it's a bird! it's a plane! it's....a pomegranate?

I'm sure everyone by now has heard all the buzz about so-called superfoods. What was once a lowly piece of fruit or veg can now be declared as the very uber of healthy, the creme de la creme of your produce aisle. Any food given superfood status automatically skyrockets in sales and pretty much needs its own agent and dressing room. 5 years ago did anyone in the Western world even know what a pomegranate looked like? It was as foreign to us as bananas were to Brits before the 1950's. But now they're all over the place; on our juice shelves, sprinkled over salads and whizzed into our smoothies. I am a great lover of the beautiful, jewel-like pomegranate, as I've previously declared. There's something about discovering a new fruit or a new veggie that just really excites me, probably more than it should to be honest. I tried my very first persimmon over the holidays and subsequently also discovered my first food allergy, although I've been told that they feel like metallic cotton in others' mouths as well. Shame really, because they're such a lovely shocking shade of orange, quite unlike anything else that regularly goes into my fruit bowl (except maybe...erm...an orange).



My point is that the superfood trend has really taken the marketing world by storm. Consumers love food trends and I am one of them. I tried acai (pronounced ah-sah-ee) for the very first time last month.



Hailed as even super-er than the lowly blueberry or even the posh pomegranate acai hails from Brazil and I'm sure their farmers are more than happy to push their exotic detoxing, antioxidant-rich fruit onto the yummy mummies and food nerds of the West. Pomegreat has even gotten in on the acai action and have released a version of their pomegranate juice blended with acai. (It's very yummy). Innocent smoothies have released a line of superfood smoothies which are on average about £1 more a carton than their normal 1 litre smoothies. Probably worth it considering how jampacked with nutrients it is. Currently residing on my fridge door is their Superfood Detox Smoothie which contains - of course - blueberries, pomegranates and acai. It's very rich and very scrumptious.



While I'm praising Innocent, I'll go on to say that I've sampled their Smoothie o'the Month, which of course is also a detox smoothie, and it contains beetroot, ginger, apples and pear. Incredibly yummy. I love veggie juice but I'm afraid drinking it straight is a bit too hardcore for me so blended with fruit and the almighty ginger is just perfect.



I suppose I could get all properly curmudgeonly here and rant about how the marketing world is preying on our "Are we getting 5-a-day??" insecurities but I won't, mainly because I fully support 5-a-day and know that on the days where I forget to include fruit and veg I feel like a big slug. I felt so proud of my best friend's son, who at the age of 4 really wanted to try my orange and carrot juice because he "loves carrots!" and was all over my pomegranate-blueberry smoothie like it was a Snickers bar.

Why do I know I'm going to get sacked with a kid that only wants to eat noodles with butter. Sigh.