Food&drink The economics of tasteless cacti

The dragonfruit is an exquisitely beautiful piece of flora. Its exterior looks like an alien spaceship. Inside its Pantone pink exterior, adorned with lush green petals, is a freckled, delicate white flesh. If you’re a believer in intelligent design, and you’re looking for an argument to support your position, consider the appearance of the dragonfruit.

And this is why the dragonfruit is the very embodiment of disappointment. Because under its riotous exterior lies a flesh that tastes like nothing. Scratch that – it tastes worse than nothing. A total absence of flavour would be better than its insipid blandness. It tastes like a faintly remembered kiwi. It tastes like a fruit that gave up on life. And yet, despite this profound mediocrity, dragonfruit is everywhere. Well, not everywhere – but it remains much more widely available than other, tastier niche fruits, like soursop or cloudberry. You can find it at many fine fruit stands, right next to food you’d actually want to eat.

Go Google “dragonfruit health,” and after 10 minutes of uncritical reading, you’d be convinced that dragonfruits are the cure for everything. That they’ll remove all of the enormous drawbacks of having a body. You’ll find that they’re touted as a miraculous source of dietary fibre. (They have about the same amount as an apple does.) You’ll be told that their abundance of Vitamin C helps your body flush toxins and heavy metals. (There is no evidence of this, and the idea that the human body must be flushed of nonspecific toxins is nonsense.) Moreover, according to lifehack.org, dragonfruits can soothe sunburned skin if rubbed upon it. (Their performance is not weighed against regular moisturizer.)

Also frequently mentioned is the abundance of antioxidants, which are supposedly great for avoiding cancer. You’ve probably heard of antioxidants, and vaguely absorbed their alleged connotation with healthy living. (Although I dare you to tell me what they are without Googling them.) However, a recent study published in Nature indicated that antioxidants made cancer worse in mice. That’s right – mice fed a diet high in antioxidants showed an increase in what’s called distant metastasis. That’s where tumours are formed in far-flung areas of the body. Although this is a small amount of data, it has worrying implications given the popularity of antioxidant supplements.

This is a really common pattern in the development of nutritional wisdom: a dietetic belief, touted as fact, is later turned on its head. Carbs were supposed to be great, now they’re supposed to be terrible. Coconut oil was supposed to be a panacea, and now data is showing that it’s just another kind of fat. Dragonfruit, basically, is sold to us by health blogs based on unproven hypotheses. If that’s not enough for you, there’s also Skyy Dragonfruit vodka. Unfortunately, it’s not available at the LCBO, so you’d have to get it stateside. I’ve sampled it. It’s gross. But not quite as gross as Palm Bay Dragonfruit Watermelon Breeze, 5 per cent ABV, whose sickening sweetness is adorned with a vague tropical aftertaste. As far as I can tell, these products exist just because dragonfruit exists. It’s another fruit, so we’ve got to make it into something. And it’s got “dragon” in the name, which is exciting, I guess.

Probably the pinnacle of all this is Pearl Butter, a pink spread made of dragonfruit, coconut flesh and, yes, pearls. “Enzymatically activated pearls,” to be more specific. Customers who prefer deactivated pearls are out of luck. The company which produces it claims that it’ll give you “the ultimate lit-from-within glow.” My suspicion is that if it genuinely lends its aficionados a spectacular luminescence, I would’ve heard about that already. Nevertheless, it sure is pretty-looking, like the dragonfruit itself. It would look very fetching on some pumpernickel toast. It could be the prop you need to take your Instagram game to the next level. Now, it may sound like I’m calling for the abolition of dragonfruit. Quite the opposite. You should buy as many dragonfruit as possible. Whether you eat them, I don’t care. Play catch with them, paint portraits on their pink sides – whatever. Just keep buying this stupid fruit. Why do I say that? Because I don’t want the people of Vietnam to starve.

Dragonfruit is big, big business in Vietnam. According to figures taken from Vietnam Breaking News, the country exported $2.46 billion worth of fruit on 2016, much of it dragonfruit. And that number is growing every year. This is all part of an incredible reduction in Vietnamese poverty. According to a World Bank report, Vietnam’s poverty rate fell from 60 per cent in the early 1990s to 20 per cent in 2010. It’s an economic miracle: the increasing prosperity of Vietnam is partially based on nonsense-food being marketed to idiots.

The reality of our badlymade world is that we North Americans do our part for humanity by wasting our money on tasteless cacti that offer no redeeming qualities other than the ones we’ll fictionalize to justify their existence. The dragonfruit contains all of capitalism’s awesome power and potential stupidity.