Not what I'm having precisely this moment (the most recent thing I ate was Honey Bunches of Oats), but the other day I got an assignment to shoot a still life from a top-down perspective in the studio. I chose to shoot a durian.



I never saw durians for sale in the East Coast, so I was a little surprised by the relative ease at which I was able to procure such a fruit. It was as simple as dropping by the local Vietnamese grocery chain.

For some reason, I decided to pick the largest specimen available. This made carrying this fruit a very interesting task and at one point the bag it was stored in gave way and the fruit fell and left a bunch of holes in my left hand. The entire time, I was also afraid that the fruit would thaw and release its notorious odor.

The shoot took over an hour. Afterwards, one of my classmates asked if she could stab the fruit. I said yes so she stabbed it. We cut the fruit open and ate it.

It was weird. It's fragrant for sure but not in a decomposing-and-covered-in-turpentine-alien-fetus way that the fruit is rumored to smell like. In fact, it's so hard to pin down the flavor that part of the fun in sharing the fruit was listening to everyone's own interpretation.

If you ask me, I say durian is most like a mixture of mango and banana with a very slight garlic undertone (but especially the spiciness of garlic). The texture is cold and slimy, reminiscent of raw chicken flesh. The unusual texture, they say, is what gets people.

I'm not sure if I'll ever eat durian again, but it's not really as crazy as everyone says it is.

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I made broccoli, rice and a fried egg for breakfast. I ate it with a spork and a knife. It was good.

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