The Frantic Search for Blackmarket Mango Juul
An excerpt from Forbidden Fruit, plus an event fighting food insecurity in NYC
Cake friends,
We’re writing to you live from Zohran’s New York. What a joy! What a week. In a time of so much instability and struggle, it’s inspiring to feel like we are entering a new era. Congratulations to many of our team members, contributors, and friends who volunteered their time and energy for this campaign—and of course to our new Mayor Mamdani and his wife Rama (who also happens to be a contributor to our previous issue, Daily Bread).
NYC is thrumming with energy, and we’re harnessing this hope to help our friends at One Love Community Fridge fundraise to open a new fridge in Crown Heights amidst unprecedented SNAP cuts.
Join us back at Honey’s in Brooklyn on November 16 for a benefit soirée featuring food from the Lao pop-up Heunkuoa, cake from Losers, a great lineup of DJs, and a magazine stand curated by yours truly. We’ll be selling Forbidden Fruit alongside issues from Acacia, Forgotten Lands, Field Mag, Off Menu, One Love Community Fridge, and The New Order. 100% of sales will benefit OLCF. We hope to see you there!
Today in the newsletter, we’re sharing a real favorite from our newest issue, Forbidden Fruit: Ankit Sethi’s true account of his blackmarket search for mango-flavored Juul pods.
Trading in Mango Futures
Essay by Ankit Sethi
It’s not hyperbole to say that mango Juul pods saved my life. I had been an inveterate smoker since college: my one true vice. Drinks and weed were fun enough at parties, but a good drag on a cigarette was the only demon calling out to me when I was alone.
Even back then, I had a vague sense of the necessity to quit before serious consequences ensued: going bald, getting cancer, or maybe both if I got hair loss from the chemo. Hand in hand with this modest wisdom came an inborn conviction that when the time came, quitting would be a smooth transition, an inevitability. I would be a smoker, and then, tides of fate intervening, no longer be.
I went through a few chapters of my early to mid-twenties with the habit going strong. In my broke international grad student era, I decided quitting might do something for my self-confidence, which had taken a hit after moving to the United States. The energy to attempt quitting often came to me after dinner time. To my mind, this would be easy: It’s only a little longer to bedtime and if you can make it that far, you wake up the next day at the twelve-hour detox mark, which is a very solid foundation (worth a chip, surely?). It would be the kind of progress my brain would be loath to destroy. Emboldened by this solid analysis, I would hold my pack of cigarettes under the kitchen tap, drench it in water, and toss it in the trash. Within the hour, though, my courage would completely buckle and I would need a cigarette. Money was tight, so I couldn’t just go buy another pack. Instead, I would carefully remove the drenched cigarettes with tweezers, then very lightly toast them on a pan at low heat. Low and slow was the key. Done just right, you could steam away enough of the moisture without burning the paper on the outside. Those drags were a soggy kind of nasty, but they burned. I eventually got quite good at toasting my cigarettes.
As I approached thirty, I started waking up to chest pain, dull needles stabbing my lungs. And over time, the needles got sharper. My situation had started to feel genuinely dire when I tried my first Juul. It took a bit to find my flavor: Cucumber felt like smoking a vegetable, “fruit” was trying to be everything, and vanilla creme was too rich to be a daily driver. But mango, oh sweet mango, was my savior! Tropical sweet yet candy sour, complex yet fresh—a chemical bouquet that took me back to childhood summers in India, every meal ending with cold, thin-sliced mangoes. A few days in and things were already different. The memory of my last cigarette was already like watching TV on mute, form and color were still visible but (at last!) nothing kept me from changing the channel.
Having secured this fragile victory, I was like the guerilla army that found their revolution accidentally victorious, now turning to the great task of consolidation and institution building. Going back to the way things were terrified me, and I resolved to construct my entire life around never letting that happen. I immediately bought several Juul devices and signed up to get mango pods auto-shipped monthly, each order at the maximum limit they would sell.
Allow me here a technical interlude: In my line of work, we often talk about High Availability or HA. HA emphasizes the need for designing IT systems that are highly resilient in the face of (inevitable) failure. Think of your favorite app being capable of serving content through earthquakes, or solar flares, or a disgruntled employee smashing some disks. Clearly, I needed to HA the fuck out of my Juul situation.
At a minimum, I carried two devices with me at all times (always in separate pockets), with at least two replacement pods and chargers. I investigated strategies—was it better to use one device as the main and switch when the first dies (Active-Passive) or to share the load equally (Active-Active)? This is but a taste of the mental effort that went into succeeding at the workplace. When I traveled internationally, I would carry three or even four devices all spread out in different pockets of my cargo pants and jackets to account for pickpockets, bad roads, nosy friends, power outages, or unknown unknowns. I carried a power bank specifically for my Juuls, phone battery be damned. I was constantly vaping. I was vaping in my seat through eighty-six-minute movies at Regal; I was covertly vaping in my seat through thirteen-hour international flights. There was never a time when I couldn’t take my mango hits.
