The Fruit Cure

Description

“lucid and elegant” — The Washington Post

“A deeply compelling read … Spellbinding ….” — BookPage

“Her journey from desperation to self-acceptance is moving and well rendered. In the crowded medical memoir field, this stands out.” — Publishers Weekly

A powerful critique of the failures in our healthcare system and an inquiry into the sinister strains of wellness culture that prey on people’s vulnerabilities through schemes, scams, and diets.

Jacqueline Alnes was a Division One runner during her freshman year of college, but her season was cut short by a series of inexplicable neurological symptoms. What started with a cough, escalated to Alnes collapsing on the track and experiencing months of unremembered episodes that stole her ability to walk and speak. 

Two years after quitting the team to heal, Alnes’s symptoms returned with a severity that left her using a wheelchair for a period of months. She was admitted to an epilepsy center but doctors could not figure out the root cause of her symptoms. Desperate for answers, she turned to an online community centered around a strict, all-fruit diet which its adherents claimed could cure conditions like depression, eating disorders, addiction, anxiety, and vision problems. Alnes wasn’t alone. From all over the world, people in pain, doubted or dismissed by medical authorities, or seeking a miracle diet that would relieve them of white, Western expectations placed on their figures, turned to fruit in hopes of releasing themselves from the perceived failings of their bodies.

In The Fruit Cure, Jacqueline Alnes takes readers on a spellbinding and unforgettable journey through the world of fruitarianism, interweaving her own powerful narrative with the popularity and problematic history of fruit-based, raw food lifestyles. For readers plagued by mysterious symptoms, inundated by messages from media about how to attain “the perfect body,” or caught in the grips of a fast-paced culture of capitalism, The Fruit Cure offers a powerful critique of the failures of our healthcare system and an inquiry into the sinister strains of wellness culture that prey on people’s vulnerabilities through schemes, scams, and diets masquerading as hope.A BookPage Top Ten Books of January 2024
A SheReads Most Anticipated Memoir of 2024
An InsideHook 10 Books You Should Be Reading in January

“an engaging story” – The Wall Street Journal

“lucid and elegant” – The Washington Post

“A deeply compelling read … Spellbinding ….” – BookPage

“Alnes’s interweaving of personal experience, diligent reporting and wide-ranging cultural history make The Fruit Cure an engaging, clear-eyed, often vulnerable read that goes a long way to make sense of why so many of us seem to find the simple act of eating so fraught.” – New Scientist

“Her journey from desperation to self-acceptance is moving and well rendered. In the crowded medical memoir field, this stands out.” — Publishers Weekly

“Like an episode of Maintenance Phase meets the essay collection The Empathy Exams, The Fruit Cure brings both rigorous reporting and fearless self-examination to bear on questions far beyond health, athletics, wellness, and food. What Alnes is interested in here is nothing less than the mysterious relationship between our thinking minds and our physical selves and the essential joyful horror that is having a human body.” – Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of The Third Rainbow Girl

“The Fruit Cure is an eye-opening, at turns heartbreaking, and long overdue reckoning of wellness culture—the scammy cures, miracle diets, and broken systems that operate like an elaborate MLM scheme, ensnaring people in an endless pursuit of promised cures. Part memoir, part cultural critique, Alnes takes us on a relatable journey through the world of fruitarianism and introduces us to a cast of complicated characters behind the raw food lifestyle. It’s a fantastic look at wellness and diet culture and the influencer economy, all done with nuance, humor, and empathy.” – Christine Yu, author of Up To Speed

“Weaving a deeply vulnerable personal narrative into a larger historical story of dieting, harmful pseudoscience, and trendy health fads, Alnes connects our current societal obsession with control to a long history of the constant betrayal of people’s simple desire to get better. I have never been more compelled by a book, and I have never felt more moved by the offering of a self — honest, tender, and vulnerable — that Alnes presents.”—Devin Kelly, author of In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen and Blood on Blood.

“The Fruit Cure presents a type of human trajectory we don’t consider enough: how we took the emerging cultural possibility of being selective about how we eat, and how we might manage our well-being through diet, and turned it back into an unhealthy and extreme practice. Alnes’s book is an eye-opening journey into how isolating the pursuit of health can be when our society does not keep an open mind and inclusive practice that prioritizes care, and the dangers that come with the push toward individualism.” Casey Johnston, editor, She’s A Beast Newsletter and author, Liftoff: Couch to BarbellJacqueline Alnes is a writer, runner, and assistant professor of creative writing. Her work has appeared in publications like The New York Times, Guernica, Jezebel, Iron Horse Literary Review, Longreads, Ploughshares, Tin House, Electric Literature and The Boston Globe. She has a PhD in creative writing from Oklahoma State University and an MFA in nonfiction from Portland State University. She teaches at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.

1. Alnes writes about how messaging from her coaches around overcoming pain in sport meant that she tried to push herself past her limit, even when her symptoms were severe. Are perceptions of mental and physical health shifting due to ongoing public conversations? 

2. Because of her neurological episodes, Alnes writes that her memories of her illness are foggy, and that “holes in the narrative emerge.” Does this admission lead you to trust the author more or less? What expectations do you have around truth and memory in memoirs?

3. The author writes about how cultural perceptions of epilepsy and seizures—often historically associated with demons needing to be cast out of a person—negatively influenced her perception of her own neurological symptoms. What stigmas or stereotypes have you heard about a chronic illness or disability?  

