People throw away so much strawberry in an effort to cut the leaves off. Just eat the leaves. Next time you go to eat a strawberry, try eating the leaves too - they're very mild in flavor, and you waste no strawberry!
In at least some varieties of strawberries, the top of the berry has the least flavor and sweetness, and the bottom has the most, so I don't feel like I'm losing much.
When I stopped smoking strawberry leafs where one recommended component of tobacco replacement. It does smoke well, and also makes a great component to tea. Never eaten it fresh tho.
I tried following an authentic Southern pickled watermelon rind recipe, and they were so sickly sweet I couldn't stomach them.
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.
Pickled savoury watermelon is something i discovered not that long ago and it really surprised me. It's amazing. I otherwise don't care much about watermelon but pickled it gets so much flavor. I know many people who can't handle it because it "doesn't taste how it looks".
If you don't know your bananas are free from pesticide and fungicides make sure to dispose them in the trash. It's not even recommended to compost banana because it's so full of toxins.
I am reminded of the saying in my family: Anything is edible if you're willing to eat it.
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.
Aren't the seeds of the apple supposed to contain cyanide? Article points this out too and risk doesn't seem worth it. I used to eat the whole apple long time ago until someone pointed that out and from my googling, it was correct. Now I try to eat all of the apple except the seeds and stem.
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.
You would need to eat the seeds of SEVERAL HUNDRED apples in one sitting, and you would need to grind them up finely beforehand to get full amygdalin absorption.
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.
I don’t know much about apple variety names, but if you love apples and plan to visit Aomori prefecture in Japan during apple season, I highly recommend stopping by a market or grocery. I used to live in northern Akita and there was a farmer from Aomori that would come by with freshly picked apples to sell at one of the supermarkets. They had many varieties and they all tasted amazingly sweet and unique. I have yet to find an apple anywhere close to those since moving back to the states. The most recent new variety that I tried that I liked was Kiku. It’s like a sweeter version of a Fuji apple with a very similar texture. Based on your preferences, I think this would a fun one to try.
Grapes are commonly peeled in Japan, and people will look at you strangely if you eat them skin on. However, Japanese grapes are huge and have a thick, astringent skin that peels off easily.
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.
I've had this conversation and the way I explained it is that our grapes are closer to the boba in bubble tea. It's not quite right (they don't pop quite as much) and boba isn't Japanese, but it gets the point across.
Like my parent said, the grapes in East Asia are thick-skinned, and people either peel them or suck out their flesh. The ones sold in Europe are very thin-skinned, and peeling is largely impractical. I'm relating the latter to boba.
big purple concord grapes grow wild in the US and are thick skinned and you squeeze or suck out the grape inside, skin significantly more tart than the sweet grape, pretty sure those are the tannins that you get in wine from skin contact even those those are different grape varieties.
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 split my time between Europe and China so I'm aware of the differences in that regard. My question was specifically regarding the comparison between European grapes and boba because I was struggling to identify any shared attributes from the varieties I have experienced. Is there a variety of grape which is more chewy in texture, perhaps?
I'm unclear why such a simple question appeared to offend at least one person.
Fun fact: a lot of people think artificial grape flavoring doesn't taste like grapes. And that the "Welch's concord grape jam" variety of jams is artificially flavored.
Yeah, Concord grapes are based on Fox grapes; when the new Welch's headquarters opened on Baker Ave they included a plantation started from cuttings from the original farm (which is just a house now but they still maintain their own grapes.) Welch's downsized and moved the HQ to Waltham last year, apparently the vines got distributed to local historic places and farmers https://concordbridge.org/index.php/2026/04/06/the-grape-esc...
I live near a Korean pan-Asian convenience store, and I've been enjoy the variety of beverages and ramen available there. Oceania today exports foods with significant influence by Italian cuisine, in particular.
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!
I'm 45 and only recently realised the grapes in the UK are "seedless". Grapes with seeds was not a pleasant experience when I accidentally ate one whilst in Croatia.
If by "genetic modification" you mean "random genetic mutation" formally known as stenospermocarpy.
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.
I much prefer grapes with seeds. They are much tastier and have a nicer texture in my opinion. The difference is enough that I almost consider the seedless variety to be a separate fruit altogether.
