A “Nutritional Masterpiece” and What Papaya is Supposed to Taste Like

In my entire life (toda mi vida?”) I have only bought two papayas. Each time, they sat on my kitchen counter in Montreal not ripening for periods of time ranging from a few days to a week and half and in the end they always tasted like nothing. That’s not to say I’ve only eaten papaya twice in my life, but in most of my cases of free papaya (fruit platters at catered events and fruit salads at restaurants that don’t know how irritating it is for a lactose intolerant person to be given yet another fruit salad where all the fruit has been sitting in refrigerated trucks and storehouses for up to a month) the fruit has tasted like absolutely nothing. And in the best of cases it has tasted like starchy fibre with a slightly bitter or rancid aftertaste.

So I always dreamed that a fresh papaya would taste like…well…something. Maybe it would be intoxicatingly sweet and pungent and initiate some kind of papaya awakening in me.

My first papaya juice in Lima, however, was pretty lacklustre. It was from a little snack shop next to Jazz Zone (pronounced “Jazone”) where an Argentinian fusion band at the International Festival of the Cajon was playing that night. Not the fanciest place, so I didn’t expect the best quality fruit, but even every so-so tropical fruit here in Peru will be better than in Canada, I figure. But there was no papaya epiphany in that juice. There was a tiny bit of bitterness to the aftertaste of the papaya juice, but the juice itself was fairly bland. It’s supposed to be so good for you, a “nutritional masterpiece” according to one website I found, full of Vitamin C (aka vitamin sunshine), potassium, folate, fibre, Vitamin A, E, and lycopene. It’s also supposed to help digestion as the papain helps to break down protein…

…which was important because my dinner at the little snack bar consisted of a relatively expensive ($7 Canadian) entire perfectly-steamed fish in a soup-like, tomato-based sauce with lots of onions, red peppers, and what I’m pretty sure was cassava, a starchy root I’d happily take over the hundreds of kinds of potatoes grown here in Peru. For about $1.25 Canadian, the digestive powers of the glass of juice seemed like a steal, but after tasting the fairly bland flavour, I told myself I’d have to keep looking for better papaya. I’m sure it’s not supposed to taste like that. You wouldn’t make a juice out of something so boring, except in maybe a juice bar at a health food store, but those generally don’t exist here (health food stores, I mean. There are lots of juice bars, but mostly every restaurant offers fresh juice instead of having specialty places that only sell juice).

So I’ll keep trying papayas and report back when I figure out what the big fuss is all about.