my low stakes hot take

Cooked fruit is bad.

I understand the preservation reasons for cooking fruit: I have nothing ideologically against jams and jellies. They serve a purpose; I respect the purpose. That does not, however, change the fact that they are, as a foodstuff, bad.

Look. Look! You take a perfectly nice piece of fruit and you slimify it. I don't know about you, but I quite prefer my apples crunchy^[1] and my strawberries firm at the least. I have no interest in selecting a fruit of the appropriate texture and making it hot and mushy, or worse, allowing it to become cold and mushy. Absolutely no thank you.

Things this includes:

• Jams and jellies
• Apple sauce
• Any manner of fruit pie,^[2] cobbler, crisp, crumble, or buckle
• Any manner of fruit ice-cream
• Fruit muffins and pastries
• Dried fruit (yes, this absolutely counts)

Am I a picky eater? You could absolutely say that, yeah. And a lot of my food rules make no sense and are inconvenient to say the least—I'd definitely pay God five bucks to get rid of my distaste for egg yolks. But on this hill I will absolutely die: cooked fruit is just bad.