A Religious Experience

Have you ever met a juicer?


You know what I'm talking about, right? One of those guys with 0% body fat, jogs twenty miles a day, always in a good mood? They suck down juice for breakfast, lunch, dinner; making a mockery of their own digestive tracks. "You want solid food, stomach? NO! You're getting pureed celery and carrot, just like when we were six months old!"

And then there's all the talk about how a juicer extracts the essential nutrients of fruits and vegetables that you can't get any other way, which doesn't make sense because if I wanted all the nutrients of an apple, I'd just eat the apple. All the preaching I've ever heard about juicers and their incredible supernatural properties stinks of New Age gimmicks.

Despite that, I've been curious about juicers; and today, I tried one.






Something interesting that I learned about juicing. While a fruit might appear juicy, it's probably only about 2% juice. The rest is just skin and pulp and crap. See?

Two peeled oranges. One peeled banana. One apple.

Out of this I got about twelve ounces of juice. It was a comically small return, given the effort of buying all this produce, peeling it up, extracting the juice, and then cleaning the pulp out of the machine and washing all the different, detachable parts. The only fringe benefit is watching a piece of modern engineering tear apart produce so fast that the fruit literally disappears as soon as it hits the blades. So cool.

But when I finally got to drink the juice? It was a singular, unprecedented experience in my life.

Let me give you some perspective: I drink juice every morning, and in the evening I usually have another glass of juice. I never buy crap. Anything with corn syrup I don't even consider a juice. I like the good stuff. I know what good juice tastes like, and if you regularly drink soda then you'd find me really fucking annoying.

But after a sip of this magic potion extracted from a plate of baby vomit, I had to sit down.
It was as if I'd spent my entire life drinking flat soda, and I never knew it was flat until I finally got to drink one that was carbonated. It wasn't simply that the flavor was richer. It was better. It was a lot fucking better in ways I wasn't expecting.


It's still a pain in the ass to clean up, though, and it's definitely the most expensive twelve ounces of juice I've ever drank, but any doubts I had about juicing went away with that first sip of fruity heroin. Fucking amazing.