Is the poison fruit from The White Lotus real? Details revealed

The White Lotus Season 3 recently came to a remarkable conclusion on HBO. The latest season of The White Lotus saw the depiction of a deadly poisonous fruit that assumed center stage in the narrative.

As per the details from the finale episode of the Mike White led show, Timothy Ratliff's obsession with taking his own life to escape his troubles pointed out the existence of an otherwise common occurrence in South Asia, i.e., the poisonous fruit of the pong pong tree.

When asked by a member of the group of the high-profile guests vacationing at the resort in Bangkok about the fruit's edible properties, a resort employee explains that the kernels of the seeds of the pong pong tree contain the poisonous agent cereberin, which can actually cause heart failure if ingested in real life. The pivot around which the third season revolves is actually rooted in real life.

The White Lotus: poisonous pong pong tree and other details

The themes of tasting the forbidden fruit and allowing one's own self-destruction are replete throughout the entire narrative of the HBO show. Therefore, it is only pertinent that Mike White and his writers' room decided to incorporate the real-life pong pong tree and its poisonous seeds into the storyline.

The seeds have been used for centuries for a variety of purposes, including medication, shamanistic witch trials, and more importantly, suicide and chemical assassinations.

The poisonous agent present in the seeds of the pong pong tree is cerebrin, which, if ingested, can cause one's heart rate to decrease dramatically. The poison then proceeds to shut the victim's heart down by reducing heart activity. The victim would feel dysrhythmia and palpitations before expiring.

A National Geographic report quoted Professor Owen McDougal, who is a professor of biochemistry at Boise State University:

"It (cerebrin) will basically override the polarization within the body that's required for the heart muscle to contract and relax, without the impulse and relaxation phases, the heart muscle just stops working. It's not a desirable way to go."

The poison has, however, held deep cultural ties, with many communities using it for ritualistic purposes. This has been reiterated by a 2002 journal article that the National Geographic report mentions:

"A person suspected of spiritual subversion, and sometimes even of theft or other mundane offences, had to drink a solution of tangena shavings in water, followed by pieces of chicken-skin. Vomiting the latter was taken as a sign of innocence. Some people thus tested died from the effects of the poison. Others failed to vomit the chicken-skin, in which case they were considered guilty and liable to be executed.”

Mike White speaks about The White Lotus Season 3

In an exclusive interview with The Hollywood Reporter, writer-director Mike White spoke at length about the third season of The White Lotus. When asked about his decision to come to Thailand to film the third season, White remarked:

"Originally, I wanted to shoot in Japan. I was in Thailand when my dad and I got eliminated from The Amazing Race — two weeks in an elimination station with all these other bitter reality contestants, I was just like, “I don’t ever want to come back here.” But HBO was really pushing it because Thailand had good tax incentives. As an artist, your knee-jerk reaction is, “I’m not doing that!”

The White Lotus is exclusively available on HBO.

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Edited by Sroban Ghosh