The Fruit Cure

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 centre 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.

About the Author

Jacqueline Alnes is a writer, runner, and assistant professor of creative writing. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Guernica, Jezebel, Longreads, Ploughshares, Tin House, Electric Literature, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere. In 2017, her essay ‘I Remember, I Re-re-remember’ was selected as runner-up in the Black Warrior Review Nonfiction Contest by Hanif Abdurraqib, who described Alnes’s writing as ‘a complex narrative about the fragility of the body, and the ways in which it can fail us, or dare us to remain triumphant in spite of its failing.’ She served as nonfiction editor of The Portland Review, holds a PhD in creative writing from Oklahoma State University, and an MFA in nonfiction from Portland State University.