The beast in its lair

Sometime last year, our next door neighbor gave us a nice, unassuming-looking aloe plant, which took its place among the potted plants in our bedroom. Jason happens to be very good with plants, but the voracity with which this guy grew was surprising, almost alarming in a “Feed me, Seymour!” kind of way. It pushed against other plants, snaking its way under their pots like it was some crazy octopus-shaped professional wrestler trying to trip its opponents with a showy move. Soon, I was hovering over all of our guests, trying to foist pieces of the plant on them for any touch of sunburn, any tiny insect bite.

But still, the thing grew. Noticing the Technicolor aloe beverages in supermarkets, I began to think, “Why not?” and started to poke around on the Internet to find out more about drinking aloe. What I found was a raging aloe controversy, with some people saying that it cures everything from diabetes to bed sores and other people saying that it causes cancer in mice. The truth, of course, probably lies somewhere in between. As best as I can discern, the more controversial component of aloe is the yellowish latex part, which is right under the skin of the plant and, in addition to possibly blocking your intake of potassium, is apparently a powerful laxative. Leaving bodily harm aside, that sounds somewhat unpleasant.

But the aloe gel that is in the center of the leaves sounded fairly innocuous and possibly even healthy. And what the heck? Maybe it would make me feel like a million bucks. So I decided to give it a go last night.

Yup, looks like lemonade.

I took an aloe lemonade recipe from this woman, who, in addition to looking like an earnest homespun kind of blogger, also had an aloe growth problem. I broke off one of my plant’s massive tentacles and went to work filleting it, trying to avoid the bowel-loosening outer layer. (I thought it would be hard to see the latex, but actually, it was very yellow and had the consistency of milk, completely unlike the clear gel.)

The results: it tasted like lemonade. No unfortunate side effects were noted, even when I forced Jason to unwittingly drink a full glass of it on an empty stomach. While it was refreshing, the aloe was kind of a slippery, gooey mess to wrangle, so until someone can prove beyond a doubt that drinking it can cure my bad eyesight or until the plant needs pruning again, I think I’ll stick to rubbing it on burns.