I Spent 10 Years Trying To Eat Every Fruit In The World - Weird Fruit Explorer

My name is Jared Rydelic and today is a very special day. About 10 years ago, I decided to do something impossible. Try to find, taste, and review every fruit in the world. This is a project that has taken me to over 30 countries. It has taken me into markets, gardens, forests, jungles, into people's homes. I have met incredibly generous and kind people and I have learned so much. Today, to mark the 10th anniversary of this project and what just happens to be my 700th episode, I think it's only appropriate to celebrate. Today, I'm going to tell you about how it all started. We're going to look back at some of my favorite moments and I will also share with you some of the secrets that I've learned over the past decade of trying to find every fruit in the world. And what better way to do this than by going back to where it all started. Greetings everybody from Kuala Lumpur. You can see the two corn cobs behind me. Right now, I'm at my favorite market and it's a little bit different than how I remember it. They took down one of the buildings for being unsafe, but still quite a lot of familiar sights around. So the reason why I came here 10 years ago was as an entertainer. My day job is that I'm a contortionist and sideshow performer. So I was brought to the resort about an hour or so north of Kuala Lumpur called Genting Highlands. Genting Highlands is the largest hotel in the world. I think it still is. At the time, they had kind of like an international theme going on. So they had a lot of entertainment, but from different countries. So they brought people in from Korea, Japan, France, all over the place. People came in to do shows and I came as somebody from the USA. I'm going to go from this side of the stage to the other side of the stage. All in only 10 seconds. Genting kept me very, very busy. I was doing four shows a day, six days a week for three months, giving me only one day off. And every day off that I had, I would come down to see the different markets here in Kuala Lumpur, including the one that I'm at right now, which is the Chow Kit market. Because I was keeping so busy, I decided to do something in order to keep track, like have a travel diary. So I decided to keep a vlog. So this vlog was not initially about fruit, it was about just travel. It was about my trip over, the people I was meeting, the food I was eating, all the activities, the things I was doing. After making a few different vlogs, eventually I made a video about some of the fruit that I was finding here. This is a tamarillo. I do not think this is something that really grows here. Wow, this is really strange. It's like if you took guava and tomato and mixed it. I actually kind of like it. It's good. I'm not sure if I can eat the skin, so I'm going to do it anyway. Don't eat the skin. All right, that's it. Tamarillos, hooray. One more fruit down in my fruit mission. So noisy. Over the past decade of reviewing fruit, I have learned so much. One of the biggest things I've learned is just how many times I can be surprised. Like every single time I go out trying to find fruit, I learn something. I learn about fruit that looks really weird, like this, a cannonball tree, cannonball shaped fruits. You got it. Wow. See the inside? Yeah. I've been surprised by just like how fruits are used. This, everybody, is a soapberry. It is used to make soap. How fruits smell and my favorite is just how fruit tastes. I've eaten fruit that tastes delicious. I've had fruit that tastes like pickles, peanut butter, ice cream, sour cream, cheese. I've also been surprised by how bad a fruit can taste to me, which is also kind of fun in its own way. This one, for example, tastes kind of like a burning tire, complete with actually burning me. Maybe this one isn't actually edible. I've had ones that tasted kind of like potting soil, like wood and sticks. Some that were just like so sour, you can hardly like put it in your mouth. Ones that are like so spicy that you can hardly touch and probably the most infamous out of all the ones that I've had, one that tastes like vomit. All right, so we have the Noni fruit, also known as cheese fruit. I think it looks like a polyp. You first. It's like somebody like ate some cheddar cheese and like vomited on a lemon. No. I don't want to do this. They eat it green here. It's like comparing like a turd with a larger, smellier turd. I'm never doing this again. Never, never, never, never, never. I've had a fascination with fruit as far back as I can remember. When I was little, my mother would always let me pick one treat for myself every time we went to the supermarket. It could be anything at all, except it couldn't be junk food. It was during one of these supermarket explorations that I discovered the tropical fruit section at our local supermarket. Now, I was really young, maybe like six years old, seven years old, but I still have this memory of picking up a Kiwano melon. These are really interesting looking fruits. They're orange and spiky and when you cut them open, they have like this green gel inside with like a frog egg kind of texture. I remember picking this fruit up and like weighing it in my hand and kind of like squeezing it because it didn't seem real. It looked and felt kind of like a toy and I liked toys, so I put