A Friday Chat About Juicing With Your Hands
Let’s never speak of the Juicero again.
MEGAN: Happy Friday! I can’t wait to chat about what we’re going to chat about today.
NICOLE: SQUEEZE THE JUICE! WITH YOUR HANDS!
MEGAN: SQUEEZE IT. SQUEEZE THE PLASTIC BAG JUICE WITH YOUR HANDS AND MAKE BAG JUICE.
Seriously, okay, maybe everyone’s overreacting about Juicero, the dumb juice machine that squeezes a bag of juice for you and does it more inefficiently than you would with your own bare hands. But I love it. I love everything about this stupid story.
NICOLE: I think my favorite part is that the machine can decide not to squeeze the juice. If it’s “expired.” Or if it thinks the spinach has been recalled.
Or maybe my favorite part is that the CEO wrote that blog post explaining that this was easier than just eating fruits and vegetables. With your hands.
MEGAN: The fact that the machine can assess that it doesn’t want to do the job its supposed to do because it read a QR code because it’s attached to the internet is ridiculous. Like…get outta here, juice machine. The CEO’s blog post in response, however, is the actually the best part. I agree.
Eat fruit. Vegetables. Eat them. With your fucking hands. Not with a bag. Do you think people actually spent money on this??
NICOLE: Didn’t they? Or did people just buy it so they could make YouTube videos and thinkpieces about it?
MEGAN: Even though we think this is patently ridiculous, this kind of thing appeals to a certain kind of person, I think. I mean, if you watch the ad for it, the person this is intended for is a busy rich person who loves gadgets and also juice. And the internet. And having all of your things connected to the internet that you can control from your phone while sitting by the pool, maybe.
NICOLE: I will say that I buy bagged baby carrots instead of gnarly adult carrots because it is easier to eat those vegetables with my hands. The price differential is like, a few pennies per ounce? Maybe that’s my slippery slope towards a $400 Wi-Fi-enabled juice squeeze machine.
MEGAN: I’m all about ease when it comes to eating hand vegetables. I will take a bagged baby carrot over an unwieldy adult carrot, even though I know that baby carrots are just adult carrots chopped into tiny lengths and peeled. I am also a monster that will buy an entire crudite platter meant for cocktail parties and eat it over the course of a week, so do with that what you will. Do you care for juice in general? I realize that’s a central question to this entire debate.
NICOLE: It depends on the juice. Orange juice is great! Spinach juice is… like… why don’t I just get to eat the spinach with some slivered almonds and a light vinaigrette dressing?
Do you?
MEGAN: I have very clear juice requirements. I’ll do a fruit juice because, duh. If a green juice has enough fruit in it to make it not taste like rotten salad, I’m down. Beet and carrot juice makes me want to die. But I’m not the type to like, drink a juice instead of lunch. I’ve considered a juicer because it seems “fun” to make my own juices but honestly….they do seem like a lot of work.
Shit. Maybe I’m the target demo.
NICOLE: I remember when “juice” came from a cardboard cylinder in the grocery freezer section and you had to put it in a dingy Tupperware pitcher, add water, and mash it around with a wooden spoon. But sometimes if you were lucky there would be, like, a concentrated juice ice flake in your glass, because of course you’d be impatient and pour the juice before the frozen part was fully melted.
MEGAN: Yes!! Love a frozen juice concentrate, though I realized recently that I can’t drink orange juice unless it’s bougie, because the taste of certain orange juices (maybe from concentrate??) remind me of screwdrivers in college.
I still don’t think I’d buy a Juicero. I might want a Vitamix. Sauces! Soups! Smoothie/juice things! So many options.
NICOLE: The thing I don’t like about the Juicero is that the best part of the vegetable, the fiber, is the part that you’re supposed to carefully clean out of the Juicero pack and either pitch or compost before lovingly returning the Juicero pack to Juicero.
Put that vegetable fiber into brownie mix, at least!
MEGAN: Yeah! I feel like with a Vitamix or a blender or whatever, you can just throw the vegetables in there and zap it to hell and then you have the fiber and the smoothie-juice (smooce? joothie?) and you win. It ALSO seems like a real hassle to return the packs to the company. They’re reusable, I assume. A lot of people I know have SodaStreams and the hassle of like, dealing with the CO2 cartridges is half the reason they don’t use them.
NICOLE: Soda water is still pretty cheap on its own. As is syrup. Just mix ’em together with your hands.
MEGAN: Use your hands for everything!! Hand fruit and hand soda for all!!
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