Our Best Ideas For Fruit-Friendly Lunches

One of the reasons I started writing this column a year and a half ago is because lunch tends to have a reputation as a boring meal, and life's too short for 1/3 of your food to be repetitious and/or lame. I symbolize this concept with the root of all lunch evil: the turkey sandwich. But even the most monotonous thing can be spruced up with a little fruit — it's kind of a perfect seasoning on its own. Acidic, sweet, easy-to-find, probably-have-around-anyway...healthy.

In my subtle quest to heal the picky eaters of this world, when someone says they don't like the combination of sweet and savory, I always counter with this seasonal argument: You like cranberry sauce on your food at Thanksgiving, right? And nobody says no. So the turkey sandwich, bastion of the limited palate, is now acceptable with fruit. Sometimes a smear of stuffing, in a shocking reversal of texture consent. Run with it. Here are my favorite ways to strike while the iron is hot:

I estimate roughly 50 ideas in that mix. And isn't that what Thanksgiving is about? Abundance? Abundance and pie?