Slurp Slurp ...

Being lucky to have extremely spontaneous friends, I found myself, squeezed together with three others in my Mini Cooper, on a crazy road trip to Italy. I am, however, not going to blog about the trip but rather about a very disturbing incident at the very first petrol station we stopped at. Roasting inside the car in the summer heat, the four of us quickly ran inside the “shop” to buy something to drink. And then it happened:

“What’s your favourite smoothie?”,

one of my friends asked me while rummaging through the shop’s fridge until she found what she was looking for: a pale orange mixture of banana, apple, mango and passion fruit in what looked like an oversized test tube. Very tempting, I have to admit.

My favourite smoothie? I never expected to be asked this question. I already have difficulty deciding what to wear every day, let alone what my favourite item of clothing is. The same with authors, songs, films etc. So, answering my friend’s question about which puréed fruit salad I liked best was too much for me. But when I told my friend that I don’t like smoothies, I wasn’t prepared for her reaction. “WHAT?”, she stammered and gave me a look as if I had said I hated chocolate. The conversation ended in an uncomfortable silence as we went to the cash point. The tension was only resolved when we stepped out of the shop and into the bright sunlight again. It almost “ruined” the whole trip, this stupid question.

Smoothies – mashed fruit filled into small glass bottles that often bear a striking resemblance to test tubes – are for me an unnecessary evolutionary link between fruit juice and baby food. The idea, offering fresh fruit in its liquid form, isn’t new: hundreds of years ago people were already squeezing fruit to juice because it just tasted better that way. What was left, the slimy pulp, was fed to animals. Today, we preserve the pulp and swallow it ourselves, paying about three Euros per ¼ l. Hello, progress!

I am not saying that Smoothies are bad – they certainly contain numerous vitamins and minerals, and drinking them sounds reasonable from a nutrition standpoint. But that’s about it. They are boring and I much prefer the taste of fresh fruit in its original form. Biting into an apple, to me at least, is so much nicer than trying to swallow a viscous, apple-tasting sludge. Also, come to think of it, we’ll all soon enough be forced to eat/drink our lunch and supper puréed at the old people’s home anyway. I’m going to wait until then. Yuck!