I have spent many years searching for bottled pomegranate juice. I have been into every Middle Eastern grocery store in the entire Centre Of The Universe. I have prowled the dark back shelves of countless health-food shops. My searches have been fruitless.

Until.

In May I found some at last, on the dark back shelf of a health food shop. The man at the counter, who did not look the slightest bit healthy, told me that pomegranate juice was full of antioxidants and that drinking it would allow me to live forever. It would aid my digestion and calm my tremors and prevent the settlings-in of illnesses and parasites. It would frighten off rogue prions by glaring fiercely at them.

"Gosh," I said to the man who did not look healthy, "that's even better than I had dared hope. I was only planning to use it to make cocktails."

"Cocktails?" asked the man who did not look healthy, "with alcohol?"

"Yep."

"You should never drink alcohol. Your body can just shut down because you are drinking alcohol. I really don't think it's good to know that your body might not be working in the next second. Do you?"

"Come again?"

"I am supposed to say that, after you have paid, when you are leaving the store."

"That's OK. You can still say it."

"OK."

"OK."

"OK. But you should not drink alcohol because your body can just shut down because you are drinking alcohol."

"OK."

I did not tell the man who did not look healthy that I intended to disregard his advice, because I did not want to make him sad. But when I got home I disregarded his advice.

Naturally, you remember the Persian Tart. It is the greatest cocktail in the world and I invented it. It consists of freshly-squeezed pomegranate juice shaken with vodka and Triple Sec and freshly-squeezed lime juice. It is just a Cosmopolitan that speaks Farsi, really, but it is delicious. Do you want the complete recipe? Simply search Google for the phrase "do not show anyone your breasts".

Even though pomegranates are seasonal fruit and it was not pomegranate season, I was about to shake up a delicious Persion Tart. I was so happy I quivered.

But the bottled pomegranate juice was terrible. It tasted like apple juice might, after someone had used it to wash a load of socks. It was 1.5 litres of ass. Yick. So I gave up on the out-of-season Persian Tart.

Until.

On Friday I found another variety of bottled pomegranate juice at that same health food store, where the same man who still does not look healthy still works. The new pomegranate juice was from Azerbaijan. Its label made many wonderful claims, which I will quote here:

Granate juice is allocated with a combination of userful effects: improves a tone of vessels, promotes translation of "bad" cholesterol in "good", increases saturation of blood by oxygen, than sharply raises level of hemoglobin, accelerates processes of updating in a leather (skin) and in all parenhimathosis bodies -- a liver, kidneys, easy, a spleen, thyroid and prostat.

It tasted just like the May pomegranate juice. Once again, I did not make a Persian Tart. I was sad.

The lesson here is straightforward. When the man who does not look healthy speaks, listen to him. Otherwise you will wind up with accelerated processes in your prostat, and then you will need to go and see a doctor, who will stick a probe in your bum without washing it first.

Posted by Bret at August 31, 2004 02:30 PM