The only thing of interest that I learned in the comments of this entry is that SM comment leaver DesiDancer likes food. Well so do I. The Village Voice reports on a fruit that I am ashamed to admit I have never tried. It is the “Queen of fruits,” the Mangosteen:
Last month, after a long discussion with his father, my friend gave up on his latest business idea: Importing mangosteens into America. The plan was to petition the government, build a greenhouse, and then get rich off of this rare South Asian fruit, which apparently tastes like ice cream and causes perfectly normal people to burst into tears. R.W. Apple wrote in The New York Times: “I can no more describe mangosteens than explain why I love my wife and children.”
Good God. What hole have I been living in? I must have this fruit, I simply must.
Recently, I went to Chinatown to find this dark, purple treat, but the few people who had heard of it told me to stop looking. Mangosteen—widely considered the “queen of all fruit”—carries too many flies to be permitted in the U.S. Because durian, the so-called “king,” was hanging from nearly every fruit stand on East Broadway, I bought one instead. It was $8 and about the size of my head—plus spikes. While mangosteens are said to chill the body, durians are 900-calories a piece and so creamy that last year when a man in Thailand ate four in a row, he passed out and died. The Thai Ministry of Public Health then issued a warning against excessive durian consumption.
Durian looks totally freakish to me. It’s not surprising that it has been described as such:
We cracked open the skin with a steak knife. Inside there were five red seeds, surrounded by doughy goo. I thought it resembled a dead chicken, but my friends had other ideas: “porcelain fetus,” “alien baby,” “dinosaur egg,” “anonymous shit on sidewalk.” The pulp tasted burnt, warm and sweet, like onion custard, and got more syrupy the closer it was to the seeds. One friend loved it: “Durian is sublime,” she wrote me in an email later that night, “I want to inflict it on people.”
Hmmmm. Mmmmmm. Getting back to mangosteens:
The outer shell of the fruit is rather hard, typically 4-6 cm in diameter, resembling a spherical, black cartoon bomb. Cutting through the shell, one finds a very pale, fleshy fruit 3-5 cm in diameter. Depending on the size and ripeness, there may or may not be pits in the segments of the fruit.
Dammit! I always take my lunch to school in a plastic container within my backpack. No mangosteens for me. 
