Do you ever buy dried fruit?  I assume that you've eaten Peeled Snacks, but Peeled Snacks are different.  They're, you know, BETTER.  But have you ever had just plain old Dried Fruit?  The kind that they sell at Trader Joe's or Whole Foods or your local bus depot?  The kind with raisins and cranberries and apicots, and maybe some M&Ms thrown in for good measure?  Then you've eaten OIL!

I don't get this- most dried fruit, especially the generic varieties (Whole Foods' 360 and Trader Joes brands being chief perpetrators) gets sold to you coated in oil- canola oil or safflower oil, some kind of vegetable oil.  When you buy a candy bar, okay, you expect to get some oil in it.  When you buy a Greek salad, okay, there's be some olive oil in there.  But dried fruit?  Oil? Huh?

I don't get it- who ever expected food manufacturers to coat raw ingredients in oil?  This is NOT based on demand- your average dried fruit purchaser does no chew on a prune and think to him or herself, "you know what this needs?  More COTTONseed oil!".  No, they just don't think of it at all, because if they did, they'd have to think to themself, "oh gross, oil, where's an appropriate place to vomit?"

I can give you some "industry" reasons for the oil- it lengthens the product's shelf-life, it makes it easier to pack in a plastic bag, it gives it a shiny sheen, and the penultimate reason, that homosapiens think fat tastes GOOD.  But 2 seconds of thought about this "fat fruit" thing and, whoosh, all advantages fly out the window like so much regurgitated apricot....

I should mention that Peeled Snacks doesn't add oil to its fruit, but that's not a shameless plug.  It's just common sense- you don't add ketchup to breakfast cereal because it makes it easier to eat, and you don't add salt to tea because it makes it boil faster.  You don't add oil to fruit because, well.....

....because that's really disgusting....

Yours, disgusted,

Peeled Skinny