(upbeat music) - My name is Jared Rydelek and
today is a very special day. About 10 years ago, I decided
to do something impossible, try to find taste and review
every fruit in the world. This is a project that has
taken me to over 30 countries. It has taken me into
markets, gardens, forests, jungles, into people's homes. I have met incredibly
generous and kind people and I have learned so much. Today, to mark the 10th
anniversary of this project and what just happens
to be my 700th episode, I think it's only
appropriate to celebrate. Today I'm going to tell you
about how it all started. We're going to look back at
some of my favorite moments and I will also share with you some of the secrets that I've
learned over the past decade of trying to find every fruit in the world and what better way to do this than by going back to
where it all started. (upbeat music) Greetings everybody from Kuala Lumpur. You can see the two corn cobs behind me. Right now, I'm at my favorite market and it's a little bit different
than how I remember it. They took down one of the
buildings for being unsafe but still quite a lot of
familiar sites around. So the reason why I came here 10 years ago was as an entertainer. My day job is that I'm a contortionist and sideshow performer. So I was brought to the resort about an hour or so north of Kuala Lumpur called Genting Highlands. Genting Highlands is the
largest hotel in the world, I think it still is. At the time, they had kind of like an international theme going on, so they had a lot of entertainment but from different countries. So they brought people
in from Korea, Japan, France, all over the place. People came in to do shows and I came as somebody from the USA. I'm going to go from
this side of the stage to the other side of the
stage, all in only 10 seconds. (audience chanting) Genting kept me very, very busy. I was doing four shows
a day, six days a week, for three months, giving
me only one day off and every day off that I had, I would come down to see
the different markets here in Kuala Lumpur, including the one that I'm at right now, which is the Chow Kit Market. Because I was keeping so busy, I decided to do something
in order to keep track, like have a travel diary. So I decided to keep a vlog. So this vlog was not
initially about fruit, it was about just travel. It was about my trip over,
the people I was meeting the food I was eating, all the activities,
the things I was doing. After making a few different vlogs, eventually I made a video about some of the fruit
that I was finding here. This is a tamarillo. I do not think this is something
that really grows here. Wow, this is really strange. It's like if you took guava
and tomato and mixed it. I actually kinda like it, it's good. I'm not sure if I can eat the skin so I'm gonna do it anyway. Don't eat the skin. (coughing) All right, that's it, tamarillos, hooray. One more fruit down in my fruit mission. (intense music) So noisy. Over the past decade of reviewing fruit, I have learned so much. One of the biggest things I've learned is just how many times I can be surprised. Like every single time I go
out trying to find fruit, I learn something. I learn about fruit
that looks really weird, like this, a cannonball tree,
cannonball shaped fruits. (metal clanks)
Ah. - [Cameraman] You got it. - [Jared] Wow. - [Cameraman] See the inside? - Yeah. I've been surprised by just
like how fruits are used. This, everybody is a soap berry. It is used to make soap How fruits smell and my
favorite is how fruit tastes. I've eaten fruit that tastes delicious. I've had fruit that tastes like pickles, peanut butter, ice cream,
sour cream, cheese. I've also been surprised by
how bad a fruit can taste to me which is also kind of fun in its own way. This one, for example, tastes kind of like a burning tire complete with actually burning me. Maybe this one isn't actually edible. I've had ones that tasted
kind of like potting soil, like wood and sticks, some that were just like so sour you can hardly like put it in your mouth. Ones that are like so spicy
that you can hardly touch it. And probably the most infamous out of all the ones that I've had, one that tastes like vomit. All right, so we have the noni fruit, also known as cheese fruit. - It looks like a Buddha. - I think it looks like a polyp. - No, you first. - It's like somebody like
ate some cheddar cheese and like vomited on a lemon. No. - Aww! - I don't want to do this. They eat it green here. It's like comparing like a turd with a larger, smellier turd. I'm never doing this again. Never, never, never, never, never. (doorbell chimes) (bell chimes) (door clanging) Oh no. (eerie music) (upbeat music) I've had a fascination with fruit as far back as I can remember. When I was little, my mother would always let
me pick one treat for myself every time we went to the supermarket, it could be anything at all, except it couldn't be junk food. It was during one of these
supermarket explorations that I discovered the
tropical fruit section at our local supermarket. Now I was really young,
maybe like six years old, seven years old, but I
still have this memory of picking up a kiwano melon. Now these are really
interesting looking fruits. They're orange and spiky
and when you cut them open they have like this green gel inside with like a frog egg kind of texture. I remember picking this fruit up and like weighing it in my hand and kinda like squeezing it
because it didn't seem real. It looked and felt kind of like a toy. And I liked toys, so I put
