There’s no point putting fruit in the fridge, just stop buying it

Is there any greater domestic exemplar of virtue-signalling than an overabundant fruit bowl? Books may dress a sitting room, but a kitchen cries out for glossy apples and curvaceous pears, pristine bananas, a cascade of bright satsumas, ripest plums, all studded with prohibitively expensive, out-of-season cherries.

Ideally there should be enough to impress your guests, make your family feel especially loved and to run up a couple of Arcimboldo portraits before the fruit flies descend and it all goes off.

But the very future of the nation’s fruit bowls is in peril with this week’s bossy diktat that we should store fruit in the fridge to reduce waste.

According to the waste charity WRAP, the Food Standards Agency and the Department for Food and Rural Affairs, our apples and oranges should be tucked away in the salad box with the veg in order to prolong their life.

Ironically, we bought them to prolong our own, but frankly who among us is going to scrabble about for a chilly Pink Lady when there’s a lovely room temperature bag of Kettle Chips to be eaten instead?

I’m not sure why anyone thought keeping fruit in the fridge was good – or even practical – advice. For a start, space in my fridge is at a higher premium than a shoe concession in Harvey Nicks. There’s certainly no room for my Easy Peelers.

The truth is that modern fruit bowls are aspirational, the lavish repository of our good intentions; to eat fewer Marylands, consume more clementines, to glow with pomegranate health rather than bickering on the sofa over a tub of Ben & Jerry’s.

We pop that bag of Braeburns into the supermarket trolley and know that we’re firing a shot in the battle against diabetes, dementia and middle-aged spread. If only we could get fired up enough to actually eat them.

Just as sophisticated Georgian hostesses would rent pineapples as a table centrepiece, my ostentatious fruit bowl usually convinces visitors of my esoteric-yet-wholesome values.

The reality is not quite so palatable. My husband is Scottish and will never voluntarily eat a piece of fruit. Being half-scottish, my children had to be tempted early on with attractive cut-fruit platters, which means they now won’t countenance raspberries or grapes unless they have been elaborately arranged into fractals.

I do eat fruit, but not by the cornucopia, hence the flies, even in winter.

I suppose one option would indeed be to cram it all into the fridge, although this will hardly up your fruit consumption, since chilling it robs it of flavour – and the out-of-sight, out-ofmind principle means those Conference pears will simply stay in there, oozing, until the end of time.

But a better solution, radical as it sounds, is to give up our delusions of impeccable healthfulness and buy less fruit in the first place. Like wine glasses, fruit bowls have grown bigger and more capacious in recent years, so maybe it’s time to downsize.

A smaller bowl equals less fruit, equals a fighting chance of getting through it. The display can still be as pretentious as you like (care for a mangosteen, anyone?), just without the unconscionable waste.

And best of all, it leaves the fridge free. After all, where else are we going to store our half-empty jars of jalapenos, cling-filmed leftovers and ageing stubs of Parmesan?