No Durians

We’ve all seen various signs in hotel rooms. The ubiquitous No Smoking, the fire escape plan, admonishments to not flush various things down the toilet. But this one was new to me:

What the hell is a durian and why would only one kind of fruit be banned from rooms? Since Al Gore invented the intertubes, I was able to use DuckDuckGo to figure out why.

Some things produce a wide array of opinions across a spectrum. Others (like velvet Elvis, NASCAR, and Donald Trump) elicit polarized feelings. People love or loath them. Durians fall into the latter category.

Per Wikipedia,

Some people regard the durian as having a pleasantly sweet fragrance; others find the aroma overpowering and revolting. The smell evokes reactions from deep appreciation to intense disgust, and has been described variously as rotten onions, turpentine, and raw sewage. The persistence of its odour has led to the fruit's banishment from certain hotels and public transportation in Southeast Asia.

Okay, I understand that small percentages of people may have strong negative reactions to certain foods (when I become World Dictator, Brussels sprouts will be wiped from the face of the earth), but I’ve not known of public prohibitions for any of them.

Many have recorded their feelings about durians. Alfred Russel Wallace described its flesh as “a rich custard highly flavoured with almonds”. Not a man to gloss over things, he expanded on this. “A rich custard highly flavoured with almonds gives the best general idea of it, but there are occasional wafts of flavour that call to mind cream-cheese, onion-sauce, sherry-wine, and other incongruous dishes. Then there is a rich glutinous smoothness in the pulp which nothing else possesses, but which adds to its delicacy. It is neither acidic nor sweet nor juicy; yet it wants neither of these qualities, for it is in itself perfect. It produces no nausea or other bad effect, and the more you eat of it the less you feel inclined to stop.”

Others have been underwhelmed. Anthony Burgess wrote that eating durian is “like eating sweet raspberry blancmange in the lavatory”. Travel and food writer Richard Sterling says “its odor is best described as pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock.”

Other comparisons have been made with the civet, sewage, stale vomit, skunk spray and used surgical swabs.

I don’t know if I’ll be trying durians while I’m here, but if I pass a street vendor and get a whiff of skunk with an overlay of gym socks, I may try to be brave and see if I agree with Alfred Russel Wallaces’s assessment.