Why You Should Be Afraid of Jackfruit
Things like this should not fall from trees
If you’re not afraid of jackfruit, I have a theory. You’ve never met one.
You may have seen little bits and pieces of one in a hipster dish, but never the full creature in all its glory. If you saw one in real life, uncut, you’d run in the opposite direction.
There are so many things wrong with the very concept of jackfruit that each wrong thing deserves its own little headline:
Jackfruit is too big.
No fruit is supposed to be this big. Okay, I know, watermelon. But watermelon begs you to bite into a slice and maniacally slurp up the juices.
Jackfruit looks like something is going to jump out of it and eat you maniacally. Besides, would you ever consider boring out a jackfruit and pouring tequila into it?
Also, you could fit about 15 watermelons inside a small jackfruit. No lie.
Not only is jackfruit too big, but they hang from trees.
That’s just wrong. What if your toddler gets nailed by a falling jackfruit while she’s sitting under the tree drooling over the latest Bella Poarch videos? How is this a good thing? I mean, apples are hard, but they’re not the size of small cars. They won’t really hurt you if they fall on your head.
Jackfruits look devious
Holy shit, they have spikes! They look eerily like the coronavirus, except they’re the size of bunker-busting bombs.
I don’t want to eat a fruit that looks like it needs to be splattered with Lysol and is too big to fit in an airplane’s overhead.
Jackfruit fans compare it to meat
What???? NO! No, I do not, I repeat, do not want to eat fruit that tastes like meat. Especially fruit with spikes. And is the size of a tiny home. If I want meat, I’ll find myself some good old-fashioned methane-producing bovine.
I’m no climate denier, but I might become one if I’m forced to eat jackfruit that tastes like meat.
It can weigh 120 pounds
That was almost as much as I weighed in high school. And then there’s that poor toddler sitting under the tree watching videos. Also? I walk to the grocery store and back. How the hell am I supposed to carry a jackfruit home? A wheelbarrow?
They’re stringy
Unless it’s guava, I’m not going to eat your stringy fruit.
They look like they’re gonna hatch at any time
I don’t want a Jackfruit sitting on my kitchen counter only to see a Rudy Giuliani clone pop out of it. Do you?
You can’t throw it
You should be able to throw fruit that falls from a tree. Full stop.
You can’t slice into it without using a weapon of mass destruction
You need a power saw and a backhoe to carve it up and distribute it. I don’t even want to think about the kind of knife that would be required to slice one of these things. Would you want someone stalking your neighborhood who owns a knife big enough to power through a jackfruit?
The only way to enjoy jackfruit is to cover it with stuff
Anything. It doesn’t matter. But now we encounter a double problem. You should not, under any circumstances, cook fruit unless it’s in a pie. And nobody is baking jackfruit pie.
You also shouldn’t need to cover up food that you’re supposed to look forward to eating. This is a very simple concept everyone can understand.
For example, I tried some jackfruit not too long ago in a pre-made pouch of astronaut food from Trader Joe’s.
Astronaut food, for those of you not living alone, is any pre-made food that comes in an envelope that you can heat in the microwave. There’s tons of it at the supermarket if you know where to look (Aisle 5, Astronaut Food).
The little envelope came packed with Tikka sauce and some jackfruit. I thought to myself, hmmm, well camouflaged. Perhaps I should finally try this stuff. I love Indian food, and I don’t care much what they put in it as long as nothing is swimming around aggressively in the sauce looking for food of its own.
So I cooked it up and put it on a bed of rice and quinoa (the pre-cooked kind that comes in an envelope).
I stared at it, dukes up, for a very, very long time.
I knew that its flavors would be covered up by the sauce, but I was still afraid. This wasn’t my first showdown with jackfruit. Other times, I’ve backed down, unwilling to try it.
I sniffed it. Everything seemed okay. The mixture from the envelope looked a bit like pulled pork in tomato sauce. I found this disconcerting. I asked myself why I was eating fruit that looked like pulled pork. That seems wrong on many levels.
I didn’t really know what I was eating, so it was fine. They could have replaced the jackfruit with empty tea bags and I wouldn’t have noticed.
I’ll probably try it again someday. I’ve always wanted an excuse to buy a machete.
NOTES
Jackfruit is actually a popular food in Bangladesh. And very cherished in general throughout South Asia.
So I’m not going to go on an anti-jackfruit crusade or anything. I’m an American, which means I complain about stupid things. This is what we do.
So, I just have one request: If we are going to eat the stuff, can’t we at least call it by its (somewhat) Malaysian derivative, chakka pazham? I could eat something called Chakka Pazham, I think. That’s a cool name.
This story originally appeared on Muddyum.
