Eating Fruit Skins
pgadey.ca
pgadey.ca
You don't have to eat them. There's no benefit to eating them. They don't taste good. They provide a negligible amount of nutrition, if any, and harm you very mildly. The stem of an apple is edible, but for what? A gram of extra fiber after you manage to gnaw through it?
You can eat banana peels, but you probably wouldn't want to. It's a terrible texture and flavor. They decompose well, so there's no meaningful environmental benefit. Yes, they have nutrients. You can eat a second piece of fruit instead.
And this is not universally good advice. The seeds, leaves, and stem of the pawpaw is filled with toxins—enough that folks have died from it.
I don't think the author is trying to make a point, but rather to show that we do things because we were told them. But it's important to also realize that the cultural reasons are sometimes backed up with hard-earned lessons or to save us from having to learn for ourselves that watermelon rind isn't pleasant to eat without preparing it in other ways.
As linked in the original article - says 150 seeds to a few thousand depending on the apple variety.
Yes, apple pips do have a tiny amount of cyanide in them (but why)
This is a from a reasonable source and relates to cherries: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-40738573
I think we can assume that apples and cherries are OK to eat. Apple pips are fine and why on earth would you want to crunch through a cherry stone.
Black cherries (prunus serotina) I ate a whole bunch of during late summer. Much smaller than the Prunus avium (sweet cherry) which ripens around early June here. Allegedly the fruit does contain the cyanide producing compounds but without the enzymes. The catch is if you chew the pits (or eat the leaves/stems) it is poisonous. Poisons a lot of horses and other livestock: https://horsedvm.com/poisonous/black-cherry-trees
Delicious almond like flavor, have experimented with wild chokecherries (Prunus virginiana).
https://itdoesnttastelikechicken.com/banana-peel-bacon/
Sounds simple enough - is there anyone who has done this? Bacon is a hard one to replicate!
Just because we think you shouldn't do something doesn't mean you really can't is the takeaway I guess. We don't normally eat apple cores but you could and you'd be perfectly fine.
That “properly” is doing most of the heavy lifting there. The reason i would be weary of running the dishwasher with a toaster inside because i would worry that liquids trapped around thin electric conductors will corrode them. In othet words toasters were not designed to be easy to “properly” dry them out. And that damage might not be appearant right away or after a single wash.
In fact i wouldn’t trust the professor’s claim that the “toaster is perfectly fine” unless the professor conducted a lot of experiments. And even then i would only trust it with the toaster models he tested the claim with.
That's alright, but then grass and pebbles are also edible.
e.g. Bitter cassava is a staple crop in parts of South America and Africa. Unlike apple seeds, it contains substantial quantities of cyanide. It's a great crop because you can plant it and forget it. No need for fences. Animals won't eat it. A chemist would be hard-pressed to come up with a more effective method for removing cyanide from it than some of the traditional methods of cooking it. However, problems arise when people cook and consume it in non-traditional ways.
Traditional knowledge can be both constraining and protective. It's like a fence whose purpose you don't know. Tearing it down is a gamble. You might win. You might lose. It's probably not a bad idea to try to figure out why a tradition is there before you mess around.
Many of those are traditions or ritual behaviors that decrease the chance of poisoning, sometimes subtle chronic poisoning rather than obvious acute poisoning.
Interestingly, I think the rest of your comment supports exactly the opposite message. Traditional food preparation is the way it is for excellent reasons, that's true.
And what's also true is that you have absolutely no hope of determining what those reasons are. You can mess around and see if you get problems. But if you don't do that, you'll never have any idea what's behind the traditions. Investigating the question before messing around would be a gigantic waste of time and effort.
Sure I wouldn't eat a handful but several are not a big deal and given their taste I usually do that.
"They don't taste good" is such a sweeping claim in the post attempting to generalize. You know what, people can't even agree which apple variety is the tastiest, and you want to make a claim this broad?
:)
You should only ever eat fruit skins if the fruit is organic and the skin is clean.
At this point I think its safe to say there are hundreds of scientific studies out there telling you why. This is one example[1].
I quote from their abstract:
Notably, the distribution of pesticides in the apple peel and pulp layers is visualized through Raman imaging, confirming that the pesticides penetrate the peel layer into the pulp layer (∼30 μm depth). Thus, the risk of pesticide ingestion from fruits cannot be avoided by simple washing other than peeling.
Afterall, if a pesticide washed off in the rain, it wouldn't be much good as a pesticide .... it would be a very expensive proposition for the farmer to re-apply after each rainfall.
Likewise, when Japanese people go overseas and start peeling grapes, people look at them strangely. Eventually they figure out that Western grapes are small, hard to peel and the skins are thin and nearly tasteless, so they adopt our barbarian habits too.
Updated to add: Japanese grapes like Kyoho are actually hybrid cultivars of Western grapes (Vitis vinifera) and Concord grapes (Vitis labrusca), which is why they're so different.
