Exotic Teas and Fruit

LAT1963

What was your morning beverage? Is there an interesting story associated with it, either its ingredients and history, or a personal association you have between that beverage and an event in your life?

This morning's tea was "King of Fruits", a Thai-sourced green tea scented with bits of freeze-dried Durian fruit, distributed by the Japanese tea company Lupicia.

Durian fruit is renowned in Asia for its sweet taste and for the nauseating stench of it's whole, fresh, ripened form. It is a spiky relative of Jackfruit (which can often be found in the US in canned form, like peaches). The whole Durian is so stinky that it is illegal to bring through many international airports and seaports, and illegal to import fresh Durian to the US. You can only find it dried, canned, frozen, or otherwise preserved in some way.

If you have watched any Jackie Chan movies set in Asia, he often falls into a bin of football-sized spiky mystery fruits; those are Durian. We westerners get the joke because we can see the spikes; Asian audiences get the added joke of knowing the stink.

Why does a delightfully sweet fruit evolve to be huge, hard-to-open, and stink to high heaven? Because the Durian co-evolved with Asian elephants as its seed dispersers. Elephants have been known to walk 50 miles following the scent of a Durian tree in fruit, in order to feast on it's elephantine morsels-of-joy. The seeds are adapted to pass through the elephant's gut undigested, this finding the ground in a mound of elephant poop--the seed's own personal soil-amending compost heap. Durians appear to be one of the Asian elephant's (wild or captive) favorite treats.

Because of the decimation of elephants in parts of Asia, the future of the Durian tree in the wild is uncertain.

sljohnson1207

I like Twining's Camomile, Honey, and Vanilla flavor. It's special to me because I can't drink black teas, green teas, teas with citrus, etc. due to a medical condition and extremely limited diet due to that medical condition. That is why it is so very special to me.

This one tastes and smells good. It's naturally sweet, so I don't have to add sugar or honey to it.