Last night my wife came home from grocery shopping and was putting the Red Delicious apples she bought in the fruit bowl, when she called me into the kitchen.
“Smell these apples” she said.
Blech!:eek: They smell like butthole.
They weren’t rotten. We cut a couple open. They were fine. The fruit was sweet.
But the peelings smell the way a bathroom smells after someone takes a big dump. I’m not trying to be gross here. I’m serious. They smell like shit!
WTF?
She washed them all off, but they still kind of stink.
What kind of pesticide could be sprayed on fruit that would smell like this?
Only the peelings stink. We cut a few open to see if they were rotting on the inside. They were fine. I tasted the meat of the fruit to just to see. It tasted fine. I did not taste the peelings.
We’ve since thrown them all out. Even if there’s nothing wrong with them, it’s hard to eat an apple that smells like shit.
My theory is, this was not a naturally occurring odor. Something was sprayed on these that stinks like this. But what?
…you might get sick to your stomach when you read this…
…they had actually managed to get shit on them. Manure is certainly a common enough fertilizer, so there’s reason enough for it to be present in the apple orchard. It doesn’t make sense for it to get on something that grows as high up as apples, but I suppose the farmer may have applied it by mixing it with water and using a hose that splashed the apples, or perhaps it had been freshly applied to the ground and someone dropped the apples while picking them.
In an orchard near where I live that has both pick your own and sells apples they pick for you there are several ponds throughout the property that are used for irrigation of the apple trees. Anything they were using for fertilizer would end up in the pond and could conceivably get sprayed on the apples. Some of the trees were quite low to the ground. The ponds were quite scummy.
IIRC they had signs up in the pick-your-own section warning you NOT to drink the water from the irrigation lines.
Perhaps this is an evolutionary survival strategy on the part of the apple tree…
P.J. O’Roarke once described the moena tree, a tropical hardwood that strongly resembles mahogony in appearance, hardness and durability. It would be highly sought after except for one thing… it smells like a fart when cut. O’Roarke attributed this to an evolutionary adaptation to defend the tree against Swedish Modern furniture designers…
