The Jackfruit

A couple of days ago I posted a picture of a strange mystery fruit that I encountered in a large crate on the street in Chinatown. Each fruit was the size of a watermelon, a sickly yellow colour, and covered in soft spines like a weathered pinecone. This fruit, I discovered, is the Jackfruit—and I discovered this immediately because there was a sign directly above the crate of fruit labelling them as such.

Even though I saw this fruit in real life and subsequently read about 1/10th of the Wikipedia article on it, I have a hard time believing it is a real thing. First of all, it’s called a “Jackfruit,” which is just about the worst name for a fruit. Second of all, why is it so big and why is it covered in those weird spines? And thirdly, and most importantly, why, if it is the size of a watermelon, does it grow on a tree and not on a vine? Because this giant, monstrous fruit—that can weigh up to eighty pounds—grows on a tree, making it the largest and heaviest fruit that grows on a tree. How is this even practical in terms of spreading seed? Doesn’t all the fruit just fall off from the tree in one big heap (because the fruit can weight up to eighty pounds each) and then rot in a pile? I guess a lot of seeds are spread by animals, but what kind of animal—and this includes you, humans—would ever approach this monstrous fruit that kind of resembles an enormous, poisonous caterpillar and think, “Yes, I am going to eat this fruit. And then I am going to do it a favour by dispersing its seed throughout the land”?

At first I was going to write a comment like, “$2/lb!? Buying one of these fruits would
cost like $40!” as if that was a crazy exaggeration. But these fruits weight 80 pounds, so…

On the inside, the flesh looks like the horrific offspring of a rotten watermelon mating with an oversized pineapple. Apparently it tastes like a cross between an apple, a pineapple, a mango, and a banana—which sounds delicious, but unfortunately I will never receive any confirmation of this because I will never eat that putrid, rotting flesh. Also, it seems like the flesh comes out in weird clove-like clusters that resemble either garlic, cashews, or wisdom teeth.

This fruit is the worst and I hate it.

It tastes like an apple, banana, pineapple, and mango in one
But looks like a watermelon coated in hardened corn niblets
And it weighs anywhere between eighty pounds and a tonne:
It’s impossible to imagine that eating this fruit could be deliberate.