[guest post] crumbly fruit and the importance of keeping at it by Kayode D. '27

Today, sorbet made me think about how important it is to keep going.

Fruit sorbet is incredibly easy to make. You freeze some cut up fruit, and then once it’s frozen, you throw it in a food processor with a bit of lemon juice and a bit of honey and you process it until it’s smooth. That’s how simple it is. I make it every week or so for my family in the evenings and it’s a nice treat for the summer. The thing is, when you put everything in the food processor, the moment you turn on the food processor, the fruit crumbles. And like yes obviously, you’re processing frozen fruit so it’s going to crumble. But after it crumbles, it just stays crumbled for a while. You keep turning the food processor on, and then the fruit crumbles a little bit more, but then everything gets kind of settled in the position it’s sitting in so you have to turn off the food processor, open it up, move the fruit around with a utensil to get some air and space to move in there, close it, and turn it back on. But the fruit is still just crumbly. And you keep doing that, and the fruit is STILL crumbly. But if you add water, you’re compromising the thickness of the sorbet and just making a smoothie. So, you turn the food processor on again, and you clean your table a bit, and when you look at the food processor again you listen to it and realize that it’s not making the processing noise, it’s just whirring in a circle over and over again. So, you turn off the food processor. You open it up. You move the fruit around with a utensil. You close the food processor, and you turn it back on. And you start to worry a bit that the crumbles of fruit are going to melt before they emulsify into sorbet. I feel like at this point, you would start to wonder if you somehow messed up the process for making something that only involved three ingredients and one appliance. But somehow, it’s still just crumbles.

And so you open the food processor.

You move the fruit around with a utensil to get some space for it to move…

And then, right below where the blade of the food processor spins, you see it—smooth, non-crumbly, completely processed fruit, with a bit of lemon juice and a bit of honey. Your sorbet shines through. Excitedly, you move the rest of the fruit that wasn’t below the blade and still sat on top of everything not reaching the blade around, and this time when you turn the food processor, all the crumbles fall into the whirring blade. And when you open the processor back up, you’ve done it! The sorbet is finally finished. You smooth it out in the processor, and it moves perfectly with your spoon. And then you scoop it out for everybody into bowls and pass it out and sit in your room and write an email and eat the bowl.

Every time I’ve made sorbet, I always get just a little bit nervous about that part where the fruit is these tiny, chopped up pieces and they’re just not turning into sorbet. It’s a weird feeling where I don’t know what else could possibly happen with the fruit besides it ultimately turning into sorbet, but it’s still odd when it just won’t. Smoothen. Out.  But then, right when I’m actually starting to lose hope, it finally turns. I feel like if I were trying to make sorbet on campus, there would be a bunch of people asking me why it wasn’t working. And I almost start to wonder that same thing every time I make it, even though I’ve done it a solid dozen-plus times now. But you just have to keep going. Turn off the processor, open the processor, move around the fruit and chop it up a little bit so that it has some room to fall down into the spinning blades, close the processor, turn on the processor, repeat. Over and over again. And the moment you think you’ve done that little song and dance too many times, your fruit finally comes together.

All of this to say, even when it seems like your processor is full of crumbly fruit, bits that will never come together after all your effort, you have to just keep going. And just when you’re really losing hope, like really REALLY losing hope, is the moment you’ll achieve what you’ve been working for the whole time. You think you’re messing up something simple and you feel bad about yourself but really that’s just a phase of the process.

I guess that can also be what it feels like to go through personal change. Like you’ll just be stuck with the crumbly fruit forever, but you just need a bit more time, and eventually that evolution will reach an apex and you’ll come out better for it. And really, crumbly fruit isn’t all that bad. If we expect ourselves to be the sorbet immediately of COURSE we’re going to hate the crumbly fruit which is essentially the ANTITHESIS of sorbet. Instead of being smooth and velvety it’s rough and rocky. But in and of itself, little bits of fruit are nice too. I wouldn’t hate to eat them with a spoon. And, really, there are still a few bits left even when you get all the way to the sorbet. Even as you change what you look like, those parts of your personal growth change with you.

I don’t know. Just something that was on my mind as I was whipping up a batch a bit ago. I expect I sound like I’m just waffling, but these days it feels like there’s a lesson to be found in everything, under every rock and within every food processor.

I was going to say, “well, I gotta go, my bowl of sorbet is going to melt,” but actually I finished it before getting to the end of this email. Oops. It was watermelon pineapple.

Don’t hate the crumbly fruit,

Caleb