Tropical Fruit > Tropical Fruit Discussion

Prioritizing Fruit

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Epiphyte:
I recently tried yellow dragon fruit and liked it way more than the red flesh and white flesh varieties.  I also recently tried jackfruit and really liked it.  Since I like these two fruits so much, I really wish that I had learned about them decades ago.  It makes me wonder just how many other fruits I haven't tried yet but would love. 

One of the worst things in life is overlooking the best things in life.  Unfortunately, overlooking the best things is way too easy, given how many things there are competing for our very limited time and attention. 

Fortunately, we don't all look in the same places.  It's a given that plenty of you have tried yellow dragon fruit and jackfruit way before I did.  Those of you who loved it told others about it, which is great, but it took way too long for me to get the memo.  Way too many other people still haven’t gotten the memo.

The solution is simple.  We make a list of fruit and sort it by donations to this website.  For example... I could donate $10 to this website in order to increase the ranking of jackfruit by $10.  The higher up jackfruit is on the list, the more people would try it. 

Why not just use voting?  Because then the top fruits would be things like apples and oranges... fruits that everybody already knows about.  The majority can't know anything valuable before the minority does.  Plus this website needs donations anyways. 

I'll share a couple relevant examples from nature. 

When the 1st bee discovers that my cherimoya is blooming... hah.  Dragon fruit?  Nope.  I can't remember if I saw any bees on my Surinam cherry, but let's go with it.  She flies back to the hive in order to recruit other bees to help harvest the pollen/nectar.  The way she recruits is by dancing.  You probably already knew this, but maybe you didn't know how she conveys her valuation.  She does this by the intensity of her dancing.  The more valuable she perceives my Surinam cherry, the more intensely she will dance, and the more bees she will recruit.  It's important to appreciate that dancing intensely will burn more of her precious calories, so it's a sacrifice for her, just like spending money is a sacrifice for us.  We should use our sacrifices to prioritize fruits, just like bees use their sacrifices to prioritize flowers. 

To be clear, whenever we buy a fruit we are making a sacrifice to help prioritize it.  But of course we aren't going to pay more for the fruit than we have to.  We all want the best possible deals.  The problem with deals is that they skew the prioritization.  No deals with donations though. 

The second example from nature involves a creature that we all hate… slugs.  Ugh.  Go to the ant thou sluggard?  Actually, it seems like slugs are extremely effective at finding and destroying valuable plants.  This is because they are essentially completely honest with each other.  One lucky slug finds your jackfruit seedlings and fills its belly with 5% of them.  Of course the bastard wants to eat the rest of your seedlings, which means it needs to be able to find them again.  It does so by leaving a trail of slime that it can use to essentially retrace its steps.  However, if any other slug happens to stumble upon the slime trail, they will also be able to use it.  So the next night there are 3 slugs eating your seedlings.  The night after that there are 10 slugs… within a few days your seedlings are all gone.  Any subsequent slugs will leave new trails that say “empty belly”.  Well, they won’t sacrifice their calories to say “full belly”. 

Slugs are way too good at recruiting each other.  Good for them, bad for us.  Bees are also really good at recruiting each other.  Good for them and us.  What about us humans in terms of recruiting?  We have lots of room for improvement. 

Logistically, maintaining the fruit prioritization list would only be a lot of work if lots of people are regularly making donations.  By then though a portion of the money could be used to automate the system.  And then another portion of the money could be used to promote the list.  As a result, we will minimize the amount of time it takes for the best “new” fruits to go from scarce to abundant. 

driftwood:
huh

FlMikey:
Not sure if being trolled or not...but I'll bite.  Why would this "solution" supersede a free Google search? 

skhan:
I'm glad you enjoyed Jackfruit.
I finally got around to trying a yellow dragon fruit and I found it to be really nice as well.

As for your suggestion, some points to consider are:

Would someone have the motivation to spend money to rank their fruit higher? (I get in terms of the forum donation drive but frankly those only last a few hours)

Taste is subjective, some people want things really sweet, some people want things sour.

Fruit access, Let say a bunch of people from South Florida voted for mango because of all the fancy Zill varieties that we have access to here.
If someone in Georgia saw the ranking list and bought a mango from the store they would be very disappointed.

Plenty of awesome fruit has only been tried by a few people and the only way to try them is to live in that locality or grow it yourself.


There is another thread where members list their top 5 fruits (not only tropical).
If your looking for somemore suggestion I'd start there, they may even have connections to help you find rarer ones locally.

johnb51:
 :-X

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