated by the Aqua West Filtration System. I am not a connoisseur of California filtration systems. But if this becomes a trend, the choice of water-treatment device should definitely be a factor in every restaurant review.

May 1991

Ripe fruit wants to be eaten. It has no other function, makes no other contribution. It does not produce sugar to nourish the rest of the plant, as the leaves do. It does not search for water and collect minerals like the roots or distribute nutrients like the stem. A fruit’s only purpose is to seduce animals like you and me into becoming cheerful dupes in its secret reproductive agenda.

The dream of every plant is to propagate its own genes and species. For most, this means spreading their seeds far from the mother tree or bush so that the offspring will not compete with its parents for water, breathing space, and sunlight. Every seed has its own means of transportation, papery wings or balls of fluff that ride the wind, or burs that hook onto your jeans or fur. Fruits have another way. As spring draws into summer, they become plump and juicy and brilliantly colored, sweet and perfumed and irresistible.

At least that is what nature had in mind. Yet last summer I hardly dared to eat a
Prunus persica,
and this year’s portents are even worse; I doubt that travelers would have brought today’s supermarket peaches from China to Persia to Europe in the first place. Peaches and melons and pineapples—most fruit, in fact— do not get any sweeter or more flavorful after they are picked from the tree, vine, bramble, or bush (though they may improve in texture or color). Yet most of American agriculture, even some
farmers at my local green market, seem determined to harvest fruit earlier and greener every year. And there are no laws ensuring that those little “Vine Ripened” stickers on the most expensive produce at your store mean anything at all. The penalty for pasting a sticker on a hard, tasteless piece of fruit should be the same as the penalty for printing counterfeit ten-dollar bills.

Eternal vigilance is the price of ripeness. Make it a habit to return unripe fruit. Throw a scene if need be. Your message may reach the wholesaler or the grower. For the smallest fruit, here’s a handy tip: When nobody is looking, remove a berry from its little basket and conceal it in your palm. With your other hand, quickly wheel your shopping cart into a dark corner of, say, the cheese department and pop the berry into your mouth. Chew. Appraise its texture, sweetness, aromatic flavor compounds, and seediness. Then decide whether to invest in an entire basket. But first buy some cheese. You can never have enough good ripe cheese.

This grazing technique is unwieldy with the larger melons. For honeydews and most of your other summer fruit favorites, we must return to basics. Here are answers to the twenty most commonly asked questions about fruit and ripeness:

1. What is the difference between a fruit and a vegetable?

The answer has nothing to do with what kind of plant it came from, and everything to do with what
part
of the plant it was. A vegetable is a plant we raise for food. Anatomically, every vegetable is composed of roots, stems, stalks, branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit. Yes, nearly every vegetable has a fruit. So asking whether the tomato is a fruit or a vegetable is as silly as asking whether that large gray wrinkled tube over there is a trunk or an elephant. A fruit is the ovary of a plant—the seeds and the tissue surrounding them. Not only is a tomato the fruit of the tomato
p
lant, but a green or purple pepper, filled as it is with seeds, is the fruit of the pepper plant. And the same goes for green beans, egg-Plant, zucchini, avocado, and pea pods—all fruits we eat during the savory part of the meal. When a fruit is juicy and high in
sugar, we tend to save it for dessert, and then we call it a fruit, even when it is anatomically a stem, like rhubarb.

Most edible plants have only one part we especially like—and for which the plant has been bred, some for 1,000 or more years. When we eat beets, turnips, carrots, celeriac, and salsify, we con
c
entrate on the roots, underground storage depots for starch and sugar, though we also eat celery branches, and some of us eat beet greens. Zucchini and cucumbers are fruits; we may eat their flowers, stuffed or not, baked or fried, but never their roots or leaves. When we are in the mood for eating leaves, we turn to spinach, cabbage, lettuce, sorrel, and all the herbs. Asparagus is a stalk or shoot. Beans and peas in
a pod are seeds; when they are
immature and their pods or shells are green and edible, they are fruits. We eat pea shoots but not bean shoots. Most of us ignore the potato flower and the artichoke stem. Potatoes, we need no reminding, are not roots. They are tubers—the swollen, fleshy, starchy subterranean section of the stem between the roots and the outside world.

2. Then what is a fruit?

A fruit is an ovary we eat for dessert. Peaches, apricots, nectarines, plums, and cherries are pretty simple ovaries—one seed surrounded by luscious flesh (the enlarged ovary wall) and wrapped in vividly colored skin. Incidentally, a nectarine is not a cross between a peach and a plum but a fuzzless variety of peach with an ancient pedigree.

3. What about raspberries?

Raspberries are more complicated. They are not true berries like currants and grapes. Each little segment is an entire stone fruit all in itself; a raspberry is made up of many ovaries from the same flower joined together. The strawberry wears its ovaries on the outside.

4. Do you mean that a strawberry is a fig turned inside out?

Just so. And a pineapple is a collection of berries all fused together. Watermelons are placental tissue riddled with seeds, a discovery that has somehow made watermelon less appealing to
me
.

5.
What is the number one poem ever written about plums?
Experts differ, but my favorite is “This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams:

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

6. Isn’t ripening a chaotic, degenerative breakdown of the flesh and skin of a fruit as it plunges toward the death and decay that await us all?

Where did you get that idea? Ripening is a tightly structured, programmed series of changes that a fruit undergoes as it prepares to seduce every gastronomically aware animal in the neighborhood. Most fruit tastes best when it is ripest, which is often just when its seeds are ready to germinate.

7. Isn’t that a teleological explanation bordering on the religious?

So?

8. When does ripening begin?

Ripening can
begin
only when a fruit has reached its physical maturity—
its full size and intended shape.
Fruit picked earlier will never ripen. And even fruit picked when it has reached physical maturity will undergo only some of the changes that we mean by “ripening.”

9. How many changes are there?

Twelve, but I’ll mention only a few.

Ethylene, a simple hydrocarbon gas, is a fruit’s own internal ripening hormone. In ways yet undiscovered, it triggers and coordinates most of the other changes as the fruit sweetens, brightens, becomes juicy and aromatic, grows less acidic and less astringent, exudes a protective wax to slow the loss of water when it finally plops from the tree and is cut off from fresh supplies.

Most fruits soften when they synthesize an enzyme called polygalacturonase, which attacks the pectin cement holding their own cells rigidly in place. The cells slide around, which makes the fruit soft, and spill out their contents, which makes the fruit juicy. Apples lack polygalacturonase, which is why they remain crisp until they degenerate and decay—the stage beyond ripeness when a fruit becomes subject to microbial attack and rot.