Every morning, hopeful moms and dads put an apple in their kids' lunchboxes, and every afternoon, a huge number of those apples go straight into the school garbage can.

Perhaps it's because Red Delicious apples, which for so long dominated the apple market, were bred to look good and keep well on the store shelves, and aren't really delicious at all. But are the ever more widely available Galas and Fujis any more likely to appeal to kids?

Apparently, it depends on whether you slice them. Regular old-fashioned apples are downright obsolete, according to this in-depth New York Times article on the rise of the pre-sliced apple, whose sales have skyrocketed in the past several years.

An apple begins to brown the second you cut it open and expose its flesh to air, so the success of the pre-sliced apple represents a true triumph of technology over nature. The secret? A flavorless white powder called NatureSeal, a blend of vitamin C and calcium that took a decade of U.S.D.A. and private research to develop.

But why do apples need to be cut up, treated with preservatives and packaged in the first place? It all comes down to “snackability;” to compete with such snack foods as potato chips and cookies, apples needed to be cut up into bite-sized pieces that could be neatly and easily consumed.

It's the same logic that brought us those wildly popular bags of baby carrots, which I was naïve enough to think really were baby carrots till I read this article. Now I know that a baby carrot is simply a regular carrot that's been whittled down to baby carrot-sized dimensions. I feel so disillusioned.

I'm all in favor of any approach that gets people to eat more fruit, and if pre-sliced apples help American apple farmers compete with all the foreign apples flooding our markets, that's clearly a good thing, too.

But what does it say about us that we don't want to eat an apple unless someone else has cut it up for us and pre-packaged it? Europeans eat more than twice as many pounds of apples annually as Americans do, and not the pre-packaged kind, either. Evidently they're not bothered by Mother Nature's antiquated packaging and lack of marketing savvy. Us? We're on the cutting edge. Of what, I don't know.