Then, in late 2019, the regulators started stepping in. My beloved mango pods were called out in the press as a public health menace, designed to hook the kids on nicotine. Near overnight, fear of FDA action prompted Juul to pull flavored pods off the market. I managed to amass a four-month supply before their website stopped selling fun flavors. To me, the stakes were existential. Running out of mango pods meant a return to cigarettes, to an ugly, slow, miserable end. No! That chemo money was now fully invested in mango futures. I found several websites that promised to ship U.S. customers mango pods from other countries. I didn’t have the luxury to worry about scams so out came the credit card. To my surprise and relief, legitimate Made in Canada mango pods began arriving at my doorstep in discreet packages. These businesses charged a pretty markup for the arbitrage, but I would have paid several times more if they had asked.
Over the coming months, I became an expert in tracking the shifting regulatory landscape across the world as successive nations struck the hammer down upon my beloved mango. The Canadian option lasted close to a year before Juul Canada also beat a retreat. I prayed for my gray market buddies to make quick friends in more laissez-faire countries. Before long, these websites began offering an “International” version which turned out to mean Russian. Same great mango flavor! This stroke of luck lasted me through the summer of 2021, before news alerts gave me advance warning that Russian regulators were also cracking down. Sure enough, I was soon receiving emails expressing deepest regrets for the “temporary delay” in sending next month’s shipment.
All was not yet lost, though. Based on a close reading of a translated Russian news article, I was able to determine that their regulators were targeting online sales but still permitted in-store purchases. What I needed was an actual, physical person who could walk into a cigarette shop somewhere in Russia and buy a bunch of pods on my behalf. Luckily, there are “proxy buying” websites where you can find someone to do just that. Searching the Russia catalogue, I picked a woman named Ekaterina from St. Petersburg whose profile touted a long career in professional proxy buying and commitment to customer satisfaction. Wanting to be helpful, I took the trouble to locate a specific vape shop in her city and placed my request. To my surprise, she playfully ribbed my modest order and hinted that others were asking in far larger quantities. It seemed I was swimming among whales, all tapping into the same market to supply their endangered favorites. Concerns about U.S. customs creating trouble proved unfounded and before long Ekaterina’s packages from St. Petersburg were renewing my stockpile. She and I traded phone numbers and continued future dealings one-to-one on WhatsApp. At this point, I was paying $35 a pack for what used to be a $16 purchase. My commitment went to the tune of hundreds of dollars a month. After a few more months of stability, Russian regulators moved to end the sale of the product outright. When I reached out to Ekaterina, she reassured me that she was able to continue fulfilling requests.
As it turned out, Ekaterina had invested in some HA of her own. Subsequent shipments to my home address began arriving from Kyiv. She had partnered with someone in Ukraine to supply her client list from perhaps the last jurisdiction still selling mango pods. The nicotine warning came in a slightly different kind of Cyrillic, but the taste was still heavenly. I admired her resourcefulness and wondered if this arrangement could finally be something stable.
Of course, a few months later, Russia invaded Ukraine. As I saw the news, my immediate thought was to text Ekaterina about our mango supply lines. No response at first. Fearing the worst, I began rationing my mango usage and forcibly acclimating myself to alternative nicotine juices (bootleg lychee wasn’t bad!). Four months passed this way, and she finally replied with both an apology and an update: It was infeasible for her Kyiv business to continue but her customers were welcome to make one final order that would be fulfilled out of her personal stockpile of 150 packs. The catch: Due to U.S. sanctions I would need to pay her using crypto. I said I would think about it and briefly considered dipping my toe in the murky pool of international financial crimes but in the end, chickened out.
Through those months of war, I held on to one last mango pod, saving it like century champagne. When I opened it up on a late August day to celebrate a big win in my personal life, I found those tropical flavors had faded, replaced by a harsh taste that stung: fruit of the rotten tree.
Ankit Sethi is a software engineer who made his future wife strawberry rose cookies for their third date and, in doing so, sealed the deal.
Want to support Cake Zine’s independent work? Subscribe to this newsletter and order a copy of our latest issue: Forbidden Fruit.
Support: On Sunday, November 9, L’Atelier Ébène is hosting a bake sale at Allan’s Bakery on the LES, starting at 10 a.m. with pastries like Coconut Sticky Buns, Beef Patty Croissant, and Ackee & Saltfish Focaccia. All proceeds will be donated to Hurricane Melissa relief efforts in Jamaica.
Support: Over 34 Brooklyn bakers are participating in a bake sale on Saturday, November 15th at Heirloom Supper Club to raise funds and shelf-stable food donations for One Love Community Fridge & The Campaign Against Hunger. RSVP here.