The most dangerous fruit

The internet warns me that the most dangerous vegetable is the avocado. Indeed injuries involved with cutting and pitting avocados are so common, that the emergency rooms have adorned them with the cute nickname or 'Avocado hand'.

And I wonder what the most dangerous fruit is?

Clearly coconuts are dangerous. They are heavy and grow high up on trees. We have all heard that coconuts kill more people per year than sharks. This is perhaps quoted more to emphasise the infrequency of shark attack than to warn people against walking in the coconut forests of Papua New Guinea, but we have heard it. It is exaggerated, and there is a Wikipedia on Death by Coconut that addresses this, but injuries are not unheard of.

It turns out there are internet lists of the most dangerous fruit. Some can kill you by choking, some, like the coconut or the durian, by blunt force attacks. Some fruits have poisonous seeds, some, like the banana, contain a chemical that is lethal in high doses– doses usually that would be impossible to consume.

The Lychee nut is poisonous if unripe, and has caused death.

No-where on these internet lists did I see the persimmon. There are all sorts of persimmon. The ones we could get in Canada were always hard, and usually more astringent and chalky than sweet. They never fit the description of the persimmons from a Rudyard Kipling story; and indeed, this is why I began to doubt his claims of how the camel got its hump.

When I came to Korea though, I met several kinds of persimmons. Sure there are the hard-bitter ones, but there are also hard-sweet and soft-sweet. This soft-sweet is really the sweetest of fruits. They cannot export them to Canada because they are too soft. I can hardly get them home for the market without squishing them. But get one home, peel off it s filmy rind, and you can suck its sweet flesh up like slurping soup.

Oh, and there are the soft-bitter. Nobody eats these, we just leave them on the trees until they drop off and cover the side-walk with the slimiest of slimes. And this is how they attack you. No poison, no blunt force death-from-above. This insidious fruit waits on the sidewalk until someone walks past, and throws them to the ground to scrape up their palms and get guck all over their pants.

More people are tripped up every year by persimmons than by sharks, and I think it is about time that this was made public.