It's official: Parents are now too busy to cut up oranges for half-time sport.

It’s Saturday morning, and it’s half-time.

I’m watching The Rockets run off the field in a sweaty, tumbling, little-kid mess. But instead of huddling together over a traditional Tupperware container of cut-up orange quarters, they wander over to their own parents for a bag of chips, a jelly snake or a quick munch on an apple before they hear the whistle blow for the second half.

No oranges. Sadly oranges at half time are no more.

Andrew Daddo has A LOT to say about the orange ban on this week’s This Glorious Mess, here:

Can you believe it? The institution that is the half-time orange is gone. Wiped from our children’s childhoods.

I’m trying very hard not to be outraged here because when I put it in perspective, really it is well, just an orange, a mere fruit but truthfully it kind of leaves me in despair.

Both my sons play junior sport in two separate teams – an under-7 team and an under-9 team and both teams, unrelated, have cut the orange.

For one team its an allergy thing one kid had a citrus allergy and the other parents didn’t object as most of the kids “didn’t like oranges anyway.”

The other team has canned the humble fruit as the whole rigmarole of ‘orange duty’ each week was just too much hard work.

On one hand I can see their point. How many times last season did I have to do the 9pm Friday night dash to Woolies to stock up on a bag of navels when I checked the orange roster too late?.

How many times did I realise just one minute to half time on a freezing foggy winter’s morning that said bag of navels all neatly cut up was not actually at the soccer field but was still sitting at home on the kitchen bench.

Little kids playing soccer outside[/img_caption]

The kids don’t eat them any way, they said.

It’s a waste of time and effort and who can be arsed cutting them up, they said.

We’re all too busy, its another thing we all just forget, they said.

So the oranges at half time were squashed.

I was denouncing the downfall of modern day society in the form of the orange ban over a glass of wine with a friend the other day, when I was startled to hear that this wasn’t anything new.

“Na, our team did it years ago” a mum of older kids told me. “Too much hard work and no one eats ‘em. The kids just bring a bottle of PowerAde instead.”

She’s right, these days many, many junior sporting codes have a “lolly’ roster instead where one family brings a bag of snakes for the players to be shared either at half time or at the end of the game. While we mums often grumble about the amount of sugar our kids consume, it seems there is nothing hard about stopping at the servo on the way to the game to grab your bag of Allens.  A British study two years ago found that 45 per cent of kids eat chips, chocolate and lollies during sports and 43% choose fizzy and sugary drinks over water.

Oranges were ditched during half time for many sports years ago in the UK and judging by a typical social media reaction to it you can see why. This this being a normal type of comment:

“So, do they wash their hands before and after eating the orange? The banana is a cleaner fruit to eat. It is possible to peel it and eat it without becoming sticky all over. Grapes and dried fruit can be eaten cleanly also.”

The poor old orange has been categorised as being too much hard work.

And maybe even bad for you….  in 2009 Netball Queensland banned the citrus fruit as they were deemed too acidic for player’s teeth.

Perhaps we’ll go the way many children’s teams in the US have turning to scientific sports bars at half time. You can pick them up in a box of 20 or so, store them in the boot of your car knowing they will never go off and there you have it a snack with creatively labeled ingredients such as “Hydrolysed Collagen Protein”, “Maltitol” and “Hydrolyzed Gelatin” – never to be forgotten.

Perhaps the orange ban is for the best. After all with a protein bar there is not a sticky finger, a time-poor parent or an unhappy child in sight.

Listen to the full episode of The Glorious Mess, including an interview with the family who pulled the kids out of school to go off to Mexico, here: