What makes mangosteens so great? One person summed it up by saying: ”Imagine the best peach you've ever eaten, combined with a touch of passion fruit, a sliver of nectarine and a nip of lychee. Imagine a concord grape's sweet purple essence giving way to the clean leanness of a Granny Smith. Add a squeeze of lime, and a spoon of buttery brown sugar. Stir.” (Jarrett Wrisley : http://dohn121.hubpages.com/hub/The-Mangosteen-Queen-of-All-Fruits)
With all of this high praise, I've really been wanting to try some, but until this week my fruit man hadn't had any for sale. I finally saw some as I biked by yesterday, so I stopped to inquire about their price. He told me they were $3/kg. At the time, I thought that perhaps I could find a better price. I thanked him and continued on my way.
Today, I asked the guys at work what they thought the price of 1kg should be, since sometimes sellers swindle unsuspecting foreigners on fruit and the like. They said that they thought $3/kg was a pretty good price. The guys were interested to know for sure, so since Sey was already headed to the market to sell some of our oyster mushrooms, I gave him some money and asked him to see what price he could get.
Sey came back bearing a bag of mangosteens. And what price did he pay? $2.50/kg! I was super surprised that my fruit man was only marking the mangosteens up by $0.50. That's a really low markup for what we refer to as the foreigner tax.
Now knowing that I was getting a good price, I biked back to my fruit guy after work to get a kg of mangosteens from him. He was really happy to see me again and even threw in an extra mangosteen and some free dragon eyes (AKA longans) to make sure I knew that he was giving me a good price. Even though I knew for sure at this point that it was a fair deal, I was grateful for his gesture of good will :)
While I devoured my delicious spoils (yes, they were as good as that description above!), I decided to research what the price of mangosteens is in America. It turns out that mangosteens weren't even allowed to be sold in America until 2007; when they did make their debut, they were "sold at $45 a pound, which comes out to be about $11 a mangosteen!" (same website as above / Wikipedia). They're still rare in America today, but the price is down to around $9/lb.
Luckily for me, I can have this amazing fruit everyday - lowest price: roughly $1/lb! ($2.50/kg; 2.2lbs/1kg; $1.14/lb) Long live the Queen (of Fruit)!
Note: This picture is from: http://www.eantioxidantjuice.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/mangosteen.jpeg. More mangosteen info can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_mangosteen
Siem Reap. Cambodia.
