Aojiru - The Punishment Drink
How many times have you seen TV Game shows in Japan where they punish their losing participants by drink this nasty green looking drinks? Maybe they don’t do it as much now but earlier in the years - they did. I myself saw a few videos of them drinking that nasty thing.
That drink is none other than the beneficial and healthy vegetable drink called Aojiru. It’s made from Kale mostly, which is why the color is dark green. The drink is also known as green drink or green juice in English, a direct translation of the Japanese meaning. (In modern Japanese, the character 青 ao means “blue”, but it is commonly still used in older contexts to refer to green vegetation.)
Aojiru was developed in October 1943 by Dr. Niro Endo (遠藤仁郎, Endō Nirō), an army doctor who experimented with juices extracted from the discarded leaves of various vegetables in an attempt to supplement his family’s meager wartime diet. He credited the cure of his son from pneumonia and of his wife from nephritis to aojiru, and in 1949 concluded that kale was the best ingredient for his juice.
Aojiru was popularized in 1983 by Q’SAI (キューサイ, Q’SAI), who started marketing 100% kale aojiru in powdered form as a dietary supplement, and sales boomed after 2000 when cosmetics giant Fancl started mass retailing of the juice. Today, many Japanese companies manufacture aojiru, usually using kale, young barley or komatsuna leaves as the base of the drink, and the size of the aojiru market was well over $500 million in 2005.
Apparently, new formulation of the drink is now decreasing the bitter greenish taste of the juice in bids to suit more consumer’s taste.
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