Similar hybrids are becoming more popular in the states, for example the "Thomcord" or "Cotton Candy". They're absolutely delicious and have either small seeds or none at all. Recommend to try for anyone who hasn't yet!
When I realized you can just eat kiwi with the skin on (if it's a very hairy one, brush them off under running water) and in no time it actually tastes better (adds some lovely contrast), it became my favorite zero-ennui fruit. It almost feels like a cheat code for something so tasty to require so little effort!
I started eating mango skin a few months ago. When it's thin and bland, it's not bad. Gives a nice crunch to the eating experience. But often it's way too thick and sometimes strongly bitter.
One time I decided to slice up a mango like a melon and just eat the flesh off the skin. A bit later I realized I had an awful itchy rash all around my mouth. That's when I learned about urushiol in mango skin! Would not recommend
A guy I was hanging around with in India (Himalayas) asked me why I was peeling the mango. He said you should eat it with the skin. So I continued doing that. One day, at the top of one mountain, I sat down to eat my mango. This Indian guy with his girlfriend walked by and asked why the hell I was eating the mango with the skin on.
People in the Amazon do eat tarantulas. They do roast them over an open flame first though to burn off the hairs as they can be harmful and irritating.
My exact thoughts reading trough this thread. Where are people even getting their bananas from if they feel comfortable eating the skin? I don't even compost them because I don't want all that toxic shit in my garden.
On a related note, a friend of mine removed both the skin and even the center core (the seeds part) of cucumbers. I think all that's left is about 30% of the cucumber.
I found that truly bizarre. Her reasoning was that it was too watery (???)
To be fair there are some sorts where the seeds can be overwhelming, but that's not what you usually get in the supermarket.
In cucumbers you can normally buy removing the seeds/ watery core in my opinion only makes sense when you for example make Tzatziki, as otherwise it can get rather watery.
I eat boiled eggs every day, usually soft boiled, but I'll occasionally hard boil some as well. Every now and again, I get one that just absolutely will not separate from the shell - so I eat the shell as well.
Personally, I like the inside of the egg a lot more than the outside, but, actually, the shell isn't bad. There's not much taste to it, but there's something slightly satisfying to me about the noise and texture as I grind it up between my teeth. I figure there'll be some protein or whatever in there as well.
(Perhaps some birdshit too. I try not to think about that. Still, this hasn't killed me yet.)
> Alex rightly points out that apple seeds do contain cyanide. Turns out, it’s not a huge risk for normal apple consumption.
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 a person who always eats the whole apple, stem and all (have done so for years), I'll object to your "apple seeds do not taste good" statement - tastes differ, to me they are delicious, certainly on par with other "normally edible" seeds like sunflower seeds! Of course I wouldn't eat them in any great quantity because of the poison issue.
By "they don't taste good" I wasn't trying to imply that they taste bad, though maybe they do to some folks. At least to me they don't taste like anything (they lack a good flavor). For me and probably many folks, the flavor isn't something that attracts me to eating the seeds.
>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
There's a long history of cherry stone consumption for some cherry species, they are very nutritious and the cyandide is removed by processing/drying/cooking.
Delicious almond like flavor, have experimented with wild chokecherries (Prunus virginiana).
I'm sure you could prepare almost anything to taste great. You can do whatever you think you'd enjoy. My point isn't to discourage you from doing it. If you want to eat apple stems or orange peels or horse chestnuts, knock yourself out. My point is that it's probably not smart to do so unless you know what you're doing and have a good reason to.
I mean it reminds me of this article where a university professor asked his students if you can put a toaster in the dishwasher. Everyone replied no, obviously not. But as the professor replied - why not? Your average toaster works perfectly fine after going through a dishwasher, once properly dried. The answers ranged from "you're not supposed to" to "it's electric"(sic).
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.
There even was a HN thread about this anecdote. I remember though that someone there made the counter argument that, yes, the toaster will be fine, but the dishwasher will be full of icky chemicals that you don't want to have on your dishes...
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.
It definitely provokes some thinking of what we even mean with "edible". The author seems to use "you can eat it and it won't kill you or make you sick" as the definition.
That's alright, but then grass and pebbles are also edible.