it in the shopping cart. When we got home, I tried
eating it and I didn't like it but I also didn't really care. There was something fun about it and the next time we
went to the supermarket and my mother told me
that I could buy anything, I took home another tropical fruit. Who would've thought that
nearly 30 years later I would be trying a kiwano melon again but this time in Kenya. The ones that you get the
supermarkets in the US don't really taste like much of anything. They just kind of have like a, like a little cucumber kind of flavor. This tastes like cucumber still but it has a sourness to it. Like almost like if you
took like cucumber and lime and mixed them together. (upbeat music) Eating at restaurants is great, especially if you're eating laksa, but I think it's important that you also try cooking for yourself. So get a hotel or an Airbnb with a kitchen and go out and get ingredients. Go to a supermarket, pick up ingredients, maybe some that you haven't had before. Take them back and
prepare a meal yourself. This is a lot of fun. It's often some of the most
memorable meals that I have and it also helps connect you with the place that you're going to because that's how people
typically eat their food. They don't eat out at
restaurants all the time in most places. And beyond that, this will allow you to take ingredients like fruit, that you maybe cannot eat out of hand, that you can't eat raw
and you can prepare it. You can get to see what it's
like when you do it properly. The cuayote has the nickname gallinita, which means little hen. It's like a little hen that
has had its head cut off. That's kind of what I
see when I look at it. (fruit crunching) And what's interesting with this, is that this really absorbs that water. Like to add my fruit. These things are now full
of the sugar solution. Let's see how I did? It's like if you made a
sponge out of an apple so you bite into it and it's soft, but at the same time it resists
and crisps as you eat it. (upbeat music) The fascination that I had with fruit stayed with me as I got older. I never really thought much about it or talked to anyone about it. Trying fruit that I didn't know was just something that I did. I did it as a kid, as a teenager. And then when I was in my early 20's, that's when things got a
little bit more interesting because that is when I started traveling. In 2008, I lost my job in the recession and when that happened, I
did what anyone would do. I decided to become a contortionist. Yeah, I had no natural flexibility but I managed to learn
quite a bit on my own. Eventually though I hit a wall. I knew that in order to get
further with my flexibility, I would have to take
proper contortion classes. So I went to a circus school in China. (relaxing music) This place was essentially
a bootcamp for art. I trained for hours a day and it was really, really hard work. But every week I had a
couple days off to recover and I made the most of those days. I went sightseeing everywhere. I wandered around this
incredible city of Beijing, I would purposefully get lost
and try to find my way back. And naturally I was
also looking for fruit. I found snake fruit, which looks like it's
covered with snake skin. And when you peel it, the texture
of the fruit on the inside is like garlic but it has the flavor of a funky pineapple. I tried rose apple. This is a light and crispy fruit with a mild but refreshing floral taste. I tried atemoya, this had the
flavor of coconut pudding, pineapple and banana. After training, I returned
back to the United States having discovered a few new fruits, a few new flexibility techniques, and most importantly I learned
something about myself, I like to travel. I like to travel a lot and
I wanted to travel more. One of the most important things that I've learned from traveling is, and this is very important, wherever you go, carry cat treats. (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (soothing funky music) The following year, I continued my flexibility
training in India by learning Kalaripayattu. This is an ancient martial art that is kind of like if you
were to mix kung fu with yoga. Now, if that sounds
like a good idea to you, let me just warn you, it was grueling and this is what I had to wear. Yeah, that's it. If it still sounds like
a good idea to you, then yes, I would recommend it. Taking these classes was also
an excuse to explore India. India was amazing. Between all the sight seeing, of course I did find more fruit. Chiku tastes like brown sugar, ber fruit was a little
bit like a mild apple and soursop was delicious, but it made me sicker than I had ever been in my entire life. On the day before, the day I left India, I went to a little market. Walking through is all the
same apples and bananas and stuff like that until I
like passed the butcher section. So people just like killing chickens and there's all of that
fun stuff going on. I go past that and the area
is like mostly closed down but there's one woman, like an old lady, sitting behind a stump and on this stump is a single soursop, that's all she had. So I was like super excited. I bought it for about 50
rupees, which is about a dollar and I ate it and the next day
I had horrible food poisoning and it carried over into my trip back. Try going through Indian security when you are unable to
be away from a toilet for more than five minutes. I was stopped for a variety of reasons. You know, look at my passport, have me sign a book, have my bag scanned, go to the ticket counter, go
