YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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!

I do like to save watermelon rinds and cook them into soup.

Anyone have a use for banana peels?

I eat the apple skin (of most apples) but I do not eat the core.

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. 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?

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.

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 and large to require so little effort!

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.

Mango skin, leaves, and sap contain compounds related to urushiol, the allergen in poison ivy.

If you eat enough kiwis with skin, tarantula abdomens start to look like something tasty.

I read that online, I trained myself to eat whole Kiwis and lo and behold: It is true!

Our brains are so wonderfully strange!

Looking at the pesticide scores, one should not eat any fruit/vegetable without peeling if it has any.

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 (???)