Eat an Apple in the Shower

Reimagining "convenience food"

I can count on one hand the number of meals I’ve eaten at my dining room table over the past year.

I feel vaguely like I should be embarrassed by this—by the dead-eyed vision of me shoveling noodles into my mouth in front of the TV. After all, the American ideal of dinner is a family affair. I’m supposed to settle into an uncomfortable wooden chair with my two-and-a-half kids and wipe my mouth on a napkin instead of my sleeve.

To be clear, I don’t think the setting of a meal is irrelevant. It matters a great deal. Think about how much better a hot dog tastes when you’re sitting on the bleachers at a softball field—the whiff of charcoal, the tang of mustard, the warmth of sun-baked aluminum on the backs of your thighs. Imagine the short-lived luxuriance of eating potato chips in bed.

My issue with the dining room table is just that it doesn’t offer much sensory input.

In related news, I’ve been eating an apple in the shower almost every day for the past month.

At first, my husband was confused by this behavior. There’s something unseemly about bringing food into the bathroom, the place where its ancestors are buried. It’s like showing a cow a hamburger.

But—as I told him between lusty bites of apple—the #ShowerBeer is a known and beloved household tradition. What’s so different about fruit?

Here’s the process: grab a large apple, straight from the fridge. For me, it’s a Pink Lady—as tart and sweet as I want to be—but any non-Red-Delicious variety will do. Peel off the little produce sticker; that’s all the prep you need. You can wash the apple in the shower.

Turn on the water as hot as you can stand and wait until the bathroom starts to fill with steam. The goal for this exercise is sensory polarization—to be stirred by pleasant contradictions. There’s the cold ache of a fridge-chilled apple while your body flushes red from scalding water. There’s the crisp snap of apple skin while your own is softening under a showerhead. There’s the mess that instantly isn’t. This is the time for ugly, noisy, monstrous bites—the kind that streak your chin with juices, that would get you kicked out of the school cafeteria. In the shower, each bite atomizes juice into a gravity-defying mist, scent borne skyward on a head of steam.

The apple is the perfect entry-level shower fruit—a one-hander with an edible wrapper. But it’s a gateway to bolder, riskier produce. Soon, you’ll want to experiment: a shower guava, a hot tub mangosteen.

Let the setting be your guide. A few years ago, I stumbled on a vocal Internet community of soaped-up orange-eaters. It was a nice experiment, but to me, the orange has always been more of a bath fruit. An orange is a fruit you want to eat sitting down. It’s a fussy fruit—a fragile fruit—a citrus fontanelle. To breach the spongey helmet, you must plunge your thumbs into its skull. By the time it’s ready to eat, you’ve accumulated a shedding of pith and peel on the side of the tub.

That’s all fine for a bath, where you can settle in and take your time. Baths are hard-coded as luxurious; showers are for sand-blasting your flesh rind as efficiently as possible.

The shower apple helps bridge that gap. It’s a way to lean into a short, everyday experience. It’s a way to wring a little scrap of joy from this weird and wretched earth.

Eating an apple doesn’t take much time, of course, making it an indulgence that respects the constraints of the genre. Maybe you’re a person like me who works two jobs and is habitually multitasking, living badly in three verb tenses at once. Maybe you have young kids, and the noisy signal of the showerhead is the only thing that keeps them from beating down the bathroom door. Incorporating an apple into your shower doesn’t require any special dispensation or production. The only clean-up is tossing the core into the little plastic trashcan by the toilet.

I think you should try it—and if you do, send me a photo of your #showerfruit.¹ I will whisper this guided meditation in a non-creepy way from a respectable distance:

You are a capybara bobbing in a steam bath with yuzu; sink your little buckteeth into the skin of the fruit. Slurp up the sticky sweetness; let the water loosen the debris from your fur. For five minutes, you have nowhere to be. You have nothing to accomplish but this.

1. Please leave your genitals out of the frame.

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