Science Questions

How safe is the wax on apples?

How safe is the wax on apples? I end up eating up to a kilo of apples some days. What bugs me is the wax that covers the apples, to supposedly preserve them. How safe is this? What actually is it?” Ace, America

This was answered by Yor_on on our forum...

"If you walk into an orchard, pick an apple from a tree, rub that apple on your shirt, you’d notice that it shines, and that’s because you've just polished off the natural waxes and also yeasts that the apple produces in order to protect its high water content.  And without that wax, fruits and vegetables would end up going all dry and nasty.

After they've been harvested, apples get washed and brushed to remove leaves and field dirt, and then they get packed in cartons for shopping to your market.  This process removes some of the fruits original wax coating that actually protects the fruit.

So the apple packers re-apply a commercial grade wax, and one pound of that wax can cover as many as 160,000 pieces of fruit.  So in other words, two drops of it on each apple.  The waxes have been used on fruits since the 1920s.  they're all made from natural ingredients certified by the US Food and Drug Administration as safe to eat and they come from natural sources such Carnauba that wax, the leaves of the Brazilian palm, Candelia wax, which is derived from a reed-like dessert plant of the genus euphorbia and also food grade shellac."

February 2010