Juice wars

I was flabbergasted by pomegranate juice in Istanbul. The squeeze didn’t stop there.

a) Seedy
There are many things I am missing about Sydney, well, Australia, at the moment. One of the less obvious is Spring Valley Orange and Passionfruit Juice. It’s worthy of capitalisation, this daily juice, this emergency repair fluid, and has wrenched me out of many a physiological and psychological pit. And then there are the liddle facts.

Anyway, fresh strained passionfruit juice surpasses the SV Orange and Pash by several degrees. It’s usually a combination of yellow and black passionfruit (one of which is sweeter), slightly sweetened and chilled. It’s embarrassingly cheap and divinely wonderful. I attempted to drink my body weight in passion juice (yes, sorry) on Lamu, being concerned that I might never sup the nectar again. Happily I find passion juice to be widely available all the way down the East African coast.
I drank this one at Buni Café in Zanzibar. My Peace Corps contact told me that in many parts of Tanzania, passion juice is the only available fresh juice. It is an excellent substitute for Spring Valley. Now I need to find a stand in for Darrell Lea liquorice.

b) Slimy
I like avocados almost as much as I like passionfruit. My fierce love for fresh avocado with any combination of lemon/lime/Tabasco/garlic/tomato/onion/toast/chilli/wasabi mayonnaise/soy is only undermined by my furious loathing for any kind of cooked or over-processed avocado. The avocado which regularly appears in the vegetable tempura bowl at Don Don on Oxford St is a blight on the good name of that fine institution. I have no hestitation about shifting to the imperative here: Avocados should be cut in half, chopped, or mashed. Avocados shouldn’t be put anywhere near heat and they shouldn’t be put in a juicer.

Avocado juice is advertised on most juice menus I’ve seen since arriving in Africa. I’ve not experienced an iota of curiosity about avocado juice. Avocados shouldn’t be put in a juicer and that’s that.

I’m staying at a guesthouse in Zanzibar which provides breakfast. Breakfast starts with a plate of fruit and a glass of fresh juice. Yesterday a glass of pale green juice was placed before me. Um, what is it, I asked somewhat timorously. Avocado juice with lime, madame. Everything OK? Yes, yes, yes.
On the grounds that any principle worth rattling on about warrants testing, I decided to swallow my doubts and taste the juice. My prudence was possibly addled by the earliness of the hour. Icy crystals of very sweet lime juice baffled my expectations as to the texture of avocado juice. This glassful was very sweet, a little bit slimy, quite creamy, and not particularly flavoursome. If I’d been told that it was soursop or custard apple juice, I might have been able to drink the whole glassful. Somehow though, the knowledge that it was avocado juice acted upon my swallowing reflexes and I barely got through half a glass. I see no reason to vary the dictum: Avocados (wonderful fruit that they are) should never be put in a juicer.

By way of conclusion, to vindicate the triumph of one juice over another, here’s a sunset more passionfruit than avocado.The rubbish on the beach is clearly a reminder that we live in a fallen world, a world in which avocados are put in juicers, a world in which neither fresh passion juice nor Spring Valley juices are universally available.