As much as I learned at West Point, the food wasn’t great.

I don’t like food that doesn’t taste good, especially when it costs a lot, like at a hotel, so I don’t. The hotel happened to have a big bowl of apples in the lobby, so I ended up eating a couple in the morning for breakfast, then a couple more throughout the day to make up for avoiding food I didn’t like.

For some reason I didn’t feel like having an apple core in front of me. Once or twice I’ve met people who told me they ate the whole apple. Since starting to eat citrus fruit skin, banana peels, mango peels, and so on, having learned other cultures do so, that they carry much of a fruit’s nutrition, and using the practices as ways to learn to live by my values, I decided to try eating the whole apple.

It turns out apples feel like they have a different shape when you don’t try to eat around a cylindrical core. They’re more spherical than cylindrical. The core is more like a pit and is easier to eat when you decide to eat everything. Nerdy people seem to want to show off their know-it-all knowledge about cyanide in apple seeds, mainly to show off, I think.

In any case, simple as the act is, it makes the fruit easier and more enjoyable. More importantly, it follows in the practice of doing simple things you want because you want to, questioning mainstream ways of doing things, overcoming inhibitions of doing something different.

I’m not saying it’s a big deal, just that it’s easy to go one’s whole life, always doing something how everyone else does, never questioning or trying it a new way, but that if you do, you expand your horizons. If you never have, try eating a whole apple and pay attention to how you feel when you do. Notice how much you pay attention to how others would perceive you.

Now think of how many things you do because everyone does it that way, but that you could do differently. I write a lot about creating habits. There’s also breaking unconscious pointless or counterproductive habits you didn’t intend to start.

For those who need support, here are some posts by medical doctors and people who researched the healthiness of eat whole apples:

• Medical Daily: There Is No Such Thing As An Apple Core: Eat The Entire Fruit Safely
• Bon Appetit: Why You Should Eat the Entire Apple, Core and All
• The Atlantic: Apple Cores Are a Myth: You can eat the whole apple. Americans could be throwing away $13.2 billion
• Snopes: Apple Seeds and Cyanide: Do apple seeds contain a harmful cyanide compound?

Now eat a whole apple and live less in mindless conformity.

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