In the video: everything you need to know about avocados/Editor: Gilad Mann Mannheim
It has happened to all of us, or at least *almost* happened to all of us, in very different degrees of danger.
Take Alana Clark, for example, a 32-year-old business consultant who lives in Paris, and definitely knows how to work in the kitchen.
So knowledgeable, in fact, that she attempted to remove the avocado pit from her hand with a perfectly sharpened knife while casually chatting with her friend.
The result was bad, very bad.
"The knife penetrated the flesh of my palm," she said, "right between the fingers, and hit a nerve."
She collapsed in her kitchen, was immediately taken to the hospital and entered the operating room the next day.
"Avocado hand", it turns out, is a thing.
Knife, avocado, hand.
The fast way to the hospital/ShutterStock
"Can you imagine someone walking into the emergency room with a bloody hand and explaining that an avocado did it?"
The meteoric rise of the green-yellow fruit has boosted its sales in the last decade by incredible volumes, establishing its status as a food staple and as a superfood.
Socially, at least.
We also participated in this celebration, obviously, and continue to participate in it - from extending life with one simple action to an easy trick that will help you choose the perfect avocado.
Obviously.
But life isn't all about colorful bowls of guacamole and photogenic avocado toast.
Life, of course, is also what happened to Clark, which in recent years has become a medical phenomenon that requires its own name.
"In some cases, the cut can be very serious," explained Dr. Marie Elizabeth Rashid of Illinois to the food magazine Bon Appétit, while warning of health consequences and significant damage to the hands of the cutters. Other doctors
pointed out that this is an embarrassing injury ("You can imagine Someone walks into the emergency room with a bloody hand and explains that an avocado did it?"), and one of them experienced it in the first person. Literally. "I cook a lot, so it was a particularly hard blow to my ego," she repeated, pointing to a reminder of that painful experience - a scar In the form of a smiley on one of the fingers of the left hand.
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Avocado/Giphy
A 2020 American study counted more than 50,000 similar injuries between 1998 and 2017, with a 40% jump in the last four years measured.
80.1% of these tens of thousands of pain were women, and about half of them were young women aged 23-39.
These staggering numbers, almost needless to say, do not include those who were cut, but did not come to get help.
The data coincides with the huge increase in fruit consumption, and the age segmentation also speaks the same language, of course.
But the base is the thing itself, on its rough and uneven skin, the slippery core and the desire to imitate the movement of a professional chef and send a sharp blade into an area full of traps.
Thus, the knife can easily slip from the pit, but even then the danger does not go away, because many of the injuries occur while people hold half a peeled avocado in their hand, and approach it with a knife in the other hand.
So how do you really do it?
First,
cut the avocado in half while it is placed and held on a cutting board
.
As soon as the knife reaches the seed, hold the cutting hand in place, and rotate the weak hand, the one holding the avocado, so that the knife remains stable, and relatively safe.
If you are less into risks and dangers, the easy way to remove the core is to simply
"push" it out
of its place, with the help of moderate finger pressure from behind and around.
"He'll jump out of there like he never intended to get to that place," described Emma Lapuerka, the magazine's senior food editor.
So, instead of cutting the flesh of the fruit with a knife, just
scoop it out with a spoon
.
"If the avocado is very ripe, you can also remove the skin easily, and without effort," she added.
Other methods advocate the use of a
metal protective glove
or a
dedicated avocado knife
, made of plastic.
It might make you feel like kids, but these kids keep their fingers crossed.
"I buy all my friends knives like this," admitted Dr. Rashid, "there is no choice."
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Avocado