Is there a grape variety I’m entirely ignorant of?
I've visited a number of European winegrower family farms and they frequently also grow table grapes for their own consumption. The table grapes they eat are much much less sweet than vinifera grapes where the yeast consume all the sugar into alcohol and which are basically too sweet to enjoy.
I'm unclear why such a simple question appeared to offend at least one person.
Nope, that's just what some grapes taste like. There's a Korean variety, and Concord at least. Wiki says it's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitis_labrusca
They taste just like Welch's.
There are some fruit drinks which contain whole fruit, like green grapes. It's sort of on the spectrum if you imagine canned grapes, which come in a "light syrup" but the beverage is a thinned-out version of that, not tart or sugary like American grape juice.
But you pour the can out, and a couple of fresh grapes come out as well. I suppose they are peeled. I was a little disappointed when the pear juice didn't include sliced pears. But there are many more fruits to try!
Seedless grapes existed in the Mediterranean centuries ago. The now-popular Thompson seedless was brought from the Ottoman empire in 1872.
Similar story with bananas and the parthenocarpy mutation. Then you layer selective breeding on top of that to create complete sterility due to triploidy.
Others like the babaco papaya are just simple sterile interspecific hybrids.
So nature actually does make seedless fruit by accident quite often. It's just that you need humans to come along and clonally propagate them.
That said, I usually eat peanuts with the shell and all. Though don’t eat too many that way, the shells are definitely not getting digested, so chew well. Also there is probably a higher chance of dirt or other stuff you don’t want to eat being on the shell, but I don’t usually eat peanuts anyway so never been a problem for me.
I’ve seen a lot of people also just wash/rub the hairs off and bite straight into them, though I find this can make a mess if they are too soft.
Hardy kiwis are also eaten whole, like a berry.
This may sound insignificant to many but for the extremely lazy like me, this is the difference between going to waste and being consumed for many fruits.
I guess maybe it's a cultural thing - I've never seen anyone ever make mash potatoes with skins inside, and mash is a dinner staple here(in fact both here in the UK and Poland where I'm originally from).
Both of your comments sound foreign to me. In my experience, kiwis are eaten with the fingers, including the skin, but they are prepared by slicing. The form you eat is a collection of circular discs, cross sections of the original fruit.
https://www.foodrepublic.com/img/gallery/kiwi-skin-is-edible...
So a spoon would make no sense - it wouldn't help you even if you were inclined to use one - but there's plenty of processing time involved.
It is easy to forget, but plants aren't inherently safe. Produce has been made so by breeding, historical wisdom, and by laws and customs and systems. While some of these things are overcautious or corrupt, others may be keeping you safe without you realizing it. Eating things you aren't expected to eat is playing with the safeties off, to some degree.
I wouldn't think you'd get into too much trouble eating the skins of things you'd find in the grocery store, but green potatoes would certainly be an exception. I'd mostly want to wash a akin I intended to eat very well, as I'd mostly worry what might have been sprayed on that part on the assumption I wouldn't eat it.
The further you get away from expectation - stems, seeds, leaves - the further you are from built in safety measures and the closer you are to eating a random plant. Even knowing that people consider something medicine is not a free pass. Medicines come with dosages and side effects. Drugs powerful enough to help you are usually also poweful enough to hurt you, and this is often similarly true with plants.
All of that is not exactly to dissuade you from trying things, and toxic bits of things are usually obvious and not too dangerous in small quantities. Still, it's worth starting small and doing the odd search first. You never know when a particular breed of apple, grown under particular conditions, will have unusually potent seeds, and you want to have some understanding of how quickly certain toxins accumulate and clear. We do have a lot of accumulated knowledge on food safety, and it is worth consulting if you are going to step off the usual path.
On the other hand, lots of things known to be beneficial and safe are considered unpalatable due to being rough and unsweet, but you can certainly develop a taste for them. Wheat bran and potato skins are among my favorites.
On the not safe front, I recently learned that volunteer squash can be very bad for you - I guess the poisonous varieties are genetically close to the edible ones.
Oh and my grandfather foraged and ate Gyromitra esculenta mushrooms. (I've eaten them as a child, I would not eat them now.) They are very bad news. The way he processed them made them safe. But he said he soaked them in salted water to "get the bugs out" - he did not know they were toxic.
I read that online, I trained myself to eat whole Kiwis and lo and behold: It is true!
Our brains are so wonderfully strange!
I assume because of their size relative to other species?
Now, I never thought that kiwi skins are not edible of course, but I just assumed they're somehow unpleasant because everyone seems to peel or spoon them.
But are you claiming you eat the whole fruit, or you throw out the tiny thorn?
Skins are healthy, but only if organic and/or clean fifteen.
Things like cantaloupes, oranges, etc are famous for harboring bad bacteria and pesticides. Does not seem worth the risk to me…
I used to watch people collect dandelions and weeds in NYC parks to make into tea and consume in other ways. I’m sure there are some benefits but I’m also sure they don’t outweigh the risks from pollutants.
