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While the rest of us were busy grillin and chillin getting our faces melted off by the heat wave on Labor Day weekend, chef Jet Tila and his team were out creating the world's largest fruit salad.
Tila, who owns The Charleston and Kuma Snow Cream, joined the University of Massachusetts for the fifth consecutive year to create the World’s Largest Fresh Fruit Salad, weighing 15,291 pounds. He's a big fan of, well, big food. He's also set five other Guinness World Records, including two for the World's Largest Stir Fry (4,010 lbs.), the Longest California Roll (440 feet), and the Largest Seafood Stew (6,500 lbs.).
It took over 500 students, staff, and volunteers at the Amherst campus to create the massive fruit salad, which was presented at the school's Welcome Back Barbeque.
It took the group approximately four hours of slicing, dicing, pitting, and peeling of 150 varieties of fruit to fill a 15-foot diameter swimming pool. The mixture included 20 varieties of apples weighing more than 3,600 pounds; 19 varieties of melon weighing more than 2,500 pounds; peaches, bananas, oranges, quince, passion fruit and rambutan.
Half of the fruit was purchased locally, giving a boost to the homegrown economy. Fresh.
