fruit · The Trophy Room
Noni
The "cheese fruit," and the smell earns it. Noni is a knobbly, waxy-white fruit studded with little eyes, and ripe it reeks of pungent, cheesy funk — yet it's been a Pacific folk medicine and famine food for centuries. A fruit you photograph more often than you eat.
Identifying
- lumpy, translucent greenish-white to yellow fruit, pitted with polygonal "eyes"
- grows straight off the branch among big glossy leaves
- ripe fruit is soft, waxy, and strongly, cheesily pungent
- small dark seeds throughout the gel-like flesh
Facts
- long used across Polynesia and Southeast Asia as a traditional medicine and survival food
- the smell comes from butyric and caproic acids — the same funk as strong cheese and vomit
- usually juiced and fermented rather than eaten fresh, because raw it is an acquired taste at best
