I thought I was a fan of fruit. Canadian author Adam Leith Gollner put my admiration to shame by spending a decade travelling the world in pursuit of exotic and elusive species of fruit that exist only in nature, diving into jungles and scouring markets and orchards like a storm chaser tracks tornadoes. In his book of lust and adventure, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession, he takes his readers along for the ride.

In a country where the fruit selection at any supermarket generally consists of apples, oranges, bananas and pears bred for looks and portability, where mangos and pineapple are still considered somewhat exotic and many processed food products have pictures of fruit on the label but don’t actually contain any, it’s difficult to grasp the diversity and sheer number of species of fruit available on our planet if you’re willing to do a little digging.

Indeed, although humans have eaten some 80,000 plant species in our history, about 90 per cent of the food we eat today is derived from about 30 species. Fruit don’t have much of a fighting chance in regions they are not native to — many are too soft to effectively ship and stack, so even the kiwi (renamed after it was disallowed entrance into the United States due to its communist-sounding name: the Chinese gooseberry) and mango that are imported year-round, are picked unripe and treated with ethylene during transport.

By page 37, Gollner has already blissfully consumed bignays, gourkas, sapotes, langsats, mombins and jaboticabas. He writes about berries I was oblivious to the existence of: bearberries, dangleberries, whimberries, white snowberries, crackleberries and treacleberries that taste, apparently, just like molasses. And that a coconut, technically a fruit, occasionally grows a pearl. In his Willy Wonka-like loopy fruit world, Gollner meets a Chilean farmer who produced a tree that bears plums, peaches, cherries, apricots, almonds and nectarines by grafting branches of different species onto one plant.

A passionate writer, Gollner pushes far beyond common taste vernacular when describing the myriad of fruits he samples during his decade-long travels. Monkey tamarind is described as “eating cloud” with the flavour and texture of cotton candy. The durian, dubbed the king of fruit by fruit aficionados, is said to smell like hell and taste like heaven. “Eating them is said to be like eating your favourite ice cream while sitting on the toilet,” he says. Apparently they taste like “undercooked peanut butter-mint omelets in body odour sauce.” Its odour is so foul that it once cleared an apartment building when tenants assumed a gas leak was taking place.

He addresses issues of politics, religion and sex as it relates to fruit, and spins tales of its history. In the mid 1900s, for example, “pear mania” was an American phenomenon on par with the British pop invasion. He writes about smoking rooms full of elite Bostonians “groaning with pleasure and rubbing their hands with glee as they gorged themselves on the new creations.”

Every hunter must have an elusive prey that is not easily unearthed, as any romance novel must contain hot pursuit. Adam still has fruits on his list of must-haves, some rare and others contraband. His most exciting discovery, the one he almost inspires me to go in tireless search of, he dubs the “miracle fruit” — a berry that on its own is relatively flavourless, but whose aftereffects are exceptional. Its temporary effect on your tastebuds makes anything sour taste sweet.

“After eating a miracle fruit,” he writes, “pickles taste like honey. A bologna and mustard sandwich tastes like cake. Vinegar tastes like cream soda.”

Calgary does have its own fruit hunter, or fruit aficionado and importer, to say the least. Andrés Herrera and his wife Belinda de Wolde founded More than Mangos after 14 Canadian winters inspired Columbian-born Andrés to begin importing exotic fruits from South America. You can buy their lulos, tamarillo, passionfruit, dragonfruit (pitahaya), pineapple guavas (feijoa), soursop (guanábana), spanish limes (mamoncillo), cactus figs (higo) and mangosteen at the Millarville Farmers’ Market or at the new Sweetgrass Market, scheduled to open mid-June. For more information, visit www.morethanmangos.com. Maybe they can track me down a miracle fruit.