Update: avocado hand – should the fruit come with a warning sticker?

” The problem may not be at endemic levels, but at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London, Mr Eccles says he treats about four patients a week with avocado hand. And at St Thomas’s hospital in London, staff have actually become accustomed to the “post-brunch surge” on Saturdays, the Times reports.”

I look forward to the warning on fat splatter at nudist camps around the UK : )

Is Which? proposing a section on dealing with vegetables and fruit safely? It might be an added reason to be a subscriber if you can confidently use Which? for advice on many matters. And it could be linked to the report on best splatter guard, and avocado tool.

To remove an avocado stone from a half avocado, hold the avocado with one hand and twist a corkscrew into the stone for a few turns with the other, then pull firmly.

The consequences of taking learning to cook and food management off the curriculum come back to cut us on the hand…

We just need a few headlines, you tube videos and good cookery programmes to put us back on track and avoiding the worst of the gory damage but it will take us much longer to teach people how to feed themselves and their families easy and nutritional food as more than one generation have lost the skills. School is not the only place of learning. Here is where Granny and Grandad could be very useful teachers.

I took the end off a finger with a mandolin because I wasn’t careful enough. Several years later I braved the machine again and I’m really not sure it is worth the bother. It would have been better to have learnt really good knife skills instead.

Almost anything that is tricky or risky has a plethora of instructions and tips on-line nowadays, including the notoriously fiendish avocado preparation experience. What none of them say is whether, with sharp knife in hand, one should address the avocado lengthwise or crosswise. Perhaps it makes no difference but I think twisting the fruit to expose the stone would be easier across the width than along the length . . . just a poser to prolong this intensely fascinating discussion. They probably look better served as two matching halves than as a top and a bottom. Avocado aficionados would probably benefit from investing in a chain-mail glove of the sort worn by butchers; this would take a lot of the pressure off A&E and help the country get back on its feet.

What else is there to do on a Sunday morning in London than admit to balsamic vinegar anxiety, or try to resolve the quinoa pronunciation conundrum? At last, the ever-resourceful avocado has provided a new topic of metropolitan discourse. Stone me! Whatever next!?

Personally I can’t stand the taste of avocado, smashed or otherwise, and don’t even think of putting guacamole on the table.

For those incapable of using common sense, try holding the halved avocado (assuming you have managed to cut it thus without severing an artery) with an oven glove before chopping into the stone with a (sharp) knife and rwisting it free.

I wonder how many of us have managed to survive diy all these years – chisels (keep both hands behind the edge), circular saws – use the guard…….. We ran courses in a factory for the workers to keep them (relatively) safe – for their benefit and the insurers. A basic lesson was not to point a screwdriver towards your other hand when tightening a screw – it can slip and make a hole.

With acknowledgement and apologies to Monty Python (and any convo regulars whose names are used here):

WC: Today on Which? Conversation we’ll be carrying on from where we got to last week when we were showing you how to defend yourselves against anyone who attacks you with armed with a piece of fresh fruit.

Ian: Oh, you promised you wouldn’t do fruit this week.

WC: What do you mean?

malcolm_r: We’ve done fruit the last nine weeks.

WC: What’s wrong with fruit? You think you know it all, eh?

wavechange: Can’t we do something else for a change?

DerekP: Like someone who attacks you with a pointed stick?

WC: Pointed stick? Oh, oh, oh. We want to learn how to defend ourselves against pointed sticks, do we? Getting all high and mighty, eh? Fresh fruit not good enough for you eh? Well I’ll tell you something my lad. When you’re walking home tonight and some homicidal maniac comes after you with an avocado , don’t come crying to me! Now, the avocado . When your assailant lunges at you with an avocado …

I eat a lot of avocados and would generally consider myself to be pretty clumsy but I have never suffered any injury preparing them and have never needed instruction on how to do so! Are people so daft that they cannot work this out for themselves? I certainly never learnt at home as avocados had barely been heard of in those days. I just cut lengthways around the stone, twist the two halves apart and flip the stone out (pointed away from me and fingers out of the way) with the point of the knife.

I thought “Avocado hand” was the title of a new horror movie…

With most fruit containing big stones [peaches, plums, apricots] the stone is free of any attachment to the flesh when the fruit is perfectly ripe. Is this not the case with the avocado? Would it not be better to wait until it is ripe enough to extract the stone effortlessly? I would expect the occasional avocado to be more palatable then anyway.

My tip – don’t eat avocados. 😉