![]() There are a number of reasons why we get so much of our produce from Latin America, and particularly Mexico. Though the Alphonso almost survived, it was an offbeat Mulgoba that just happened to make it in Floridian conditions, and so we’re stuck with its lame descendants. It may have been mislabeled, it may have been a coincidental mutant, or it may have actually been the result of some other rootstock whatever the origins of the Mulgoba, it was not one of the beloved Indian varieties. The one that survived in Florida looked nothing like the Mulgoba in India, or any Indian variety for that matter. The Mulgoba got a lucky break.īut there’s also something fishy about the American Mulgoba. The Indian varieties tend to grow in areas that are hotter and drier than (or at least different from) the conditions in Florida, and even today, South Florida represents a geographic and climatic extreme in the fruit’s range of potential survival. Mangoes were simply out of their element in Florida. The fact that all mango trees other than the Mulgoba died was not an effect of neglect, amateurism, or bad luck. And the potential pests could be neutralized by irradiating the fruit, a practice that had already been employed in sterilizing meat and other produce, and which harms the taste and texture of a mango less than the hot water treatment used for most mangoes imported from Latin America. Mango stakeholders with operations in Latin America, the source of nearly all mangoes eaten in the US, feared competition from India, with its copious production of delicious mangoes. Savani’s research convinced him that the ban was as much due to political reasons and bureaucratic inaction as it was due to legitimate phytosanitary concerns. It was on a visit to India in 2006 that Bush tried an Alphonso mango, announcing to Singh that it was “a hell of a fruit.” He ate as much as he could, like three or four kilos of mangoes.” This episode set the young dentist off on a convoluted six-year mission to understand and eventually defeat the ban. He said he had to stay because the USDA inspector told him to throw the mangoes in the trash can. Sure enough, he shows up three hours later he was smelling like mangoes completely. “I was outside of JFK Airport looking for him. Savani told me over the phone in December. “My father used to come in the summertime and smuggle mangoes for me. The overturning of the ban and the arrangement of the first post-ban shipment was largely spearheaded by a Pennsylvania dentist named Bhaskar Savani, who was born and raised in Gujarat but moved to the United States in 1990 to attend dental school. It was the Platonic ideal of a mango, this Alphonso mango. The aroma and taste was not qualitatively different from the mangoes I had known, but intensified manifold, as if the souls of ten mangoes had been concentrated in just one fruit. The flesh was a deep and uniform marigold color, completely devoid of the stringy fibers that sometimes plague supermarket mangoes. I remember being amazed that fruit that good could actually exist. But the one time I was able to eat an Alphonso mango, at the diminutive fruit stand at the luxury London department store Harrod’s, I was blown away. Many times in my life, I’ve eaten something that is supposedly the prime exemplar of its category-the best banana, the best anchovy, the best burrito-and I’ve found the quality differential to be subtle I’ve learned accordingly to temper my expectations with these kinds of things. Ah, the Alphonso among India’s beloved varieties, none is more famous than the Alphonso, grown mostly near Ratnagiri, Maharasthra, and sometimes called the “ king of mangoes.”
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