As dessert, cut fruit was served hours after dinner was done, but it was also offered up during homework time, or throughout long stretches of weekend afternoons. It was the only way I ate fruit, and such a normal part of my life that, for years, I thought apple skins were inedible. The inelegant orange wedges that came with my school lunches were a personal insult. Once, when the cafeteria at a new school served a bunch of grapes alongside its square pizza, I realized I was the only one peeling the paper-thin skin off each grape before popping it into my mouth. What are you doing? I can still hear my friends saying, as I hid the curling grape-skins under my milk carton.