Here at Chez Ewww, to my surprise, I found on the menu they serve Durian. Yes folks, durian, the infamous tropical fruit - banned in public places, hotels, malls, trains, etc. for its pungent odor - will be my taste adventure of the day. Everything I have heard and read about the durian has made me curious to try it.

There are many dissenting opinions about the durian. One hears such descriptive tales as: "Like eating custard in a sewer," "rotten onions with Limburger cheese and low-tide seaweed," "French custard passed through a sewer pipe," or "like sitting in a moldy latrine eating your favorite ice cream." Famous naturalists in history have weighed in on the durian:

Neither Wallace nor Darwin could agree on it
Wallace said, "It's delicious."
Darwin said, "I'm suspicious,
for the flavor is scented
like papaya fermented
after a fruit-eating bat has pee'd on it."

It is true, durians do announce their presence with their fragrance, gently until ripe and robustly thereafter. I believe that most of the negativity about durians is based on inexperience. Apparently, many have encountered a low-quality or seriously overripe durian. I'm sure Freud would agree, its fragrance has most likely been interpreted by snooty western food critics as resembling an unpleasant odor from their past. In today's society, everything has to be sanitized and deodorized - our homes, our cars, our clothes, our pets, our children, our armpits, and especially our noses. We have lost the sense of what the real natural world truly smells like.

The negative reports about durians can only be described as "fruit slander." Spoiled durian odor is not the normal enjoyable fragrance of fresh durian, any more than rotten fish odor is the normal enjoyable fragrance of fresh fish. Curiously, even unspoiled durian fragrance apparently reminds some people of things that smell bad. Rotten eggs, rotten onions, skunks, raw sewage — these are things that absolutely smell bad. But not durians; they don't belong in the same category. The durian aroma has a kind of pungent, strong (Tarzan swinging through the jungle strong), sweaty roll-in-the-hay aroma ... words are inadequate, really.

Be that as it may, durians and their strong jungle fragrance do not fit well in indoor environments of modern human civilization any better than, say, elephants. And like elephants, they’re really best enjoyed outdoors. But this is all retrospective musing ...

Back to Chez Ewww:
The whole place was filled with the smell of durian. The fruit was placed before me, the tough prickly husk having been removed in the kitchen. A neat compartment containing pale-yellow custard-like flesh wrapped thickly around a seed was beckoning. Some ancient primordial instinct had my mouth watering with anticipation. I dug out the giant seed and began sucking on the creamy flesh. It was delicious beyond description.