through the metal detector like I was stopped 13 times, I counted. It was such an awful,
awful, awful experience. And you know when I had soursop
the first time, I loved it. Since then, I don't like these anymore. (relaxing music) Another thing that I learned, is that you should always, always look for little old ladies. Little old ladies, I think maybe
because they'll have things that they remember from their childhood, that maybe is not as
popular as it used to be. They will sometimes
have really good stuff. And the thing with
little old ladies though, is you can't always find
them where you would expect. You gotta keep an eye out and it's worth going into parts of markets you normally wouldn't go because sometimes that's
where they set up. They can be a little elusive,
those little old ladies. So when you're going through a market maybe in the fruit and vegetable section, you won't find that little old lady, but you'll find them in
like a houseware section or like an underwear section
or like a butcher section, selling fruit. So yeah, keep an eye out
for those little old ladies 'cause they know how it's done. And this is one that I
found from a little old lady in the kinda like witchy
section of the market. And this might be something
that she was selling for that purpose. I don't really know. But she did have like a few
interesting fruits for sale. And guajilote is also
something that you know, people do eat, it's not just
for, you know, magic purposes. On the inside it also looks
a little bit like a banana. It reminds me a little
bit of like sugar cane. It's not quite as sweet as
sugar cane, but fairly close. If you want the weird stuff, you gotta find somebody who's
been eating this weird stuff since she was a little girl
like in the 20's, okay? (upbeat music) Going to China and India stoked the flames of my
fascination with fruit. But going to Malaysia had a
bucket of gasoline thrown on it. Before long, the vlog that I was keeping became almost entirely fruit reviews. And I wondered, is anyone
else making videos like this? So I looked on YouTube and there were a few videos about fruit, but almost all of them
were those dubious videos about like medicinal properties, you know the kind where it's
like poorly edited slideshows made up of stolen photos
from the internet, with a robot voice that's
played over the top, reading a Wikipedia page entry - [Robot] Benefit your
health in many ways. Health benefits of
bergamot essential oil one lowers blood pressure. Bergamot essential oil can
help lower blood pressure according to a study. - Yeah, those. Since there wasn't a whole
lot of original content about fruit, I decided to do it. I gave up the idea of keeping a daily vlog and instead focused purely on fruit with the intention of putting it online. The whole point of doing
this was to have fun, keep a video diary of what I was finding and maybe some of my friends
would watch it and laugh. If you look back at some
of the earliest episodes, they're pretty rough. I did not expect anyone to
actually watch these videos. They're actually called
santols, that's S-A-N-T-O-L. This tastes kind of like mangosteen but I would say not as
sweet as a mangosteen and it's not as creamy tasting, it's got more like a gel feel to it. Thrilling (upbeat music). After making a few videos, I started to wonder just
how many fruits are there? I had no idea. I'm not a taxonomist, I am a circus freak. So I did what anyone with a
question would do in 2012. I looked on Yahoo Answers. Lucky for me, someone had
already asked this question and the number one answer to the question of how many fruits there are
in the world was about 1000. Now at the time I thought,
wow, that's a lot of fruit, but it's not an impossible number. Maybe just maybe if I really try, one day I could review all
of the fruit in the world. Of course that was nowhere
near the actual number. I was finding so much fruit in Malaysia without really even trying. So by the time I returned home, it occurred to me that maybe
Yahoo Answers was wrong. Shocking, I know. So I did a little bit more research and it was in the book,
"The Fruit Hunters," by Adam Leith Gollner, that I
found a more accurate number. There are an estimated 240,000 to 500,000 different plant species that bear fruits. Perhaps 70,000 to 80,000 of
these species are edible. Oh no. By the time I figured out that what I was doing was
impossible, it was too late. I was in too deep. I wanted to try and find
every fruit in the world and whether or not that was
something that was achievable, I didn't care. I was having way too much fun. A lot of the fruits that we know are actually created through hybridization that is cross pollination of two or more different fruit trees. Mandarin, he didn't get along
with the girls at school, he wanted someone a little
more unique in his life. So he came across this
lady here, a pomelo. Now their parents did
not agree to their love. Imagine a little guy like this and a big sexy lady like this
getting together, going steady just wasn't natural. But despite their forbidden
love, they got married, they had kids and their kid was an orange. Yeah, the orange is a natural hybrid between those two fruits,
the pomelo and the mandarin. Something else that I've learned. But think about it,
walk, walk to get around. If you wanna like go
somewhere, walk there. I mean unless it's like really, really far or it's going through
an area that's dangerous or you know, it's like
