Alien Invasion

Aren’t lychees weird? File them under “I didn’t know they actually exist.” The first time I tasted a lychee was in the context of booze, appropriately enough – a lychee martini at Bond St in New York. It was sickly sweet and strangely cologne-like. There was a very odd perfumed edge to the drink that I attributed to the lychee canning process. I was wrong. That edge is the nature of the lychee, the most alien-looking thing I have consumed in recent memory.


I recently let my curiosity get the best of me at Whole Foods and grabbed a box of fresh lychees. Lychees are fruit technically, but resemble fleshy nuts more than anything else (to my fevered imagination, in any case). Peeling back the thin and spiky red skin reveals what resembles a large alien eyeball. Fear not, that’s the edible part. Under about 5 millimeters of translucent white eyeball flesh lies a large and shiny brown seed, it looks like an elongated marble. To eat the lychee, one has to suck the flesh off the seed, making alien slurping noises in the process (perhaps that was just me).



Lychees taste like perfume, intensely floral and cloying, very much unlike anything else I have tried. It felt almost illicit to eat, like it couldn’t possibly be a natural product and not horrifically bad for me, pickling me from the inside out like many artificially flavored foods do (this is not a medical opinion, by the way). So there you go – a natural fruit that looks alien and tastes like fake candy… in a good way.









P.S. A germinating lychee seed looks remarkably sperm-like, doesn’t it? I cannot possibly be the only one to think this. Please tell me I am not the only one.