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For anyone who has ever wondered where their apples and bananas come from - and why they often taste like cardboard - Adam Leith Gollner's first book, The Fruit Hunters : A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession, offers lots of answers.

Mr. Gollner travelled the globe in pursuit of fabulous flavours - and ended up investigating the geopolitics of fruit. He discovered an underworld populated by smugglers, Mafia types and an obsessed few who have devoted their lives to cultivating rare, exotic and long-forgotten fruits. The Montreal writer became infatuated.

"They were all so delicious and otherworldly," he says. "I kept asking myself, 'Why can't we get these in Canada?' What else is out there?' Little did I know at that point I would be spending the rest of my 20s going around the world chasing fruits."

You travelled to Borneo to sample the durian, a fruit that smells of sulphur and rotten eggs but tastes like heaven.

The durian is a large spiky fruit from Southeast Asia that is notorious for its stench. But enthusiasts consider it a gourmet treat. I loved it. It tastes of almond custard with hints of sweet potato, caramel and crème brûlée.

There's also the Lady Fruit, or coco de mer, which grows only in the Seychelles, which you call the "sexiest fruit in the plant kingdom." It's shaped like a woman's reproductive region, from midriff to thighs.

I thought it was a myth. But I found out it really exists and you can eat it.

You write that fruits represent everything that's wonderful with the world. How so?

That was how I felt initially. They just seemed so sweet and pure and life-giving. Then as I got deeper into the research I learned that there is a dark side to the fruit world, whether it's the pesticides on the fruits, or all the fossil fuels that are required to get fruits to market, or the indentured workers toiling away in the fields, without whom we would not have these fruits.

You met quite a few people who are obsessed with fruit, to the point that they devote their lives to travelling the world looking for new varieties. Do you understand the obsession?

I think the obsession with fruits for some of these characters has to do with this thirst for knowledge. This goes back to the Garden of Eden. Knowledge and fruits have a long history together. Fruits attract these people who want to find them all and know them all - which is impossible because there are still fruits out there no one has heard of.

In the course of your research you discovered how Grapples - a new fruit available at supermarkets across North America - get their intense grape flavour.

They are just regular apples covered in artificial grape flavour. The weird part is that the grape flavour also happens to be a pesticide that repels birds. It seems safe, but it just goes to show how little we know about the chemicals in our food supply.

Why have those delicious yellow mangoes, which have always been available in Canadian supermarkets, only recently become available in the United States?

The saga of the Indian mango is a perfect example of the complexities of fruit geopolitics. India has been buying Candu nuclear reactors and we've been buying their mangoes. They were banned in the United States. Recently India has been buying U.S. nuclear technology and we saw President Bush fly to India to announce that Americans were looking forward to eating Indian mangoes.

Are we eating ethically when

we purchase fruits from far-flung locales?

The flow of goods between nations is one of the essential facts of a capitalist economy. That requires fossil fuels. It's fruits in particular that rely on oil, whether it's in fertilizers made with natural gas, or farming equipment and transportation that use oil. Fruits are also covered in wax derived from oil byproducts. Solving the current food crisis means solving the current energy crisis. The two are linked.

Why does so much fruit taste sub-par in Canadian grocery stores?

Because they are made available year-round. Each fruit has a season, but fruits are now sold with the idea that they should look perfect and always be available. The result is that they don't taste good. They've been picked way before they are ripe, covered in wax and chemicals, and stored in warehouses. So you have a fruit that looks ripe but is basically dead.

What should consumers do to get better fruit?

We need to reclaim seasonality. Find a friendly greengrocery and ask them to tell you what is in season and what is good. Just like Julia Child used to recommend cultivating a relationship with your butcher, I recommend cultivating a relationship with your fruit guy.

How about tomatoes? Why do they taste like cardboard?

Because they're grown in greenhouses, picked green, stored in warehouses then gassed with ethylene to make them turn red. But wait a second - is a tomato even a fruit?

Is it?

Yes, because it has seeds.