nighttime, you know, think about it use common sense. But when given an opportunity walk, because as you walk around you'll see there's plants everywhere and sometimes those plants
have fruit growing on 'em and sometimes that fruit won't kill you. But you know, be careful. Little treacherous 'cause we're right by
the side of the road. There you can see the pandanus ball, it'd be cool to get the whole thing down and show you what it's like. But I don't think we can get up there. He's gonna knock it with a stick, I'm gonna try to catch it. Oh right, yeah. Still fell in the sand. - Yeah, but not as much. - Not as much, looks like a tooth. Like it just came out of like
some gigantic like monster. So let's give it a try. I know what that is. This tastes like artificial banana. That's that's really cool. Very fibrous. The flavor's really, really good. I would make a juice out of
this and be very, very happy. - Yeah, the best one I've tried so far of all the ones I've tried. - [Jared] You've tried it before? - Different kinds, yeah and
this is the best I've had. (upbeat music) - After 700 episodes, I have had roughly 700 different
species of edible fruit. Sure, some episodes have
more than one species in it, some of them are repeats and
some of them are not edible. But all things considered, it has been about 700 species. This particular one that I have just has this little teat here. And yes, I am tweaking a fruit right now. Now, if there are 70,000 to 80,000 species of edible fruit in the world
and you are generous enough to choose the lower number in that scale, that means that if you do the math, today I have now consumed 1%
of all the fruit in the world. It has taken 10 years for
me to reach a whole number. And you know what, I'm
pretty happy about that. You know, I have done a lot and I have a lot more work to
do, but I'm having a good time and I am glad that I have more work to do. You know, people often ask me, what will I do when I run out of fruit? Well that's not gonna happen. I've been searching since
I was six years old. And the more that I look,
the more that I find. I will run out before the fruit does. But still, I'm determined
to give it a shot. Over the past 10 years, I have reviewed fruit in West
Malaysia, the United States, Laos, Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, East Malaysia, Brunei, Japan, Bolivia, Columbia, Germany, Czech, Mexico, India, China, Canada, Madagascar the Seychelles, Jamaica, Kenya, Ethiopia, Finland, Estonia Iceland, Costa Rica, Portugal and Algeria. In all of those places, I have found at least something. (upbeat music) Coming back to Malaysia after
so many years was surreal. I walked through the same markets that I had walked through
so many times in the past. However, this time, although they were
familiar in a lot of ways, it was like being somewhere new. I visited at the same time,
it was the same season but still I was finding so much more. And the reason for that
is that something changed. After traveling the world and experiencing everything that I had, I had learned to see Malaysia
in a completely different way. And I can only imagine what
else I'll be able to see in another 10 years. So 10 years ago when I
started this project of mine, I never would've expected it
to grow to where it has today. I started it not in
order to get subscribers or make ad revenue or get clicks. I did it because it was fun. And I'm really humbled to see
that after all these years, that other people want to
actually watch what I am doing. I actually came to Malaysia
directly from Thailand and in Thailand I was hosting tours. I never would've imagined that. It made me so happy to see
people with a similar affliction for finding fruit get together
and like geek out about it. Here's a test of like
true fruit explorers. We got a noni tree here. Show, raise of hands. Who would eat the noni if we find one? - Hey
- I have to. Oh ho! - [Jared] Ah, yeah, you are, no. Peer pressure. Mark, would you do it? - Absolutely not. - Yeah, me neither, these guys are crazy, I don't know what they're talking about. I thought that this was just me, but it's something that
exists all around the world. - This is actually closely related to the Australian stinging tree, which if it touches you, will
have a permanent welt on you. - [Jared] Does that one have a fruit too? - It does, those have a edible fruit - [Jared] So that's great, we gotta. - That's one I'm not gonna, I don't know maybe, maybe I'll eat it. - [Jared] You will. (laughing) You definitely will. - Yeah, okay. (laughing) - Okay, let's see what other
sorts of horrible tortures we can find in nature. I've been very lucky to
meet such wonderful people who have taken me to
markets, who have grown fruit and sent it to me or shared it with me. People who have cooked fruit for me while I've been traveling, that has been the most amazing thing. - If you dry too fast, they're gonna take the inside with it. - [Jared] So you can like pivot it out. - [Market Worker] Yeah, pivot it out. - [Jared] When you do it that way it doesn't get any,
anything on the outside. - [Market Worker] Yeah,
take the seed from there and then you check to see how clean it is. - Okay. There's still much more for me to find, more for me to discover,
more for me to learn. What will that be? I don't know, but I
will check back with you in another 10 years. 'Til next time everybody, bye bye. (upbeat music) Steven had the brilliant idea of eating the world's
most painful plants berry. And now I feel like I have to because I give into peer
pressure really easily. (upbeat music)
