Have you ever opened up a pomegranate? It’s a gigantic pain in the ass if you haven’t. To make the least amount of mess you have to score the open tip of it over a glass bowl[1] full of the hottest water your skin can stand. You need to score so there’s a light cut around the thing so it’s divided into quarters.

You rip that bastard open with the least amount of force you can so it doesn’t go anywhere other than the bowl. Inside of it seeds nested in clusters inside the flesh of the pomegranate. You have to rip the flesh off of seeds without puncturing them. And you need to do this with your hands in the hot water. The flesh protecting the seeds will float to the top as the seeds sink to the bottom of the bowl.

Now to add insult to injury you can’t do this without finesse. You’ll puncture the seeds and stain your hands. When you’ve actually managed to remove all the seeds from the flesh of the pomegranate. You can’t do anything with them until you’ve dumped the shreds of skin and flesh of this and dumped the remaining seeds in a colander so they can be rinsed.

Even after all that to get the juice out of the fucking seeds (which look like blood red popcorn kernels) you need to press and smash them and let the juice run into a container to hold it because you can’t eat the seeds. (Actually most of a pomegranate other than the juice can kill you, it makes kiwi skins almost cuddly.) And as luck would have it, you don’t really get that much juice out of this ordeal; it’s less than 3 ounces in most cases.

So there you have it. Lots of awkward tedium for so little gain. Isn’t Mother Nature a real bitch?

[1] I’m not sure why it’s better if the bowl is glass but out of the handful of times I’ve done this literally fruitless endeavor it doesn’t work super well in plastic bowl.