Imagine, you are living in South America in the early 1900s. Your family is poor, and you work hard for everything you have. You have a lovely little patch of ground where you grow vegetables and fruits for the family, and on a trellis in the corner is one of the more useful plants, the luffa. Although it isn't necessarily the tastiest of the vegetables, it is filling and gives lots of fruit. Even better though, if you let the fruit mature and dry, you can peel them and use the luffa inside. They are such useful things, being used as sponges in the kitchen and bath, as padding for pillows, and even to re-pad the old mattress when it becomes too hard and lumpy.
When I showed these luffa's to the children, their reactions were very funny. They suspected the luffa's were some sort of fruit, but certainly didn't recognise them. The children were perplexed at the dried nature of the vegetable and wondered if they were 'some weird ingredient which needs to be soaked for hours before it's edible'. The idea that these bizarre fruits were actually something which they might see in the bathroom amazed the children.
Luffas are a type of plant and have been in cultivation for centuries. The plant itself originates in India, but is sometimes called Chinese Okra. Other names are the Sponge Gourd, Dishrag Sponge, Smooth Gourd and Loofah. Today it is commercially grown as a crop in Asian countries including China, Japan and Korea and also in Central and Southern America. These crops as mostly grown to full maturity when the fruit becomes hard, dense and dry. The fruit can then be harvested, peeled, deseeded and processed to become the bathroom sponge so popular in trendy toiletries shops.
Although its use as a sponge does have a long history, being used as the 'poor mans sponge' for decades if not centuries, it also has other uses. Traditionally, it has been used in cooking, though the mature fruit is not edible. The fruit must be eaten when it is young and green, before the dense ‘sponge’ develops inside. It has also been used in traditional medicine for many years and even today the juice of the luffa is a good, natural cure for jaundice. The luffa has also found use in other things though, being used as everything from a filter for steam engines to stuffing for mattresses to insulation for houses!