This shipment was the result of years of maneuvering and lobbying efforts that went straight to the top; even then-president George W. Bush had been plied with an Indian mango sample. The importation of Indian mangoes into the US had been officially banned since 1989, ostensibly due to concerns over pests that might have spread to American crops. Even before the ban, mango shipments from India had been vanishingly rare.

On April 27, 2007, a shipment of 150 boxes of Indian mangoes arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York in what The New York Times described as “ probably the most eagerly anticipated fruit delivery ever. ”

“India is to mangoes as Bordeaux is to wine,” said David Karp (no relation), a Los Angeles-based fruit expert and University of California, Riverside researcher who wrote the original New York Times article on the 2007 shipment. “It’s their center of origin and diversity and excellence, and there’s nothing better than a great Alphonso mango.”

But more important than quantity and variety is the fact that India’s mangoes are, by almost all accounts, the world’s most delicious.

Indian-Americans, in particular, knew exactly what they had been missing. India is the spiritual, cultural, botanical, agricultural, and culinary homeland of the mango—scientifically, Mangifera indica. The South Asian nation grows far more mangoes than any other, representing over 40 percent of the world’s production of the fruit. Over 1,000 varieties grow in India, each one celebrated and defended in its region, from the bright orange Kesar of Gujarat to the small green Langra of Uttar Pradesh.

Ah, the Alphonso; among India’s beloved varieties, none is more famous than the Alphonso, grown mostly near Ratnagiri, Maharasthra, and sometimes called the “king of mangoes.”

Many times in my life, I’ve eaten something that is supposedly the prime exemplar of its category—the best banana, the best anchovy, the best burrito—and I’ve found the quality differential to be subtle; I’ve learned accordingly to temper my expectations with these kinds of things. But the one time I was able to eat an Alphonso mango, at the diminutive fruit stand at the luxury London department store Harrod’s, I was blown away. I remember being amazed that fruit that good could actually exist. The flesh was a deep and uniform marigold color, completely devoid of the stringy fibers that sometimes plague supermarket mangoes. The aroma and taste was not qualitatively different from the mangoes I had known, but intensified manifold, as if the souls of ten mangoes had been concentrated in just one fruit. It was the Platonic ideal of a mango, this Alphonso mango.

The overturning of the ban and the arrangement of the first post-ban shipment was largely spearheaded by a Pennsylvania dentist named Bhaskar Savani, who was born and raised in Gujarat but moved to the United States in 1990 to attend dental school.

“My father used to come in the summertime and smuggle mangoes for me. And he got caught one time,” Dr. Savani told me over the phone in December. “I was outside of JFK Airport looking for him. Sure enough, he shows up three hours later; he was smelling like mangoes completely. He said he had to stay because the USDA inspector told him to throw the mangoes in the trash can. He ate as much as he could, like three or four kilos of mangoes.” This episode set the young dentist off on a convoluted six-year mission to understand and eventually defeat the ban.

It was on a visit to India in 2006 that Bush tried an Alphonso mango, announcing to Singh that it was “a hell of a fruit.”

Savani’s research convinced him that the ban was as much due to political reasons and bureaucratic inaction as it was due to legitimate phytosanitary concerns. Mango stakeholders with operations in Latin America, the source of nearly all mangoes eaten in the US, feared competition from India, with its copious production of delicious mangoes. And the potential pests could be neutralized by irradiating the fruit, a practice that had already been employed in sterilizing meat and other produce, and which harms the taste and texture of a mango less than the hot water treatment used for most mangoes imported from Latin America.