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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Related to yours: the other day my wife told me she saw mandarin oranges peeled and individually wrapped in plastic. Mandarin oranges come with their own goddamn natural packaging. Why on Earth would you replace it with plastic?

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The obvious answer is "to accommodate people with arthritis or other manual dexterity limiting condition."

That's not obvious, as presumably you don't need much more effort to peel the skin off a mandarin orange than you'd need to peel off the plastic wrapper.

I had some "Easy Peeler" mandarins yesterday and, without any arthritis, they were much more effort than removing a plastic wrapper would have been.

I can't even begin to imagine how hard it would be if I had crippling arthritis in my hands.

I wonder how many people buying this do actually have athritis.

I don't know but there were a lot of disabled people praising Whole Foods for their peeled oranges back in 2016 when that whole backlash happened.

Seems unlikely to me. And of course we don't have to presume, but can look at what people with those issues say, and they've been vocal about it whenever there's been a too-successful campaign against these things.

Careful with unintended consequences. Convenient fruits may displace some greener inconvenient fruits, but may also displace some order-of-magnitude worse food items, such as cheeseburgers.

Fruits are incredibly convenient by themselves without extra wrapping, the reason some people prefer cheeseburgers over fruits is not convenience, but because cheeseburgers taste better.

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