Franken-fruit! It’s Alive! And Tastes Great!

According to just about everybody, we’re supposed to eat daily servings of fruits and vegetables in order to stay healthy and live to be 114 years old. That good advice that has been around as long as fruits and vegetables have been around. But curious farmer types, being what they are, aren’t satisfied with your common variety of apple, tomato or carrot. Instead, a bunch of inventive cross pollinating inventors are ushering us into a brave new world of purple potatoes, white asparagus and tomatoes the size of softballs. They’re also finding ways to create stronger yielding crops which can feed more people around the world. Franken-fruit or just good eats? You make the call.

The basic idea is to mix and match the seeds and pollination process to see what can be grown. Instead of leaving it to the birds and the bees, agriculture scientists are stepping in to provide a “helping hand.” It’s a painstaking process that requires a lot of sitting around watching plants grow. Leading the charge is the Hazera Genetics company based out of Israel. One of their first successes was the hybrid induced yellow cherry tomato. At first it was thought that consumers might be turned off by the color but instead they took a shine to this new veggie oddity. Now seeds for this variety sell for around $160,000 a pound. Yes, that’s $160,000 for tomato seeds. They’re now working on lemon scented tomatoes. Not sure why but sounds pretty interesting.

We can sit back and wait for evolution to solve some of food issues but who has a million years to spend waiting? Japanese farmers wrestled with that age old question of “how to fit a watermelon into a refrigerator?” and came up with a novel approach in melon storage: the square watermelon. This isn’t so much as hybrid development as it is forced growing. In this case, a typical watermelon is grown in a plastic cube. The result is a nice square watermelon that can easily slide onto any fridge self. One little drawback: these watermelons sell for around 75 bucks a piece. Okay, maybe that’s a big drawback for a fruit that’s going to end up sliced and diced anyway. And if you go crazy with the melon baller it kind of defeats the purpose of having a square.

Over the years there have been some happy accidents that nobody was planning which turned out to be pretty tasty. The Cherimoya is a fruit first concocted by accidental cross pollination in Jamaica. The taste is described as a cross between a banana and a pineapple with a dash of mango and papaya thrown in for good measure. That’s some sweet accident.

Another interesting hybrid is the Uniq Fruit. This is a citrus hybrid combining the flavors of a grapefruit, a tangerine and an orange. Tastes good in the inside but looks awful on the outside. That’s why the original name of this hybrid was Ugli Fruit. Gee, who would have thought that food called “ugli” wouldn’t catch on?

There are plenty of other weird, exotic and just downright crazy looking fruits and veggies. Some the result of genetic engineering and some mere happy natural creations. Either way, hybrid fruits are here to stay. What have you tried? And more importantly, what would you like to see blended together?

— Meyer (who is off to the Farmer’s Market!)