Big Islander passionate on future of fancy fruit

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor

Ken Love, in his orchard, holds an abiu, a fruit from the Amazon that tastes like créme caramel. Exotic fruit, he says, has a future. Carl E. Koonce III • Special to The Advertiser Learn more ... For information about Ken Love's various fruit projects, write Ken@mycoffee.net or phone (808) 323-2417.

Love, a former photojournalist who planted a coffee and macadamia orchard but then became passionate about tropical fruits, has yet to meet a fruit he won't chomp into. That includes the notorious durian with its odor that reminds some people of — well, never mind.

During a long morning's walk through a friend's experimental orchard (we couldn't get to his own remote property because his truck had broken down), Love, a friendly-faced man in a faded aloha shirt and clutching an unlit pipe, apologized repeatedly for hopping around from topic to topic. "I suffer from ADDF — attention deficit disorder fruit, or attention deficit disorder farming," he says. "I just get so excited."

What he's excited about is the possibility that Hawai'i-grown specialty fruit could become a significant but 'aina-friendly industry, one that allows some folks to make a nice side income from a roomy back yard while others farm full-time and others earn a living from secondary products (jams, relishes and such). A business that dovetails with tourism through farm tours, roadside stands, inns. And one that slows the incursion of million-dollar second-home developments.

It makes him nearly froth at the mouth that we import thousands of pounds of lemons and avocados and oranges each year when all three grow well here — they just might not be as pretty or as evenly shaped as produce buyers would like. "In Hawai'i, we're not buying our own stuff. You have to love yourself before you can love anyone else!" he all but shouts.

A Japanese speaker who first visited that country as a photographer and now returns to learn more from a place that packages fruit as exquisitely as jewelry, Love is passionate about a Japanese technique of using waxed bags to protect fruit while it is ripening. He says the difference can be as much as a 40 percent higher yield of marketable fruit.

A researcher by nature, Love has spent countless hours digging up information about varieties and planting techniques and sales ideas. "You get interested in one fruit and it just leads to another," he says. He reads just enough Japanese to be able to pick his way through books on agriculture and culinary uses of produce. He speaks with hushed respect of those who have gone before him — horticulturists, biologists, gardeners and backyard grafting experts who have contributed to the field.

At the same time, Love is a realist. He knows Asia can sell lychees and rambutans for a fraction of the cost that Hawai'i farmers can. The industry must be smart and proactive, he says: Growing the fruit is just half the battle.

"We can't be competitive in fresh fruit, but we can be competitive in how it's packaged and marketed, and what we create with it," he said.

Through the Kona Pacific Farmers Cooperative, he has landed a grant for a three-year Twelve Trees Project to identify a dozen fruit trees that can be harvested throughout the year and provide consistently high-quality fruit. The grant will finance an organic test orchard at co-op headquarters in Captain Cook. Local culinary schools will develop recipes and products from the fruit, and local chefs will be recruited to buy it.

He also has published a Hawai'i specialty fruit poster showing 120 fruit varieties, and a pair of 8 1/2-by-11-inch laminated plastic cards with photographs of seasonal Big Island fruit, useful for identifying fruit by common and Latin names. (Either item sells for $15 at www.hawaiifruit.net.) "How can we market what we've got if we don't know what we have? There is so little in the way of readily available reference material," he said.

He's got a pretty good idea which fruits show the most market potential because each Thursday for the past year and a half, he has stationed himself at the cooperative's farmer's market, offering samples of various fruits he has grown or acquired, and tracking people's reactions. He also attends such events as the fall Big Island Festival, erecting a mind-boggling display of fruit and offering information and samples.

Every so often, he borrows a commercial kitchen to create a batch of products, such as his Fruit and Fire — an Indian-style chili fruit sauce that is positively addictive (and usually sold out). The kitchen of the home he shares with his wife, Marg, is an experimental station where he has learned to make his own umeboshi from homegrown chu ume plum (Prunus mume) and to create a jackfruit jerky in the food dehydrator that is perpetually humming on a side table.

Rhedia, wampi, acerola, langsat, sapoté — the names are like an exotic language of their own. Love calls them out as he roams through the trees in the hot stillness of a Kona noon, a missionary in a battered old hat. "I just love 'em all," he says.