← Misc · 2022 – 2026

Fruit Hunting

Tropical fruit from three Hawaiʻi trips, strawberries from every kind of source, and a few durians.

This post collects the fruit. It turns up in a lot of our photos: from markets and farms on trips, and from a farm stand, the supermarket and the Asian supermarket at home. Most of these moments already appear in the trip posts, one photo at a time. Here they are together, with a few that never made it into any post.

The photos come from both of our phones. My wife's camera roll has most of the strawberries; mine has most of the durian. Where she found something on her own, I say so; "we" means we were both there.

Hawaiʻi, three times

Hawaiʻi is the easiest place to go fruit hunting that we have been to. The fruit turns up at markets, on tables and benches, and on the trees along the way.

Big Island, September 2025

The first trip was mine, without my wife. On September 12, 2025, I drove across the island to Hilo and its farmers market, a long covered hall with a mural of sliced fruit along the back wall and stalls under blue umbrellas. There were piles of papaya, bananas, pineapples, avocados, dragon fruit and rambutan, the red, hairy relative of the lychee. I bought far more than two days could use. Lunch, a few blocks away, came with a drink served in a hollowed-out pineapple. The full day is in Fishponds, a Crater and the Milky Way.

Later that afternoon, back on the Kohala Coast at the Mauna Lani, the snack was a whole fresh durian, cracked open on the balcony table at 4 pm. With durian's smell, outdoors is the right place for it.

Big Island, September 2026

A year later I was back, this time with my wife, and on the second day we crossed the island to Hilo again. By 12:32 on September 8, 2026, the haul was lined up along a bench on the bayfront near the Moʻoheau Bandstand: dragon fruit, a pineapple, mangoes, papaya, passion fruit, an avocado, two cacao pods, and a large green pear-shaped thing we took for a fruit. It turned out to be a kind of squash. Two minutes later one of the cacao pods was split open. Inside, the beans sit in a cluster wrapped in white pulp, which is sweet and is what you eat; the beans themselves are what becomes chocolate.

In the next few minutes a pink guava and a papaya were opened too. Then came the mangoes, eaten on the bench with the bay behind, and the pineapple after them.

The next afternoon, at a coffee farm in Holualoa above Kona, the fruit was still on the plants. Coffee is a fruit before it is a bean: the branches were hung with cherries in every stage, green, yellow and red, and a wooden box by the pulper was full of ripe red ones.

On the same farm a banana plant had a bunch of small green bananas, with the purple flower still hanging below it. The bananas point up toward the leaves, not down.

On Oʻahu later that week, the island tour made a brief stop at the Dole Plantation, in the pineapple country in the middle of the island. The whole trip is in the Hawaiʻi 2026 post.

Kauaʻi, April 2026

On Kauaʻi in April 2026 the fruit came in a bowl first. On April 24, at the Hanalei Valley lookout, a small stand called Hanalei Organic sold açaí bowls topped with banana, figs and berries, with the green valley below the counter. That afternoon we went east to Kīlauea, and by 1:28 a small haul of fruit was laid out on a wooden table: a big papaya, mottled green and orange, a small green citrus, two yellow fruits, a brown one, and a hand of small green bananas, short and fat, fanned out like a crown. That trip is in the Kauaʻi post.

Strawberries

Strawberries come from everywhere: from supermarkets in plastic clamshells, from a farm stand in Irvine, and for one spring from a pot at home. The most unusual ones were white.

White strawberries in Portland, Maine

In January 2025 I flew to Boston, where my wife had already been for a week, to bring our dog Wangcai home, and on the Saturday we drove up to Portland, Maine. That evening at the hotel there was a clamshell of white strawberries, sold as "Berry de Blanc", and they were photographed from every angle. White strawberries are not unripe red ones. They are varieties bred to stay pale, and you can tell they are ripe from the faint blush on the skin and the red of the seeds. One berry, shaped like a molar, got a photo session of its own after midnight.

There was also a box of ordinary red strawberries, with a few of the white ones tucked under it. The rest of that weekend is in Bringing Wangcai Home.

At the farm stand

On April 4, 2025, we stopped at the strawberry stand at Tanaka Farms in Irvine. Spring is strawberry season in Orange County, and the stand had rows of open cardboard baskets on a wooden table, each filled with large berries standing on end.

From the supermarket

The rest come from the supermarket. In May 2025 my wife's photo of a box of Driscoll's "Sweetest Batch" at home shows the darkest strawberries in this post, almost burgundy.

Grown at home

And one spring we had our own. In March 2024, when we lived in Los Angeles, there was a strawberry plant in a black nursery pot at home, with fresh green leaves. By April 13 it was in a bigger grey pot and had one small red strawberry, hanging over the soil. It is the only one in the photos.

Other berries, and grapes

The other berries mostly arrived on top of something. In Cancún in July 2022, breakfast was a bowl of melon, pineapple, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries on granola. The açaí bowls in Hawaiʻi came with berries on top as well.

Grapes count as berries too, botanically. We were in Temecula wine country on April 22, 2023, too early in the season for any grapes. What the vines had instead, in my wife's photo at 1:26, were the tiny green flower clusters that become the bunches by late summer.

The oranges at The Huntington in San Marino were further along. On March 12, 2023, we walked past citrus trees there with the branches full of small orange fruit.

Durian, and other rare finds

In Los Angeles, the Asian supermarkets of the San Gabriel Valley carry fruit that is hard to find elsewhere. On the morning of March 16, 2023, we spent a while in the produce section of SF Supermarket in San Gabriel. One table was nothing but cherimoya from Australia, each one on its own yellow foam tray, with red dragon fruit at the end. Another was green mangoes, each wrapped in a white foam net, next to a crate of small green jujubes.

The durians were in a freezer case, whole, each in a yellow mesh bag, under a sign for frozen durian from Vietnam.

A year later, on March 24, 2024, two whole durians in yellow nets were at home, and by five o'clock one of them was open on the kitchen counter, its shell split along a seam to show the pale yellow flesh inside.

The most recent one was on September 25, 2026, at home, a little after eleven at night: a durian split into two halves on the counter, with the yellow pods still sitting in the white shell. With the Big Island one in 2025, that makes four durians in this post, not counting the freezer case.

The furthest of the rare finds came from Sanya, the city at the southern tip of Hainan, China's tropical island, during our trip to China in February 2023. On the evening of February 5 there was a bag of sugar apples: knobbly, pale green fruit made of rounded segments, a relative of the cherimoya. The rest of that trip is in the China 2023 post.

That is the collection so far: markets, benches and farms on trips, and at home the supermarket, a farm stand in strawberry season, and once a pot of our own.

Some photos in this post are my wife's.