There is no such botanical creature as a "goji berry" anymore than there is an actual "bindi eye". What passes for goji is most commonly Lycium barbarum, or "wolfberry". This stuff can be picked up for a song at your local Chinese herbal shop and, I'm reliably informed, is as revered in the Chinese medicinal sphere to about the same degree as the ginseng root. The Chinese call it "Gou Qi Zi" - their word for "lycium", the "Qi" pronounced "chi" - which, when phonetically shoehorned into English, becomes "goji".
Where the goji can be found depends very much on who you ask, but you won't readily be told the truth - that it grows all over the world, though most abundantly in China. The people who flog it to you will tell you there is only one 'true' goji - theirs - and that it thrives in bountiful quantities in special places among "the unpolluted hills" of Tibet and the Himalayas.
In December last year, Simon Parry, a journalist for the South China Morning Post, actually went to Tibet in search of the goji, to the very region advertised as the font of the berry by the Tibet Authentic company. The folk at Tibet Authentic (whose website describes getting a prescription from a certified medical doctor, rather than drinking goji juice, as a "quick fix") refused to take Parry to their goji or tell him where he might find it, so he asked around: Tibetan medicine stores in Lhasa had never heard of Tibetan goji berries; a traditional medicine expert in Nyingtri, while confirming that berries grew in the region, declared it "impossible" that they could be exported on such a scale; an elderly nomadic couple, who had spent 60 years wandering the mountain valleys, did not recognise the goji berries when shown a picture of them.
"A pig farmer who guided us there," wrote Parry, "was perplexed at our interest. 'Sometimes, if there are many berries, we pick them and sell them in the town,' said Penba Niyama, 42. 'But Tibetan people don't buy them ... we just leave them for the birds to eat.' When I told him people in the west paid the equivalent of 140 yuan for a small bag of the berries, he shook with laughter. 'People there must be very strange,' he said."
Why Tibet might be chosen by western marketeers as the geographical seat of goji is no mystery. Despite being home to one of the more miserable peoples of Earth - an average life span of 60, one in three families hosting at least one disabled family member, an infant mortality rate of more than 1-in-10, an appalling adult literacy rate and an exiled spiritual leader so chosen because he lucky dipped the right toys as a kid - Tibet is still the "alternative" culture of choice in the eyes of dopey westerners who see it as some kind of advanced plateau of uncorrupted knowledge, its hillsides steeped in all manner of ancient wisdom apparently lost to its own wretched people. It is entirely possible that the modern obsession with Tibetan wisdom and longevity is based less on fact than on the 1933 James Hilton novel, Lost Horizon (indeed, the real-life Shangri-La, through which thousands of backpacking bozos stampede each year, was actually named after the fictitious place in the book).
But goji isn't confined to the Tibetan Plateau, rather the entire Himalayas and their immediate surrounds, the general inaccessibility of the region tailor-made for anyone selling something the root of which they do not wish to be found. Like Earl Mindell.
The father of the modern goji cult, Dr Earl Mindell is a Canadian-American who describes himself as "the world's leading nutritionist", but who actually scored his PhD from an unaccredited online university (the same "diploma mill", in fact, from which the Honourable Marcus Einfeld 'graduated'). Mindell, who published Goji: The Himalayan Health Secret in 2003, and who also happens to sell "goji" juice through multi-level marketing group, Freelife International, recently claimed during a Canadian television interview that "goji" was a cure for cancer, as had been proved, he said, by a study from the prestigious Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York, when in fact, according to the Sloan-Kettering website, no such study has taken place there at all. Almost everything else "Dr" Mindell has said about goji juice appears to be complete bunk.
In fact, for all the claims that riddle "goji" literature insisting that "studies have proved" this or that, there appears to be not a shred of credible evidence that "goji" is anything but a regular antioxidant, the legend of its magical properties existing exclusively on "goji" advertising material, which is equal parts hearsay, folklore, flaky testimonial and flat out lies.
Take this website, for example:
"They contain 500 times the amount of vitamin C, by weight, than oranges making them second only to camu camu berries as the richest vitamin C source on earth."
Not so. According to wikipedia - which notes its references and can at least be trusted for the fact it is selling nothing - the vitamin C content of wolfberry is "actually comparable to many citrus fruits and strawberries" and "is considerably lower than for numerous other fruits and berries, such as the Australian Kakadu 'billy goat' plum". The website continues:
"In several study groups with elderly people the berry was given once a day for 3 weeks, many beneficial results were experienced and 67% of the patients T cell transformation functions tripled and the activity of the patients white cell interleukin-2 doubled."
Really? What are these studies, where were they conducted, and by whom? One would think that those who so easily quoted from them would be able to supply a link or at least an annotation. Unless, of course, these studies don't exist. And again:
"The famed Li Qing Yuen, who apparently lived to the age of 252 years (1678-1930), consumed Goji berries daily. The life of Li Qing Yuen is the most well-documented case of extreme longevity known."
