Calla: Alyx, smoothies are disgusting and the biggest trick played by the health and wellness industry on regular people since coconut oil.
Here’s the thing: drinks should not be thick. It is deeply unpleasant. Anything thicker than a flat white is no longer a drink but some kind of sloppy dessert that you persist in drinking through a straw.
Second, all fruit is better in fruit form. Absolutely no fruit in the world is improved by being blended into a runny paste with protein powder and coconut water, or even – health be damned – ice-cream. Blueberries, objectively the best fruit, turn into weird shredded bits of skin. Everything tastes like banana. Even kale is better when allowed to maintain its structural integrity.
And the whole concoction is too thick to be swallowed like a proper liquid and instead sits on the tongue like some kind of weird fruit soup.
Please don’t try to get me to make one – I already know what they taste like and I don’t own a blender. Why? Because the only thing you need a blender for is making smoothies and they suck.
Alyx: Calla, you’re completely missing the point of smoothies. And I can prove you wrong without making you try one. My argument is logical, not culinary: they’re not meant to be good. They’re meant to be efficient. You’re totally right blending something as texturally magical as a blueberry into a smoothie makes it less than the sum of its denatured parts. And it’s little seeds? Ugh. Gross.
What a smoothie is good for is taking a lot of cheap, low-waste, healthful ingredients and combining them as quickly as possible into something you can consume rapidly first thing in the morning.
As a vegetarian, you’re probably acutely aware that vegetables are hard work. That’s probably why so few of us eat enough of them. Sure, kale can be better if it hasn’t been blended into a smoothie. But to make it better you have to either massage it and break down some of its toughness with acid (effort), chop and steam it (effort), or turn it into chips in an oven (so much effort). Smoothies eliminate that work.
You just buy a bunch of frozen cruciferous things (spinach, broccoli, the aforementioned kale) and chuck them into a blender with a sweet fruit like banana or mango and some coconut water to make it runny. Then you whiz it for a minute and you’ve got a breakfast that’s already delivered about half your recommended daily amount of veg – which is a lot more than can be said for toast or cereal.
Now you’ll notice I said you should buy frozen veggies. This is important for two reasons. The first is they blend much easier, so the smoothie will have a more pleasant texture and will be icy cold. The second is frozen vegetables are cheap and don’t accidentally turn to goo in your fridge if you don’t eat them in time. If you need extra protein you can use a powder (really gross) or frozen peas (not as gross).
As for the “too thick to be swallowed” thing, you need to make them runnier and drink them through a thick, glass straw. Efficiency!
Since you don’t have a blender, my assignment to you isn’t to make a smoothie and see if it’s OK. It’s to think about what a low-sugar, high-vegetable smoothie could do for you. Think about your daily vegetable intake and your routine. Are you in a rush in the mornings? Are you eating all five serves every day? If you are getting enough vegies, do you have to really think about it and try hard to make it happen? If you’ve answered yes to the first or third question, or no to the second, the real answer is smoothies.
Sure it’s not a special treat but it’s palatable enough and the real treat is not having to be particularly mindful of your vegetable intake for the rest of the day. I’ve been having one for breakfast for the past five years so I can concentrate on enjoying the meals I want to enjoy without worrying about the ones I just have to get through.
Calla: Alyx, I am getting flashbacks to an argument my dad used to have with my mother and me around this time every year when the apricots started to ripen. He always wanted to turn them into jam, saying it was not physically possible to eat all the apricots on the tree. Mum and I always resisted. Store-bought apricots are terrible and ours were ripe for such a short window. We would not waste such fleeting bounty by turning it into jam.
So every year we ate apricots by the bucketful for about three weeks until they started to rot. What I am saying is do not bring common sense to a food fight. I shall not heed it.
Like you, I eat the same breakfast pretty much every day: porridge with whole rolled oats and chia seeds plus yoghurt, soy milk and whatever fruit is going (usually blueberries). I soak the oats the night before so I can just microwave them for two minutes and I’m done.
The key difference between this breakfast and the vaguely palatable vegetable smoothie you described is: I like this breakfast!
Nutrition is all well and good but if you’re eating things you don’t like just to meet your vegetable quota, well, if you’re a person like me that means you’re having a second breakfast of a croissant with your morning coffee to make up for the fact that your first breakfast sucked. It’s not efficient if you need a do-over at 11am.
Macros are wonderful if they work for you but what I care about is food. And that means getting my five-a-day in other ways, which I mostly manage to do. My diet is very far from perfect, but that’s due to an abundance of chocolate and never enough protein, not an absence of vegetables. And yes, I know protein powder in smoothies would help with this, but weighed up against the cost of a consolation pastry I’ll just add more Greek yoghurt to my porridge and hope for the best.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to learn that I eat the best – both in terms of the quality of meals and their nutritional value – when I make food that I actually enjoy. That does take time but I enjoy the time that it takes. My morning routine is very streamlined – I don’t wear makeup because I am so bad at it that almost no one can tell when I’ve got it on – but unless I have a very early start, I make sure I leave 20 minutes to have breakfast and a coffee while catching up on all the ways the world slipped into the ocean overnight.
I like cooking, on my own and with others, even if it just turns out as it does most nights: roasted vegetables tossed through raw vegetables with whatever pulse doesn’t need to be soaked for 12 hours.
I do very much get the benefit of having pre-packaged servings of vegetables ready to go in the freezer. I always have at least two types of soup on hand for lunch or a quick dinner. Arguably, soup is just a warm smoothie but it tastes better and has more interesting textures. Although that could be because – as you noted – I don’t own a blender.
Now if you like smoothies, that’s wonderful. Continue to enjoy your healthful breakfast. But if you don’t, no amount of efficiency or cost-effectiveness is going to make you feel satisfied unless you are a person to whom food is just fuel. I envy people who think on such terms because it must make things easier but I’ll never be one of them. On the plus side, it means I’ll never need to try to get broccoli out of a glass straw.
Alyx: Look, I hear what you’re saying about what works for you, and it’s true that for me breakfast is a necessary chore. I can’t take pleasure from food unless I have an hour – minimum – to appreciate it, which means I have one pleasurable meal a day and the rest is purely fuel. But you haven’t refuted my broader point which is that smoothies (unlike coconut oil) are not a trick – they’re a life hack.
You may hate them and that’s fine. You do you. But admit it: when you set your feelings aside and look at the world through the ice-cold, runny green lens of nutritional efficiency they make perfect sense. I’m not trying to change your heart, Calla, I’m trying to change your mind.
Calla: Well, yes, when considered through the cold hard lens of nutritional efficiency, smoothies make sense. But so does Soylent, the meal replacement drink that swept through Silicon Valley a few years ago but which, Alyx, I doubt you’d recommend. Making decisions on the basis of nutritional efficiency is no way to live a life.
It’s only a life hack if it works for your life otherwise it’s just a suggestion which can be happily disregarded.
Alyx: Well, there’s one thing you’re definitely wrong about. I used to drink a product very similar to Soylent every day when I lived in the US. I didn’t own a blender at the time. It was a very efficient alternative.
Calla: Of course you did. I’m going to file this one under “irreconcilable differences”.
Prove Me Wrong is a new summer series in which Guardian Australia colleagues argue over whose tastes on popular culture, food and leisure activities are right … and whose are wrong.
