On Eating Fruit Skins

This summer, I learned that one can eat a whole apple. Every part of the apple is edible¹. Before learning this, I would just eat the flesh and throw away the core. The core seemed hard and jagged and inedible. Turns out, you can eat the whole thing. I suppose I’ve always known that deer eat the whole apple. Why shouldn’t people eat the whole apple too²?

I tried it out a few times but initially hesitated to eat the stem. Once, I even ate everything but the stem and carried it around for a while. After a while I started to feel silly, carrying a little stem, and decided to eat the stem too. Indeed, the stem is edible too.

A few years back, I learned that one should eat the stems of strawberries. In my community, they’re considered medicine. A vital part of the fruit. When I started to ask around about this sort of thing, I learned that kiwi skins are also edible.

Alex rightly points out that apple seeds do contain cyanide. Turns out, it’s not a huge risk for normal apple consumption. ↩︎
This argument is obviously nonsense. There are probably a tonne of things that deer eat that people should not eat. I’m put in mind of a time when a friend said that horse chestnuts should be edible since horses presumably eat them. I thought about it and replied, “Maybe they’re used to induce vomiting in horses. Who knows?” It turns out, after a bit of Googling, that horse chestnuts make horses and people sick but deer can eat them. ↩︎

On Eating Fruit Skins

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