Eddie’s food annoyances: all that wet fruit

Adeline (nickname: Eddie) loves eating, a lot and often, both at home and out. Usually, that goes well, but sometimes it doesn’t. In the series Eddie’s food annoyances you can read about the latter. This time: the misery of juicy fruit.

When I’ve peeled a kiwi, you might as well put me straight in the shower. I’m always covered in juice from head to elbow. By the way, this doesn’t only happen with kiwis, but also with pears, oranges, peaches, watermelons and, of course, nectarines. In short: every piece of fruit with juicy properties.

The wet fruit

I absolutely love the juiciness, really: I love fruit for that. But what a wet, sticky mess it is. The annoying thing is that you should actually treat juicy fruit like a meal, complete with bib, knife and fork and napkin, but you use it as a snack. That’s where it gets dangerous, because it means you eat it while doing other things, and that’s where it goes completely wrong.

So wrong that the letters ‘J’ and ‘H’ on my keyboard stick a little because I just had to finish typing a sentence with my kiwi fingers. Nothing is as dangerous as combining an everyday activity with wet fruit. This sounds much grosser than I mean it.

Showering and then eating

You think the damage is limited to your keyboard, but in the meantime the wetness from all that fruit is also secretly dripping between your laptop and the edge of the table, where you end up mopping through it with your forearm. Result: a quarter of your body is now stuck to other objects because of what initially seemed like an innocent snack.

And then there’s that feeling of wet juice running between the dimples of your fingers, making your hands start to stick together into one whole. Yuck! Because of all the moisture, fruit is also slippery, so you dive after pieces of kiwi and somehow make it even stickier than it already was.

Current score between you and the kiwi: 0–10 for Team Wet Fruit.

The fruit salad strategy

The silly thing is that just thinking about the juice running down my fingers from a particular piece of fruit also makes me a little itchy. As if the stickiness has already started doing its work. It even puts me off eating wet fruit, despite the fact that I like it. For a while, I used the fruit salad strategy.

First, spend an hour peeling all the wet fruit, throw it into a large bowl, shower, and only then eat it. But that did create quite a barrier when it came to having a snack. And I haven’t even mentioned scooping out a kiwi yet—the sheer horror of the wet pieces flying around your ears.

Even a banana

I know we absolutely despise pre-peeled apple pieces from the supermarket, but I would still appreciate an exception for kiwis and pears. By now, the idea of stickiness clings to me so much that I could swear even my banana felt a little sticky last week.

Read also:

• Eddie’s food annoyances: the supermarket sampling
• We need to talk about people who chew ice creams
• Dishes that (star) chefs never put on the menu