The Fruit Hunters

Adapting the titular 2008 book by Adam Leith Gollner, filmmaker/narrator Yung Chang's The Fruit Hunters opens with a juicy montage featuring exotic (and even erotic) fruit-bearing plants before following the globe-trotting eco-adventures of botanists, growers, and gourmands enamored with fruit—especially the undomesticated, vanishing, and heirloom fruits that are never found in the homogenized grocery-store produce section. In Los Angeles, actor Bill Pullman helps lead a quixotic neighborhood movement to open a community orchard. In Italy, a "fruit detective" travels to monasteries and their centuries-old monk-maintained fields in search of rarities pictured in Renaissance-medieval paintings. In Costa Rica, an entrepreneur seeks a sustainable alternative to the omnipresent "Cavendish" banana, a monoculture now potentially endangered by blight. Chang also serves up several imaginative dramatic tableaux re-enacting fruit's impact on human progress and the rise and fall of nations (conspicuously absent: the United Fruit Co. and its questionable role in U.S. meddling and regime change in Central America). A lush and flavorful documentary sure to appeal to foodies, history buffs, and armchair travelers, this is highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (C. Cassady)