I like the bitter to offset the sweetness.
- Start from the blossom end (the bottom). This makes the core more palatable for multiple reasons.
- The blossom remains themselves may have mold in very rare cases. Take a look before you start eating.
- Some apples have much, much harder core walls and are not really edible this way. Others are quite soft. So it will depend on variety.
- Don't bother eating the stems and seeds. It's pointless.
I really only do this when I don't have a place to put the apple core, e.g. on a road trip if I don't have a trash/compost bag. (Can't throw it out the window because it will attract wildlife to the roadside.)
If you look at the "Dirty Dozen" vs. "Clean Fifteen" lists of fruits/veggies that come out every year, you'll notice that the cleanest fruits are almost always ones that grow with a thick skin or covering, or are covered by soil: banana, pineapple, avocado, corn, (shelled) peas, watermelon, carrot, potato, etc.
And the dirtiest ones have a thin or no skin: greens, stone fruit, blackberries, strawberries, apples, pears etc.
The clean fruits aren't really any cleaner, the study just tests the "edible" part minus the outer skin. If you eat the skin of conventional Clean Fifteen, you might as well be eating a Dirty Dozen.
Anyone have a use for banana peels?
We throw away a butt-ton of watermelon rind in the summer. I never thought to see if they could be used for something.
For banana skins, you can turn them into a vegan bacon. Many recipes online that are all pretty much the same result. I like them too.
I should try again sometime with a regular cucumber pickle recipe, just replacing cucumbers with watermelon rinds, but I don't think my family wants to humor me again.
I created a lab for intro biology around testing for HCN in various plant tissues. The interesting thing is not all apple seeds actually seem to produce HCN. Granny Smith seeds seem to always produce it (and relatively speaking a lot), while some little lunch box sized Fuji apples I bought at a farmers market don't produce any at all.
I found that truly bizarre. Her reasoning was that it was too watery (???)
My late father-in-law ate entire apples-- core and all. I've tried but I can't stomach the texture or how much more the fibrous parts of the core get stuck in my teeth. It doesn't disgust me, I just don't prefer it.
Not to miss an opportunity to talk about apples:
I started eating three apples / day for lunch last year. I hadn't realized how dirty apples are. I assumed the washing they get in processing gets them pretty clean. It does not. I wet them and clean the stem and flower areas with a paper towel. I'm shocked at how dirty the towel ends up.
I'm a sweet apple kind of guy. Envy apples are the bomb. I used to like Honeycrisp but the rumors of their being bred into shitty tastelessness are true. They're terrible. Shockingly, sometimes Red Delicious, which I'd previously relegated to the "buy as a last resort" list, are actually pretty good now. Fuji, Gala, and Cosmic Crisp are all decent specimens.
My wife likes Pink Lady but I think they're just a little too tart. She can also put away the Granny Smiths which I find to be horrifyingly sour. Ick!
Anybody have feelings about other apple varieties a person like me might be into?
and there are bold mushroom hunters
but there are no old bold mushroom hunters.
I don't eat mushrooms-- can't stand the texture. I heard a podcast episode re: death cap mushrooms and it was chilling. A guy in the podcast talked about tasting a death cap then spitting it out and rinsing his mouth. He said they had a good taste.
Absolutely horrifying.
I like putting my apples in the fridge. Love me a cold and crisp gala apple. On very rare occasion, the gala I get are mushy. But otherwise, they are my favorite.
We're talking about almost a cup, or 100+ grams of apple seed here.
Your body continually neutralizes cyanide with the enzyme rhodanese, so there's also no danger of cyanide accumulation from eating a few apples a day.
On the flipside: Kanzi “disappointment with every bite”, Ambrosia “pie apple because the raw texture sucks”, Autumn Glory DNF, Kissabel “lost its joy and turned grassy, DNF” Sugarbee “kinda one note, chewy, technically better than Red Delicious” Sweetango “knockoff Honeycrisp”, Evercrisp “painfully crisp, annoying to eat, fades to zero, looks like it was factory-polished, DNF”, Dazzle “all the flavourlessness of a Red Delicious with a nice crisp”, Ginger Gold “ten seconds of wonder and then mushes into disgusting texture and flavorlessness”
If you eat it from the North Pole to the South Pole, there is no core.
The core is only there if you eat around the equator.
Give it a try.
Also, don’t feed them to dogs especially small dogs.
Highly unlikely to be a problem but people die from water poisoning so…
Some fruit skins are okay, others are not.
And some are only okay if home grown or organic bc the skin is otherwise loaded with pesticide residues
I thought eating the skins on kiwis was normal
The evolution of the rumen was one of nature’s best tricks.
Huh? What does this mean? Isn't this a binary? Either they are or are not medicine. I don't "consider" Tylenol a medicine. It is because it has an effect.
But, yes, the strawberry is medicinal—everywhere.