The Dark Fruits

As I surfed the airways last night, looking for something to watch that did not include scantily dressed, bosomy, peroxided women fistfighting over something or someone, I chanced upon a commercial for Northland Dark Fruit Juice.

Dark fruit. Just the name conjures up something mystical, poetic, ominous, to wit: "the current economic crisis is the dark fruit of our labour in the fields of greed" or some such (feel free to use this sentence. I will charge only $1.00 per use, a very reasonable fee).

Apparently, the Big Wheel of Food Fads has spun and landed upon fruits with deep pigmentation as the most recent panacea for what ails us, fighting cancer by slowing the growth of colon cancer cells by as much as 80%, according to studies. And then there are all of those free-radical fighting, antioxidant benefits that will make us look better, live longer, and be debt-free in six months (well, maybe not that last one.)

We certainly are living in the Dark Ages. Last year's big movie The Dark Knight, dark fruit (you know, dark is one of those words that if you repeat it a lot it starts to look weird), dark economic times.

Northland's dark fruit juice includes juices of cranberry, blueberry, red grape and, my personal favorite, the pomegranate, the latest fruit to attain superstar status. I remember eating pomegranate seeds as a child, when my grandmother, that gustatory Magellan, introduced it into our diets on occasion. But then, it receded from my consciousness as a fruit to be regularly enjoyed.

It reappeared in a literary sense in one of my favorite Greek myths about Persephone, the goddess of earthly fertility, wherein the forbidden eating of four pomegranate seeds causes her to spend four months in the underworld every year, causing winter to descend upon the earth (kind of a parallel to the situation with Eve and the apple in the Garden of Eden). Interestingly, the word pomegranate is from the Latin for "apple with seeds."

Pomegranates, obviously an ancient fruit, have a rich history in many cultures. The shrub that produces it is native to an area from Iran to Tibet, and has been grown throughout the Mediterranean and northern Africa. The fruit is particularly useful in arid areas because of the sacks of juice it holds. Pomegranates last a long time, and were carried on caravans to provide liquid sustenance.

In the U.S., pomegranates are grown in California and Arizona; you can find them in supermarkets throughout the country. There are a number of recipes that use the fruit in a variety of ways.

Grenadine syrup is actually thickened, sweetened pomegranate juice, which suggests that all of those Singapore Slings and Tequila Sunrises we children of the seventies drank in college may bode well for us in our later years (I guess that would be now). We didn't know it then, but we were ahead of the curve.

Pomegranate juice is being added to all kinds of unlikely items, like soda, or body washes. There is also pomegranate-flavored vodka. I am sure that pomegranate-flavored chewing tobacco is probably in the works.

Maybe just having one sit in a bowl on your table will bring you to health.

Of course, pomegranates may have had their day in the sun; the other day I heard that black raspberries are the latest go-to fruit for cancer prevention.

I don't know about you, but I am looking forward to the day when scientists discover that a large bowl of ice cream a day keeps cancer away. Or, perhaps, a piece of butter cake.

Until then, I think I will look for pomegranates, as well as the other dark fruits, the next time I go to the market; berries are great to add to cereal or yogurt or oatmeal anyway. In the meantime, I think there is a bottle of Grenadine in the back of the liquor cabinet. Bet it tastes great on ice cream.