4. Throughout the book, Alnes contemplates the differences between healing and a cure. Is there a difference? Explain. 

5. Alnes incorporates historical research in which she connects present messaging around wellness to the past. What historical moments or figures in the book surprised or intrigued you? 

6. Alnes was drawn into an online community of fruitarians, but later wishes she would have paused to analyze the harmful rhetoric before it sucked her in. What questions might be valuable to ask when you encounter media or messaging that seems alluring? What steps can you take to learn more about a creator or account before following them? 

7. Online communities can be incredible spaces where people with similar interests can communicate from anywhere in the world. They can also become insular echo chambers that ensnare vulnerable populations. What is your perception of the 30 Bananas a Day group? What elements of the group seem positive? What elements seem unhealthy?

8. Alnes interviewed several former members of the fruitarian movement for her book. Did you notice any themes emerge in these interviews? 

9. Two of the central figures in the 30 Bananas a Day community, Freelee and Durianrider, declined multiple interview requests from the author. In what ways does Alnes work to include their perspectives? Does the author’s portrayal of the movement’s leaders feel nuanced and balanced? 

10. The author raises questions about whose responsibility it is to monitor accounts that distribute health advice on social media platforms, as she reflects on the potential harm caused by creators who advocate for diet plans with no credentials to back up their claims. Who should be held responsible for monitoring accounts on social media that dispense health advice? Is it up to viewers to think critically, creators to prove their credibility, or social media companies to provide content warnings? 

BEFORE THE DEFAMATION LAWSUIT, THE CUPS OF COCONUT sugar poured into banana smoothies, the sexual assault allegations, and the dissolution of what was once a dream, there was a man and a woman. Acne covered the woman’s face and shoulders and chest. Her gut was inflamed, a symptom of systemic candida. The man, whose father had passed from cancer, was sick of the lies. Sick of the fries. Sick of rubbing thighs or listening to MLM gurus with dollar$ in their eyes. And so the man and the woman separated good food from bad. They called the good food Raw, and the bad food they called Murder, Torture, Junk, and Harm.

The man and the woman worshipped what the earth yielded, an abundance of fruits and greens plucked ripe from their vines and stalks and trees. They ate dozens of bananas per day, and mangoes, dragon fruit, persimmons, oranges, peaches, watermelon, papaya, and more. Piles of durian crowned the man’s bed. And the woman lay on the ground in a bikini, hair spilling across her face, boxes and boxes of dates surrounding her toned body as the man looked on. The man pressed the fruit between his fingers, saying squishy, date sugar, nutrition, nutrient-dense, and neither were ashamed.
 
The man and the woman held the knowledge of good and evil; they could discern between the sweet flesh of a sun-ripened pineapple and plastic bags filled to the brim with animal blood. They knew that water and carbohydrates in the blood equaled beauty; fat in the blood, ugly. Pure thoughts came from drinking water. With this knowledge, the man and the woman created a website. The man and the woman painted the header with a faded image of browning bananas in the sun. They added green trim to a white background. They added an image of spotty bananas. They renamed themselves Durianrider and Freelee The Banana Girl. With that, the 30 Bananas a Day movement began.
 
Freelee and Durianrider invited their followers to a fruit farm in Cairns, Australia, where there was a garden and the garden was good. From the garden came tatsoi, a green with leaves like flattened lily pads; Black Russian tomatoes; a bowl of pea-sized cherry tomatoes; tall sprigs of dill; cos lettuce; and sweet leaf skimmed from the stalk. People multiplied, journeying from all around the world. They gathered around a picnic table where the garden’s bounty was arranged. Sun overhead, they ate until they were satiated.
 
Tanned and wiry, the people bore gifts: They whacked a cleaver against a rod of sugarcane before twisting it and twisting it, milking the juice into a bowl. They broke open the scaly green skin of a jackfruit with their fingers. They sifted, smashed, and sieved coconut until it turned to oil, and they slathered it behind their ears, on their shoulders, and into the palms of their hands. They jackhammered avocado, mango, pineapple, and banana in a large pot, poured the golden mixture into a pitcher, drank from it, and said wow.
 
Durianrider, standing before the small crowd of disciples, said, “People just want to feel good.” And it was so. There, on the farm, the people slept in tents; the people woke up and ate coconuts; the people went down to the creek for a swim; the people did yoga beneath the limbs of an ancient tree; the people walked the walk and talked the talk and ate raw food and only raw food. No one snuck down the road for a hamburger.
 
Freelee and Durianrider posted footage of toned bodies, testimonies about healing from chronic illness, and images of an abundance of fruit to their site. Through raw food and raw food alone, their followers turned from flab to fab. From tragic to magic. From around the world, people watched and saw that the movement was good. Like fruit flies lured by the sweet stench of something overripe, people desperate to heal from eating disorders, to cure illnesses, to save the animals, to find community, and to feel young again were drawn to 30 Bananas a Day.
 
I was one of them.US

Additional information

Weight	18 oz
Dimensions	1.0500 × 6.3000 × 9.3000 in
Imprint	Melville House
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09781685890759
ISBN-10	168589075X
Author	Jacqueline Alnes
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	PSY011000, HEA024000
Subjects	fruitarian, psychology books, eating disorder, biographies, motivational books, HEA024000, books for women, psychiatry, health and wellness, autobiographies, gifts for women, gifts for her, self help books for women, health books, fitness books, womens health, mom gifts, health and fitness, inspirational books for women, fruitarianism, biography, feminism, mental health, psychology, PSY011000, wellness, self help, healthcare, health, happiness, history, cult, motivation, aging, depression, gifts for mom, fitness, Human nature, self help books