Durian Emptied a Library in 2019. It Also Fuels a Multibillion-Dollar Trade.
In 2019, 550 students evacuated the University of Canberra's library because of durian. Its sulfuric odor had been mistaken for a gas leak — and according to JSTOR Daily, that kind of false alarm is common enough to have grounded planes and baffled fire departments. Then there is the other half of the fruit's reputation: despite the smell, durian's sweet flesh has built a multibillion-dollar consumer market that the article says fuels economic growth in Vietnam, Malaysia, Cambodia and Thailand. Disgust and appetite rarely share an object this openly. The smell that reads as danger to a fire alarm and the fruit that reads as luxury to a buyer are the same thing.
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For anyone who has not met one, the American botanist Francis Ramaley's 1905 attempt to describe the smell is a good starting point: a rare combination of vile odors, he wrote, moving from rotten eggs to sewer gas to garlic before giving up on classifying it at all.
The market is the real rebuttal to the smell. Revulsion is not rejection — people simply disagree about what the fruit is worth enduring.