PLASTIC SURGEON WARNS: AVOCADO IS DANGEROUS

Say wine, snacks or haute cuisine and the gourmands at online food magazine FavorFlav know where to drink, how to eat it and what to cook. This time our cheffies serve you: 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 hand while cleaning an avocado. The cause: the hard pit must be removed from the fruit with a knife according to instructions. Dangerous, say the surgeons.

Where does it go wrong? People cut the avocado in half and then try to remove the pit with a large kitchen knife the pit from the avocado. On the packaging, for example that of Albert Heijn, there is a little drawing of a knife in the hard pit, so you can remove it that way. Dangerous, warn the plastic surgeons. They are treating more and more people who have chopped their hand with a chef's knife in such a firm blow or who try to pry the knife under the pit to pop it out afterwards. Such a knife quickly slips on a slippery avocado, resulting in serious wounds, where even tendons and muscles can be affected.

Numb fingers
Plastic surgeon Annekatrien van de Kar tells NOS: ‘We often see that sensory nerves in the fingers are damaged or cut. Sometimes people even hit a tendon.’ The consequence can be permanent numbness of the fingers. If those tendons cannot be repaired, it may mean that someone can no longer move their fingers, or only after a long course of physiotherapy.

Knife stays in the drawer
That must change. The plastic surgeons advise leaving the chef's knife in the drawer. The NVPC has even made an instructional video in which they demonstrate a special avocado cleaning device. With a plastic knife, the surgeon in the video cuts the avocado in half, uses a special grip tool to pick out the pit, and with a kind of egg slicer, he removes the flesh, which is immediately sliced.

Watch out: avocado!
American plastic surgeons have called for a warning sticker to be mandatory on avocados, explaining to people that they should not chop into the avocado with a knife. That might be a bit too far for the Netherlands, but an instruction that recommends using a large knife is the other extreme.