Bullshit. Li Qing Yuen's existence is no more "well-documented" in the real world than the life of Clark Kent. In 1933, TIME magazine made mention of this dubious character of folklore, noting somewhat cautiously that "to skeptical Western eyes he looked much like any Chinese 60-year-old". Assuming the old bugger actually existed at all, and that he was telling the truth if he did, the secret to his long life, according to 'the man' himself, was: "Keep a quiet heart, sit like a tortoise, walk sprightly like a pigeon and sleep like a dog" - no mention at all of pigging out on "goji". The only "documented" 'evidence' of Li Qing Yuen and goji berries together occurs in Earl Mindell's Goji: The Himalayan Health Secret, this unique history dutifully repeated nowhere else but on goji merchant website after goji merchant website. Anywhere else, and the "250-year-old man" is generally regarded an urban legend.
At the website for Goji Australia is a real whopper:
"Would you believe the average woman in the Himalayan Hunza tribe lives to be 100? Their secret? The berry of the goji (pronounced Go-jee) vine."
Bollocks. Though the Hunza do not keep birth certificates, making it difficult for anyone to ascertain their ages, the highest credible average estimate on record is 90, and their secret, well-known to all who've studied them, is apricots. Still, this nonsense is perpetuated as goji profiteers breed like rats.
And then there is this, from a flyer left fluttering from my letterbox recently:
"The Biggest Discovery in Nutrition in the Last 40 Years!" - TIME Magazine reveals the "Breakout Superfruit of the Year".
Pretty impressive. Surely a journal as respected as TIME wouldn't write such a thing if it weren't true. Well, it's isn't, and TIME didn't. This appears to be a complete rebuilding of a quick mention goji berries scored in TIME on July 16 last year, a wrap-up of the 52nd Summer Fancy Food Show in New York in which goji was described as "this year's breakout" of the "so-called superfruits" section of the show. The only other mentions of goji in TIME have been in an October 9, 2006 cover story about bogus supplements and in a response to a letter on the popular "Ask Dr Weil" column of September 6, 2006, in which Dr Weil replied to a reader's query by asserting that goji berries "offer no special benefits that pomegranates and more familiar berries do not". But I wouldn't bother calling the number on the flyer - you'll get a recorded message telling you to leave your details so someone can flog you some goji juice.
Which is not to say the goji berry has not received some positive press - just about every brainless magazine in the country has gushed about goji in the last 12 months, almost always quoting directly from goji marketing material - even The Daily Telegraph using goji promotional websites as references for nutritional information. When reading magazines, it's important to bear in mind that they exist not primarily to bring you information, but simply to meet their own print schedules, the staff - crumby 'journalists' and eager work experience kids, mostly - finding a ready-made slab of illustrated advertorial irresistible in those frantic, empty-paged hours before deadline.
The goji experience is actually an excellent example of how the internet is not so much an "information super-highway" as a bullshit mega-sewer, with apparently credible websites set up to support fraudulent information disseminated by others.
"Tibetan Goji berries are not Chinese wolfberries and it is not correct to call the Chinese wolfberry 'Goji'," lies the website for The Tibetan Goji Berry Company. "Local harvesters are careful to distinguish the 'Goji' berry from its distantly related offspring, the Chinese Wolfberry (Lycium barbarum) ... See the 'Goji' research pages for more information." Ignoring for the moment the vendor's own curious use of ironic quotation marks, a click to the "research pages" takes one to studies that certainly prove their point, conducted at The Tanaduk Botanical Research Institute, an establishment that sounds credible enough, but turns out to have no physical presence on planet Earth. A Whois search reveals that gojiberry.com and tanaduk.com are run by the same person, the "founder" of the Tanaduk Botanical Research Institute, Bradley Dobos, presumably the same as mentioned in this story:
"Julia Dobos and her husband, Bradley Dobos, a nutritionist, started importing Gojis about six years ago and selling them online."
Julia and Bradley Dobos are, in fact, The Tibetan Goji Berry Company.
It seems that, no matter how deeply one wants to descend into the goji juice well, there will always be bullshit waiting to meet you. Even the consumer information panel on a bottle of the stuff tells you that much. At first, the percentage looks good - 27 mls of goji juice for every 30 mls of what's in the bottle - but look closely and you see that's 27 mls of "Goji Juice Blend". Even if there are any magical properties to the goji berry, you have no way of knowing how much of the stuff you are getting in your "blend". And to find out, of course, you'd have to go to the Himalayas, 'cos they sure don't bottle it here.
It's a matter of common sense. There are no clinical trials that can't be linked to a merchant. There are no "amazing facts" on websites that aren't selling something. For a magical "superfood" that is taking the Australia by storm, there are precious few goji outlets, or known goji offices, or bricks-and-mortar establishments that one might approach when one has a complaint. Almost exclusively, goji products are sold by folk with mobile phone numbers, PO boxes and websites - nothing that can't be deserted quickly when the heat is felt around the corner. And that heat will come, when thousands of people realise they've spent a fortune on fruit juice, or when someone who abandoned their chemotherapy for the magical powers of a fairy-tale berry decides to sue the manufacturer for their own imminent death.
Goji juice, it appears, is fruit juice, nothing much more and a good deal less. If it's not, the people who are selling it will sue me for saying so. But they won't, because then they'd have to stand up in court and tell us what it is they've been peddling.
* First published in the Sydney Morning Herald on June 25, 2007.
