Burying the Hatchet

Coconut and I have been at odds for as long as I can remember.  With the notable exception of coconut milk in Thai curry, I have loathed every food I have ever tried that has even the smallest traces of coconut.  “You can’t even taste it!” “It doesn’t even taste like coconut!”  Oh, how I detest those wheedling phrases, but I always relent.  I always give it a try.  Coconut shrimp, Caramel Delite/Samoa Girl Scout Cookies, Piña Coladas, Mounds candy, coconut rum… no, thank you.  Part of it is a texture thing- I can tell instantly if a cookie has coconut in it- and part of it is good old fashioned flavor.  I admit that I occasionally tell people that I am allergic in order to justify not eating proffered coconut treats. (Remember that episode of Wishbone when Sam had that awful reaction to the granola bar with coconut in it?  I was crazy jealous.)

So, naturally, when I was offered “coconut juice” on my first day in Zanzinbar, I politely but fervently declined.  “But Jo, it doesn’t even taste like coconut!”  *sigh*  So I relented to my sweetly insistent guides, and the driver pulled over to the side of the road.  He got out and came back a few minutes later with a large green coconut whose top had been whittled down and with a hole in the top.  He handed it to me and told me simply to drink.  When I looked inside, all I could see was clear liquid, and it didn’t smell anything like coconut, so I figured, what the hey?  I drank deeply from the awkwardly large seed, and it tasted magnificent!  Which is to say, NOTHING like coconut!  From my experience, I would say it tasted like very slightly sweetened water.  Had the coconut stayed on the tree for another 6 weeks or so, all of that water would have been absorbed making the hard coconut flesh that torments me so, but when it is still young enough, the “juice” is a delightfully refreshing treat. 

I feel that this is a big moment in my life, philosophically speaking.  If I can find a way, after all of these years, to enjoy raw coconut, then surely there must be a way to world peace!  But, you know, a way that doesn’t involve cutting down a growing thing in the flower of its youth to drink its life source.  That seems a little extreme in any other situation.