Doing things as we were told to is sometimes called "following tradition". Traditional knowledge can be based in superstition or valid information that's out of date, but it can also be based on things that remain relevant.
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 the traditional method 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.
There are a lot of examples of this in the book The Secret of Our Success (which argues that human cultures have a lot of culturally-evolved knowledge which individuals would be very unlikely to develop in a single generation, and which often provides benefits for reasons that aren't consciously understood by the actual members of the culture, while occasionally including some noise or bad advice).
Many of those are traditions or ritual behaviors that decrease the chance of poisoning, sometimes subtle chronic poisoning rather than obvious acute poisoning.
> It's probably not a bad idea to try to figure out why a tradition is there before you mess around.
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.
Well, they're all editable, only question is if you like it and if the fruit skinn itself is good. I eat most kiwis with the skin on because it's a nice tart/acidic contrast to soft sweet insides, but some kiwis have extremely thick and acidic. Most pear cores are soft and sweet, but very few apple cores, nor worth it.
I ate Kiwis for years before someone told me most people DO NOT eat the skins. I looked at my bag of kiwis, and the even the damn monkey mascot was holding a spoon...mocking me...
Don’t worry, my kids eat the skin too. I guess we forgot to tell them not to and they didn’t find it unpleasant. I tried a bite for my own edification and I did not find it pleasant.
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.
When I wash them I rub the hairs off, and then cut them into thick slices, leaving the skin on. Trying to skin or eat them with a spoon is just a pain, and I don’t find the skin unpleasant.
Also eating skins turns kiwis from a fruit you have to spend time to preprocess (halve + grab spoon) to an immediate snack.
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.
Well, thank you for editing to post to not ask me if I only like microwave dinners.
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).
You can just break them into two roughly equal halves and use your teeth to scoop out the flesh. No need for either a knife, a spoon or any kind of preprocessing. I've been eating them that way for decades.
> Also eating skins turns kiwis from a fruit you have to spend time to preprocess (halve + grab spoon) to an immediate snack.
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.
Kiwi fuzz irritates my throat, so I rub a lot of the fuz off, and then use a straight bladed knife to "shave" the rest off. The skin gives a tart contrast to the fruit center. I'm sure there's lots of valuable nutrients in the skin too
The golden ones (as opposed the green variety that are more common in the US) are significantly tastier (at least, universally shared opinion among everyone I forced to try them) and have basically no fuzz/hair.
I'd like to see the the cited source for that statement.. I've always eaten the skins of kiwi fruit. its offers a nice tangy counterpoint to the sweet flesh. Eating it without the skin just sounds boring.
Umless specifically indicated as untreated, citrus peel in soaked in very nasty antifungal waxes. In the EU they are specifucally warned about not fit for consumption.
Citrus peels taste good. They're used for cooking in every culture that grows citrus. Eating them raw is only bad due to farmers poisoning the food they sell.
I was joking, but there is a huge difference between using citrus zest/rind in cooking or as a garnish and eating the whole thing like an apple, including the pith.
I've never eaten citrus like an apple except when at a restaurant and they give slices of lemon or lime - I eat those whole. I usually eat the fruit first, then the peel. The bitterness of the pith is not noticeable at all when eaten like this.
Organic doesn’t mean pesticide-free or non-toxic. Organic farming can use pesticides such as copper compounds, pyrethrins and spinosad, all of which have their own toxicity and environmental risks
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[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 15.0 ms ] threadAnyone 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But are you claiming you eat the whole fruit, or you throw out the tiny thorn?
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?
Skins are healthy, but only if organic and/or clean fifteen.
I found that truly bizarre. Her reasoning was that it was too watery (???)
Personally, I like the inside of the egg a lot more than the outside, but, actually, the shell isn't bad. There's not much taste to it, but there's something slightly satisfying to me about the noise and texture as I grind it up between my teeth. I figure there'll be some protein or whatever in there as well.
(Perhaps some birdshit too. I try not to think about that. Still, this hasn't killed me yet.)
Also, don’t feed them to dogs especially small dogs.
Highly unlikely to be a problem but people die from water poisoning so…
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 the traditional method 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.
https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
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.
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.
Hardy kiwis are also eaten while, 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.
I like the bitter to offset the sweetness.
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