Yes, I’m back, after a summer of unplugging, replugging and then unplugging, I’m riding on the peaking crest of the fruit wave that is pounding through your life right now. Seriously, I mean have you been paying attention? Just LOOK at all the amazing vegetation we have right now, and especially the huge diversity of fresh fruit. Fruit is symbolic of the full expression of the drama of life, so pregnant and juicy, so full of possibility — and yet possibility only — as the fruit itself is only the potential of a new life yet to come. But we don’t see this, the rough winter ahead of us, and instead we consume the fruits, the juices dripping down our chins in a sticky film like fly paper — it is the LUST for fruit, yeah VERILY, that is symbolic of our lust and desire for life itself. Fruit is so fucking good. Yeah baby!
Fruit fruit fruit fruit fruit. There is so much of it. So much we can do with it! Calm down, relax. Let’s celebrate fruit but let’s be aware of what we are doing. Too much fruit can leave you sitting in a barren wilderness of physiological confusion where every fruit becomes like an empty husk. Like sitting on the stained bedspread of a cheap motel, possibly with the clap, and definitely without your left shoe.
Fruit fruit fruit fruit fruit! More properly identified as the seed of the plant, there are a huge diversity of shapes and sizes, everything from the winged helicopter samara of a maple tree to the fat fat fat juicy fatness of a ripe ass mango. Ok, calm down. Often what is best about fruit, or what we call fruit anyway, is what surrounds the fruit. You get that? What surrounds the fruit. What embraces the fruit, what is bound to the fruit – something extra — something superfluous maybe? But OMFG! It is nature’s gastronomic cleavage shot. Just look at a peach. Just pick it up and look at it. Need I say more? Is there anything more exquisite than popping a pit from its orangey-pink goodness? Fruit is designed to tempt us. Nature wants us to scatter her goodness so she kicks up the lust factor a notch by clothing these naked seeds in some of the tastiest flesh you’ll ever have the chance to suck on.
But maybe nature is a little more coy than that. You see, what we read into fruit is really just a manifestation of our collective human psychodrama. The pomegranate of Persephone and Hades, the story of Adam and Eve and that fucking apple – fruit is not only symbolic of our existential angst but our issues with neuro-regulatory control. And partly this is because we are too damned smart for our own good, which basically means we’re ripe, plump idiots. You see, early on during the agricultural revolution we discovered this ability to hybridize our food. With fruit this meant we could take bitter and rather tart fruits, say like a wild crab apple, and over several millennia, turn them into very sweet and relatively fiber-free replicants, sometimes like the banana or green cardamom, disabling the plant’s ability to sexually reproduce. If you hadn’t noticed, this is an encroaching theme in modern agriculture, from the seedless watermelon to the in vitro fertilization of turkeys, our food is literally losing its potency. We cut off their cojones for an empty dick, and now what do we have? Supermarkets stuffed full of emptiness, packaged by the phallus of a marketing splurge.
As I mentioned in my post on vegetables earlier this summer, most fruit is far too sweet nowadays to be automatically considered good. We need to restore neuro-regulatory control by being a little more judicious in our approach. The kool-aid is higher potency people, and what we are seeing now, with sky-rocketing rates of diabetes and heart disease, is a species-wide bad-trip at risk of getting our proverbial stomachs pumped. “Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables” my ass. Eat vegetation, of which a very little bit can be sweet. Too much sweet will raise your blood sugar (duh!), cause weight gain (duh!), promote vascular damage (duh!) and feed cancer cells (duh!). And whether it’s black forest cake or bunches of grapes, sugar is sugar is sugar. Petroleum products are natural too, so let’s get away from this “natural” sugar argument. We’re smarter than that, right?
What most fruits do have is a kick-ass collection of antioxidant compounds, that do in part offset their negative effects. But the best fruits are still those that aren’t full-on sweet, what I refer to as “half-sweet” fruits. When I work with folks that have poor glycemic control, I remove all sweet fruits, but allow a portion of half-sweet fruits as a snack. This might include some apple, blueberries, raspberries or strawberries, or tropical versions like cantaloupe, guava and passion fruit. I generally counsel them to avoid very ripe fruit, or very sweet fruits like mango, papaya, banana and dates. This is not to say that otherwise healthy folks can’t eat these sweet fruits, it means that for chrissake put your shirt on, come on inside and have cup of common sense.
In Ayurveda fruit is cooling, and anyone eating fruit should be aware that fruit will tend to cool them down. So if you have weak digestion, are already complaining of cool qualities like cold hands and feet, or are living in a cold place, you don’t need to eat fresh fruit. I know, it sounds sacrilegious, but just eat more lightly steamed and stir-fried veggies and you’ll feel fine. The only way for cold people to eat fruit is to change its qualities. In India, even where its hot hot hot, the people there avoid eating too much fresh fruit, at least without modifying it somehow. For example, fruits like mango, papaya and melon are chopped up and then tossed with a little oil, and herbs such as spices such as cumin, coriander, hing, ginger and black pepper. You can even buy pre-made fruit chaat spice mixes in your local Indian grocery store – the closest one to me is the Punjabi Market between 50th and 51st Ave, on Main street. These herb mixtures counteract the cooling, cloying properties of fruit, and promote good digestion, which is essential to good health. You can also try fruit salads with herbs such as basil, mint and cilantro, with a little salt… total delish.
For dry people lacking energy stewed fruit is very good. I have several folks eating this regularly, to build up the blood and vital energy. I get them to cook up fruits like prunes, raisins, goji berries and figs, along with spicy herbs such as cinnamon, cardamom, clove and ginger, and a dollop of ghee or butter, and eat this before bed. Not only does it build up the body, it moisturizes the bowel in the treatment of scratchy sad little poops. For added fun and benefit I add in herbs such as Shatavari (for women) and Ashwagandha (for men), to boost the medicinal effects. Also prepared with herbs like Dang gui or Rehmannia, and then blended, filtered and mixed with equal parts molasses, we got ourselves a nice medicinal syrup to treat anemia and post-partum issues.
One thing folks often do is can their fruits, which literally means cooking the living bejesus out them and then storing them in sugar. Canned fruits are tasty but a squirmy, slippery, sloppy version of plain old sugar. Maybe something pretty special 200 years ago when you ran out of potatoes and carrots, but nowadays canned fruit has lost the context it once had. So instead of canning, why not ferment your fruits? Did you know you can do this? That’s right, just like making lacto-fermented veggie pickles you can make fruit pickles! In India they frequently make pickles and chutneys from fruits like mango and lime, using a plethora of herbs and spices such as ginger, garlic and chili. You can make fruit pickles from any fruit, adding in whatever spices you like, including dried fruits like raisins and even nuts. Just chop it up into chunks and add some salt. Mix well in a bowl and store in a mason jar at room temperature for 2 days, and then store it in the fridge. Here, check out this recipe. Not only is this something rather special and unique in terms of flavor, it is contains less sugar than the fresh fruit, and its good for your gut and immune system too! Woo hoo!
Now go forth, and be fruitful!
