Choosing fruits and vegetables can be stressful. What are the rules?

My friend Olga was recently involved in a nefarious collard greens incident.

“At the grocery store?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I was in the produce department and this woman was breaking up bunches of collard greens and putting the parts she liked into her plastic produce bag!”

“I hope you called the police immediately,” I said.

“No, no, no. Don’t be silly. But I was curious. I asked, ‘Can you do that?’ Because it’s hard, sometimes, with produce. You’ll find a bunch of something, but it’s not all good. So I asked her, and she told me, ‘If it’s already bagged, I don’t take it apart. But if they’re selling something by the pound, what’s the difference? Especially at these prices!’”

I immediately related.

“That’s why I hate buying onions by the bag,” I said. “Because when you get home there is always an ugly, nasty onion hiding on the bottom. It’s soft, or wet, or …”

Olga howled: “Yes! Exactly! The same thing with apples! They look so good in the bag, but there’s always a dented, brownish one in there! I think they do it on purpose!”

“I bet you’re right,” I replied.

I love conspiracy theories.

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Later that night, when I was thinking about the collard greens, I remembered something that happened to me years ago.

I was in my local produce department, checking out the bananas — the green bunches, the yellow bunches, the already-browning bunches — when it occurred to me to break up the bunches and make my own custom bunch.

Great idea, right?

That was years ago. Today, I think everyone does this, because now when I go to the store I see piles of orphaned bananas piled up on the side of the bin.

Pick me! Pick me!

My assertive move was not without controversy, though.

One woman, who saw me tinkering, suddenly became indignant: “You’re one of the those banana splitters, aren’t you?”

“Excuse me?”

She was older than yours truly — a member of my parents’ generation. And they had their own sets of rules.

They never questioned their doctors. They never wore white after Labor Day. And they never disassembled and reassembled their bananas.

“Who tampers with their bananas? It’s just not done!”

As I told the woman in the store, “I live alone. These bunches consist of eight or nine bananas that are all going to be ready to eat on the same day. I don’t want to eat all of them on the same day.”

She sneered at me. And I knew what she was thinking: If God had wanted people to buy individual bananas, He wouldn’t have glued them all together in bunches.

She also didn’t like that I was TOUCHING them.

“It’s disgusting,” she said. “Do you think anyone wants to eat bananas that someone else has handled?”

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“Oh, I’m sorry,” I replied. “I guess you only buy those new, genetically modified bananas that pick themselves, hitchhike to New Jersey and then climb up on each other’s shoulders, jump into the bin and sit there, untouched by human hands, until YOU show up.”

Now that I think about it, all of this happened in 2007. I remember because it was the same year that my mother had abdominal surgery.

After she got out of the hospital she was struggling to gain back the weight she had lost. And I bought her bananas to put in the daily milkshakes that her doctor recommended she drink.

2007! George W. Bush was in the White House. The Colts won the Super Bowl. The Sopranos went to Holsten’s for ice cream — and never made it home.

I visited my mother on a Friday and brought her seven bananas to add to her daily milkshakes.

She stared at them and asked, “Did you break up the bunches?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“You’re a banana splitter! Is that how I raised you, with no respect for rules and regulations? What gives you the right to walk into a store and ...”

“Ma, chill. They’re bananas. And what about you? I’ve seen you pull off grapes and eat them right in the produce department.”

“I’m TESTING them!”

“Testing them for what? Mad grape disease?”

“Your father hates funny grapes. He likes them to taste a certain way.”

“Yeah, well, I like bananas that don’t all ripen at 2 a.m. on Tuesday. And because I’m such a considerate son, I picked all of these ESPECIALLY for you. I even named them for you. Today’s banana is Rita. The others are Anita, Bonita, Chiquita, Juanita, Carmelita and Dick Cheney. He’ll be ready tomorrow. He’s the second banana.”

She shook her head and said I was nuts. Then she admitted that when she shops with my father, he wants to break up the bunches, too, but she won’t let him.

“You’re two of a kind,” she screamed.

YES!

Like bananas, I didn’t fall far from the tree.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: What are the rules for choosing fruits and vegetables?