it in the shopping cart. When we got home, I tried eating it and I didn't like it, but I also didn't really care. There was something fun about it and the next time we went to the supermarket and my mother told me that I could buy anything, I took home another tropical fruit. Who would have thought that nearly 30 years later, I would be trying a Kiwano melon again, but this time in Kenya. The ones that you get at the supermarket in the U.S. don't really taste like much of anything. They kind of have like a cucumber kind of flavor. This tastes like cucumber still, but it has a sourness to it, like almost if you took like cucumber and lime and mix them together. Eating at restaurants is great, especially if you're eating laksa, but I think it's important that you also try cooking for yourself. So get a hotel or an Airbnb with a kitchen and go out and get ingredients. Go to a supermarket, pick up ingredients, maybe some that you haven't had before, take them back and prepare a meal yourself. This is a lot of fun. It's often some of the most memorable meals that I have and it also helps connect you with the place that you're going to because that's how people typically eat their food. They don't eat out at restaurants all the time in most places. And beyond that, this will allow you to take ingredients like fruit that you maybe cannot eat out of hand, that you can't eat raw, and you can prepare it. You can get to see what it's like when you do it properly. The guayote has the nickname galanita, which means little hen. It's like a little hen that has had its head cut off. That's kind of what I see when I look at it. And what's interesting with this is that this really absorbs that water. I'm going to add fruit. These things are now full of the sugar solution. See how I did? It's like if you made a sponge out of an apple. So you bite into it and it's soft, but at the same time it resists and crisps as you eat it. The fascination that I had with fruit stayed with me as I got older. I never really thought much about it or talked to anyone about it. Trying fruit that I didn't know was just something that I did. I did it as a kid, as a teenager, and then when I was in my early 20s, that's when things got a little bit more interesting, because that is when I started traveling. In 2008, I lost my job in the recession. And when that happened, I did what anyone would do. I decided to become a contortionist. Yeah, I had no natural flexibility, but I managed to learn quite a bit on my own. Eventually though, I hit a wall. I knew that in order to get further with my flexibility, I would have to take proper contortion classes. So I went to a circus school in China. This place was essentially a boot camp for art. I trained for hours a day, and it was really, really hard work. But every week I had a couple days off to recover, and I made the most of those days. I went sightseeing everywhere. I wandered around this incredible city of Beijing. I would purposefully get lost and try to find my way back. And naturally, I was also looking for fruit. I found snake fruit, which looks like it's covered with snake skin, and when you peel it, the texture of the fruit on the inside is like garlic, but it has the flavor of a funky pineapple. I tried rose apple. This is a light and crispy fruit with a mild but refreshing floral taste. I tried Atomoya. This had the flavor of coconut pudding, pineapple, and banana. After training, I returned back to the United States, having discovered a few new fruits, a few new flexibility techniques, and most importantly, I learned something about myself. I like to travel. I like to travel a lot, and I wanted to travel more. One of the most important things that I've learned from traveling is, and this is very important, wherever you go, carry catries. The following year, I continued my flexibility training in India by learning Kalaripayattu. This is an ancient martial art that is kind of like if you were to mix kung fu with yoga. Now, if that sounds like a good idea to you, let me just warn you, it was grueling, and this is what I had to wear. Yeah, that's it. If it still sounds like a good idea to you, then yes, I would recommend it. Taking these classes was also an excuse to explore India. India was amazing. Between all the sightseeing, of course, I did find more fruit. Chiku tastes like brown sugar, bear fruit was a little bit like a mild apple, and soursop was delicious, but it made me sicker than I had ever been in my entire life. On the day before the day I left India, I went to a little market. Walking through was all the same apples and bananas and stuff like that until I like passed the butcher section, so people just like killing chickens and there's all that fun stuff going on. I go past that, and the area is like mostly closed down, but there's one woman, like an old lady, sitting behind a stump, and on this stump is a single soursop. That's all she had, so I was like super excited. I bought it for about 50 rupees, which is about a dollar, and I ate it, and the next day I had horrible food poisoning, and it carried over into my trip back. Try going through Indian security when you are unable to be away from a toilet for more than five minutes. I was stopped for a variety of reasons, you know, look at my passport, have me sign a book, have my bag scanned, go to the ticket