Pomegranate Juice

Last week's $30 bananas market basket seems to have done exceptionally well at free association travel. Today's vehicle is the pomegranate juice on sale two bottles for the price of one.

RantWoman loves pomegranates and she is so glad their antioxidants and assorted other beneficial components make them all the rage. RantWoman also loves pomegranate Juice and here is the story.

While in graduate school RantWoman spent four months in the then Soviet Union in the then-city of Leningrad, now again St. Petersburg. This was late winter and spring, just before Gorbachev went to China, a few months before the Berlin Wall fell. The mood in the city was expectant, but reality was pretty gritty. For example, RantWoman lived in an international dorm. She had two roommates from her program and two Russian roommates, all in an apartment smaller than the one she alone inhabits in Seattle.

The apartment had one large room for the chicks from the US and a smaller bedroom for whichever Russian roommate and boyfriend were staying there on a given week. There was an eccentric two-part bathroom where someone nearly always had laundry hanging, and a tiny kitchen with a small gas stove and what would be a dorm-sized fridge in the US. There was a certain amount of built-in refrigeration from windows that leaked gales despite our roommates' efforts to seal them with newspring papeier mache.The building had two small elevators, though on average less than one was ever working at any given moment. In short, this was basically a sixth-floor walkup and a stereotypical Soviet apartment.

There were also a couple stereotypical Soviet grocery emporia a couple blocks away. These ran heavy into bread, really good bread actually, pasta, eggs, dairy products of highly variable freshness, carrots, cabbage, potatoes, beets, and canned goods. There were better actual produce markets a good ways away, and very occasionally there were nutritional miracles, such as 3-liter bottles of pomegranate juice right at our own store.

The first time RantWoman saw one of these, she bought it just for the excitement. Do you have any idea how long three liters of juice last if one is the only one drinking it? Considering the refrigeration options, RantWoman guesses she also should be glad the juice did not completely turn to vinegar; the juice did tend to develop a fairly fierce tannic kick by the end of each bottle.Unfortunately, later, RantWoman acquired a cold and needed TWO more of these giant bottles one after another to keep the hacking at bay for the rest of her trip. Every single time Rant Woman toted her nutritional miracle home, she also got to trot up all the stairs! Since the bottles were glass and there was paid recycling, RantWoman also got to stand in authentic Soviet lines just to recycle her bottles and reclaim the deposit.

RantWoman thought of all this because last week's bottles of juice also had more of a kick than one expects US consumers to be wild about. The fearsome taste already makes her feel healthier, better exercised on account of all the stairs, and more ecological on account of the recycling. Ecotourism in a bottle?