Woman sparks debate about touching produce at grocery store before buying

‘I always feel my fruit and veg. Some things are soft and starting to go off and others can be hard and able to eat for days’

A woman has questioned grocery store etiquette after she wasn’t sure what to make of another shopper’s supermarket behaviour.

Taylor, who goes by the username @taylerstanleyy, recently took to TikTok to question if what she saw at her local Australian grocery store chain, Woolworths, was a gross habit as she asked viewers, “Is this an ick, or is it just me?”

“Okay, so I just went and grabbed some groceries and please tell me this is normal,” her clip began. “A lady walked over and she was standing in front of me at the blueberries and strawberries in Woolworths, and she opened up the blueberries and started touching them.”

After discovering that the blueberries weren’t to her liking, she then put the first container back and repeated her process with two more until she found one she liked, grabbed it, and then walked away.

“Is that normal? Yuck,” the TikToker concluded.

After posting, many people took to the comments section to agree with Taylor’s claim that the practice was gross.

“Oh piss off. I don’t want to buy blueberries again now,” said one commenter.

Another replied: “Yuuuuckkkk!! I wash ours and this still makes me mad!”

“I saw a lady doing this at Aldi the other day, pretty much taking the best strawberries from each one and filling one container with a few from each other container,” a third commenter wrote.

Other commenters thought there were exceptions to this rule, noting that they only resort to feeling a few produce items, and not all.

“I always feel my fruit and veg. Some things are soft and starting to go off and others can be hard and able to eat for days so always check for fruit I can eat on the day. That means I need to touch,” one commenter wrote to counter the TikToker’s point.

Taylor replied to this comment, writing: “Yes me too, did it to my avocados yesterday. I don’t eat the skin off my avocado though... I get it but do you touch/squeeze blueberries before you buy? Is this normal?”

A commenter stood up for the fruit toucher writing: “I no longer buy the strawberries or blueberries. The last two lots we got were mouldy so I understand why she did it.”

The TikToker replied to this comment with her own method of checking out containers of fruit. “I will pick up the punnet and try to move them to see, maybe even open and have a look at the bottom etc but never would I touch them…” she wrote.

Another commenter acknowledged that produce should be washed regardless because of all of the hands that touch it during its journey to the grocery store.

“You wash your produce anyway. Just think about how many hands have already touched it before this woman… picking, packing etc?” one comment read.

Taylor still was adamant that touching fruit in this way was “not normal,” as she replied in the comments: “Absolutely agree, this is why I wash my veg and fruit vigorously but to go as far as touching and squeezing the berries, like cmon. It’s not normal right???”

According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the safest produce to eat is either cooked or washed. To wash your produce, the organisation recommends leaving fruits or vegetables under running water, even if you do not plan to eat the peel as germs on the peel or skin can get inside fruits and vegetables when you cut them.