counter, go through the metal detector, like I was stopped 13 times. I counted. It was such an awful, awful, awful experience, and you know, when I had soursop the first time, I loved it. Since then, I don't like these anymore. Another thing that I learned is that you should always, always look for little old ladies. Little old ladies, I think maybe because they'll have things that they remember from their childhood that maybe is not as popular as it used to be, they will sometimes have really good stuff, and the thing with little old ladies, though, is you can't always find them where you would expect. You gotta keep an eye out, and it's worth going into parts of markets you normally wouldn't go, because sometimes that's where they set up. They can be a little elusive, those little old ladies, so when you're going through a market, maybe in the fruit and vegetable section, you won't find that little old lady, but you'll find them in like a houseware section, or like an underwear section, or like a butcher section selling fruit. So yeah, keep an eye out for those little old ladies, because they know how it's done. And this is one that I found from a little old lady in the kind of like witchy section of the market, and this might be something that she was selling for that purpose. I don't really know, but she did have like a few interesting fruits for sale, and guajillote is also something that, you know, people do eat. It's not just for, you know, magic purposes. On the inside, it also looks a little bit like a banana. It reminds me a little bit of like sugar cane. It's not quite as sweet as sugar cane, but fairly close. If you want the weird stuff, you gotta find somebody who's been eating this weird stuff since she was a little girl, like in the 20s, okay? Going to China and India stoked the flames of my fascination with fruit, but going to Malaysia had a bucket of gasoline thrown on it. Before long, the vlog that I was keeping became almost entirely fruit reviews, and I wondered, is anyone else making videos like this? So I looked on YouTube, and there were a few videos about fruit, but almost all of them were those dubious videos about like medicinal properties, you know, the kind where it's like poorly edited slideshows made up of stolen photos from the internet with a robot voice that's played over the top, reading a Wikipedia page entry. Benefit your health in many ways. Health benefits of bergamot essential oil 1. Lowers blood pressure bergamot essential oil can help lower blood pressure according to a study. Yeah, those. Since there wasn't a whole lot of original content about fruit, I decided to do it. I gave up the idea of keeping a daily vlog and instead focused purely on fruit with the intention of putting it online. The whole point of doing this was to have fun, keep a video diary of what I was finding, and maybe some of my friends would watch it and laugh. If you look back at some of the earliest episodes, they're pretty rough. I did not expect anyone to actually watch these videos. They're actually called, uh, Santols. That's S-A-N-T-O-L. This tastes kind of like mangosteen, but, um, I would say not as sweet as a mangosteen. And it's not as creamy tasting. It's got more like a gel feel to it. Thrilling. After making a few videos, I started to wonder just how many fruits are there? I had no idea. I'm not a taxonomist. I am a circus freak. So I did what anyone with a question would do in 2012. I looked on Yahoo Answers. Lucky for me, someone had already asked this question, and the number one answer to the question of how many fruits there are in the world was about 1,000. Now, at the time, I thought, wow, that's a lot of fruit, but it's not an impossible number. Maybe, just maybe, if I really try, one day I could review all of the fruit in the world. Of course, that was nowhere near the actual number. I was finding so much fruit in Malaysia without really even trying. So by the time I returned home, it occurred to me that maybe Yahoo Answers was wrong. Shocking, I know. So I did a little bit more research, and it was in the book The Fruit Hunters by Adam Leif Gollner that I found a more accurate number. There are an estimated 240,000 to 500,000 different plant species that bear fruits. Perhaps 70,000 to 80,000 of these species are edible. Oh, no. By the time I figured out that what I was doing was impossible, it was too late. I was in too deep. I wanted to try and find every fruit in the world, and whether or not that was something that was achievable, I didn't care. I was having way too much fun. A lot of the fruits that we know are actually created through hybridization. That is cross-pollination of two or more different fruit trees. Mandarin, he didn't get along with the girls at school. He wanted someone a little more unique in his life, so he came across this lady here, a pomelo. Now, their parents did not agree to their love. Imagine a little guy like this and a big sexy lady like this getting together, going steady. It just wasn't natural. But despite their forbidden love, they got married, they had kids, and their kid was an orange. Now, the orange is a natural hybrid between those two fruits, the pomelo and the mandarin. Something else that I've learned, but think about it. Walk. Walk to get around. If you want to, like, go somewhere, walk there. I mean, unless