Plastic surgeon warns: avocado is dangerous
The Dutch Association for Plastic Surgeons is sounding the alarm. They are increasingly seeing people who have permanently injured their hands while cleaning an avocado. The cause: according to the instructions, the hard pit must be pried out of the fruit with a knife. Dangerous, say the surgeons.
Where does it go wrong? People cut the avocado in half and then try to use a large kitchen knife to get the pit out of the avocado. On the packaging, for example that of Albert Heijn, there is an illustration of a knife in the hard pit, so that you can remove it just like that. Dangerous, warn the plastic surgeons. They are treating more and more people who have chopped into their hands with a forceful blow of a chef’s knife or who try to lever the knife under the pit, in order to pop it out afterwards. A knife can easily slip on a slippery avocado, resulting in serious wounds that may even damage tendons and muscles.
Numb fingers
Plastic surgeon Annekatrien van de Kar tells NOS: ‘We often see sensory nerves in the fingers being damaged or severed. Sometimes people even injure a tendon.’ The result can be permanent numbness in the fingers. If those tendons cannot be repaired, this may mean that someone can no longer move their fingers, or only after a long course of physiotherapy.
Keep the knife in the drawer
That needs to change. The plastic surgeons advise leaving the chef’s knife in the drawer. The NVPC has even made an instructional video demonstrating a special avocado-cleaning gadget. In the video, the surgeon cuts the avocado open with a plastic knife, removes the pit with a special gripper and takes out the flesh with a kind of egg slicer, which immediately cuts it into slices.
Warning: avocado!
American plastic surgeons have called for mandatory warning stickers to be placed on avocados, explaining to people that they should not hack into an avocado with a knife. That may be going a little too far for the Netherlands, but instructions that specifically recommend using a large knife are the other extreme.
Read also:
- Common mistakes with the millennial fruit numero uno, the avocado
- Shocking: are avocados actually vegan?
- Holy moly: this is the heaviest avocado in the world
Source: NOS.nl
