Durian - The Stinkiest Fruit

This is a fruit I've always been intrigued by. My aunt is totally in love with it but my mom won't eat it because it smells so bad. My mother's repulsion for the fruit, has dissuaded me from trying it. Some say it smells like dirty sweat socks. In fact in South East Asian countries where durian grows, durian is prohibited in subways, malls and hotels. But for durian lovers the recent prospect of an odourless durian raised much controversy, from the International Herald Tribune:

After three decades of research, a Thai government scientist working at an orchard here near the Cambodian border says he has managed to take the stink out of durian.

The spiky Southeast Asian fruit, variously described by its detractors as smelling like garbage, moldy cheese or rotting fish, is banned from many hotels, airlines and the Singapore subway. But durian lovers, and there are many in Asia, are convinced that, like fine French cheeses, the worse the smell, the better the taste....

Durian lovers are horrified by the prospect of a no-smell durian. They complain that the fruit, which is green or sometimes yellowish and shaped like a rugby ball, is being homogenized just like the insipid tomatoes bred to look pretty behind cellophane on supermarket shelves.

A comprehensive entry on the joy of durian is in Wikipedia:

The durian, native to Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia, has been known to the western world for about 600 years. The British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace famously described its flesh as "a rich custard highly flavoured with almonds" in the 19th century. The flesh can be consumed at various stages of ripeness, and is used to flavour a wide variety of savoury and sweet edibles in Southeast Asian cuisines. The seeds can also be eaten when cooked. The name durian comes from the Malay word duri (thorn) with suffix -an.