Are Fruit Stickers Safe To Eat?

Sometimes those pesky stickers on fruit can be hard to find, and sometimes they've already fallen off, to begin with. But occasionally, it seems people accidentally find that the bite of fruit they've taken actually had the sticker on it. Others might have realized a little too late that the fruit they sliced to eat as a snack or for a fruit salad still had a sticker on it that the knife just sliced right through. So it isn't surprising that some people have eaten produce stickers and might be a little concerned as to whether it's OK.

The good news is that fruit stickers are safe to eat. Snopes even says that they are "edible." But just because they are technically edible does not mean you should be eating them regularly. Instead, you should always look for the sticker when you wash the produce. You should remove it and then wash away any residual adhesive too.

So, no, accidentally eating the 4015 sticker on your Red Delicious won't result in a trip to the ER but the biggest reason you should remove the stickers is because of the ink and other chemicals used to print them. They are safe to eat in very small quantities because the tiny amount of potential toxins in the sticker would not be harmful according to The New York Times. So the occasional mishap won't hurt anything.

As The New York Times explains, the FDA never intended for people to eat the stickers you find on fruits. Instead, those tiny annoyances to snackers serve as the primary source of information about the fruit itself — from the way it was grown to the kind of fruit it is to begin with.

Don't assume these stickers are made with something edible like rice paper or another food-safe material for consumption. Instead, it's a good idea to do your best to peel them off before taking a big bite.