I had a slightly unsettling Philip K Dick moment yesterday.

So, I was watching the Weird Fruit Explorer video on the cupuaçu fruit, a close relative of cocoa. It sounded delicious, so I search Google for distributors. Unsurprisingly, the main results were from health food distributors. Apparently it's become a coveted smoothie ingredient, Because Antioxidants Or Something.

(con't)

Well, I noticed that one of the sales sites made the claim that "the people of the Amazon know the cupuaçu as 'a pharmacy in a fruit.'" A bit hyperbolic, but not too implausible. There's a lot of good shit going on in tropical fruit.

But I thought it was a bit odd that indigenous Amazonians would use an urban term like "pharmacy." So me being me, I looked into it.

Like any other classic gumshoe... I really shouldn't have.

(con't)

I did a verbatim search for "pharmacy in a fruit" and got a few hundred results. Some also claimed this phrase was common in the Amazon. Some of them weaseled right out and said "everybody" or just "experts" used it to describe the cupuaçu.

Still not surprising, really. Health food scammers gonna scam, and they're gonna pull claims out of nowhere. I kept going and found it used for several OTHER fruits...

Then I found the only source that had anything resembling a concrete claim: they said Anthony Zimmern called it that on Bizarre Foods. I'm still working on confirming that one, but he sure as fuck ain't from the Amazon.

Still kind of okay. Still kind of not surprising.

Then I found a lengthy "debunking" of the "pharmacy in a fruit" claim that was... sigh... obviously a concealed ad for someone's cupuaçu supplements.

*grumble* Fine. Let's keep going...