The Case Against Passionfruit

The other day I overheard a colleague of mine stating that the passionfruit was underrated.  I find it difficult to believe the passionfruit could be underrated.  Lets face it, this is a fruit whose principal achievement is persuading people to eat it despite the fact that its exterior looks like a swollen, gangrenous testicle and its interior looks as though someone has already thrown up into it.

Despite these weighty disadvantages the passionfruit keeps turning up on our dining tables like a wrinkled bad penny.  This is testimony to either the persuasiveness of the passionfruit or an indication that when desperate people will eat anything that can't get away from them.

Passionfruit is one of those things I tend to eat by stealth.  Which is to say I never actually go out of my way to eat passionfruit but there are no end of things I eat that when I bite down I hear the brittle crunch that indicates a passionfruit seed has made its way into the mix.  Either that or another of my teeth has given up the ghost.  Possibly there should be one of those warning labels "may contain traces of passionfruit".

According to the fount of all knowledge (Wikipedia) passionfruit is native to South America which raises the question of what did Europeans choke on before they colonised Brazil?  After having colonised the place what on earth possessed them to take the passionfruit home to Europe?  Strangely having grown up in the sweltering tropical climes of Rio de Janeiro window boxes it turned out to be quite at home in the more temperate, windswept garbage dumps of England.

Having acquired the passionfruit the Europeans quite understandably did their best to get rid of it dumping it in every part of the world they managed to colonise.  "Here, have syphilis, exploitative colonial overlords and, wait for it, passionfruit."  Personally I suspect a lot of nations would get on better with their former colonial masters if it wasn't for the damn passionfruit.  There is only so much a proud indigenous culture can take.

It is only fair to point out that passionfruit can make loyal companions and are the ideal pet for children as nothing you do to them can make them look worse than they already do.  However some feel they are a little unresponsive.  I like to think they are just reserved.

Still the baleful effects of passionfruit glower over us.  No pavlova is considered complete without some passionfruit splattered across it like semen from hell.  In Australia we even have fizzy drinks purporting (highly dubiously) to be passionfruit flavoured.  Every fruit salad in my home country is speckled with passionfruit seeds resembling nothing so much as dessicated fly corpses and existing solely it would appear to make you doubt the durability of your teeth.  The human race marches forward and passionfruit marches with us, the evil goblin at our party of civilisation.  Hopefully genetic engineering will soon produce a photogenic, seedless variety that can clean out drains and wash our cars.  At that point I will happily buy one.