it's, like, really, really far, or it's going through an area that's dangerous, or, you know, it's, like, nighttime. You know, you think about it. Use common sense. But when given an opportunity, walk. Because as you walk around, you'll see plants everywhere. And sometimes, those plants have fruit growing on them. And sometimes, that fruit won't kill you. But, you know, be careful. We're on the side of the road. You can see the pandanus bowl. Be cool to get the whole thing down and show you what it's like, but I don't think we can get up there. He's gonna knock with a stick. I'm gonna try to catch it. Still fell in the sand. Yeah, but not as much. It looks like a tooth. Like, it just came out of, like, some gigantic, like, monster. So, let's give it a try. I know what that is. This tastes like artificial banana. That's really cool. Very fibrous. The flavor is really, really good. I would make a juice out of this. I'd be very, very happy. Yeah. The best one I've tried so far of all the ones I've tried. You've tried it before? Different kinds, yeah. This is the best I've had. After 700 episodes, I have had roughly 700 different species of edible fruit. Sure, some episodes have more than one species in it. Some of them are repeats. And some of them are not edible. But all things considered, it has been about 700 species. This particular one that I have just has this little, little teat here. And yes, I am tweaking a fruit right now. Now, if there are 70,000 to 80,000 species of edible fruit in the world, and you are generous enough to choose the lower number in that scale, that means that if you do the math, today, I have now consumed 1% of all the fruit in the world. It has taken 10 years for me to reach a whole number. And you know what? I'm pretty happy about that. You know, I've done a lot, and I have a lot more work to do. But I'm having a good time, and I am glad that I have more work to do. You know, people often ask me, what will I do when I run out of fruit? Well, that's not going to happen. I've been searching since I was six years old. And the more that I look, the more that I find. I will run out before the fruit does. But still, I'm determined to give it a shot. Over the past 10 years, I have reviewed fruit in West Malaysia, the United States, Laos, Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, East Malaysia, Brunei, Japan, Bolivia, Colombia, Germany, Czechia, Mexico, India, China, Canada, Madagascar, the Seychelles, Jamaica, Kenya, Ethiopia, Finland, Estonia, Iceland, Costa Rica, Portugal, and Algeria. In all those places, I have found at least something. Coming back to Malaysia after so many years was surreal. I walked through the same markets that I had walked through so many times in the past. However, this time, although they were familiar in a lot of ways, it was like being somewhere new. I visited at the same time. It was the same season. But still, I was finding so much more. And the reason for that is that something changed. After traveling the world and experiencing everything that I had, I had learned to see Malaysia in a completely different way. And I can only imagine what else I'll be able to see in another 10 years. So 10 years ago, when I started this project of mine, I never would have expected it to grow to where it has today. I started it not in order to get subscribers or make ad revenue or get clicks. I did it because it was fun. And I'm really humbled to see that after all these years that other people want to actually watch what I am doing. I actually came to Malaysia directly from Thailand. And in Thailand, I was hosting tours. I never would have imagined that. It made me so happy to see people with a similar affliction for finding fruit get together and like geek out about it. Here's a test of like true fruit explorers. We got a noni tree here. Raise of hands. Who would eat the noni if we find one? Yeah, you? No? Peer pressure. Mark, would you do it? Absolutely not. Yeah, me neither. These guys are crazy. I don't know what they're talking about. I thought that this was just meat, but it's something that exists all around the world. This is actually closely related to the Australian stinging tree, which if it touches you will have a permanent wilt on you. And does that one have a fruit too? It does. Those have an edible fruit. So that's that's great. That's one I'm not gonna, I don't know, maybe I'll eat it. You will. You definitely will. Yeah. Okay, let's see what other sorts of horrible tortures we can find in nature. I've been very lucky to meet such wonderful people who have taken me to markets, who have grown fruit and sent it to me or shared it with me. People who have cooked fruit for me while I've been traveling. That has been the most amazing thing. If you dry too fast, it's gonna take the inside of it. So you can like pivot it out. Yeah, pivot it out. When you do it that way, it doesn't get anything on the outside. You take the seed from here and then you check to see how clean it is. Okay. There's still much more for me to find, more for me to discover, more for me to learn. What will that be? I don't know. But I will check back with you in another 10 years. Till next time, everybody. Bye-bye. Stephen had the brilliant idea of eating the world's most painful plants, berries. And now I feel like I have to because I give into peer pressure really easily.