Oh dear, it seems like people are going bananas over Duchess Meghan’s simple gesture at her latest outing.
On her most recent visit to Bristol with Prince Harry, the pregnant royal visited One25, a charity that helps women break free from situations including street sex work and addiction.
While helping the volunteers pack food parcels for some of the city’s street sex-workers, the Duchess of Sussex wrote empowering messages including, “You are brave”, “You are strong” and “You are loved” on the bananas to the women.
And though it was meant to be a self-esteem booster, it hasn’t been entirely well-received by the media and certain sex workers themselves.
Compassionate or tone deaf? Meghan’s banana messages have caused a divide. (Image: Getty Images)
According to The Sun, one sex worked by the name of Nikki found the move “really stupid” adding, “People out here struggle to eat and sleep and she gifts us some words on a piece of fruit.”
“She has the means to help us more than that. It’s offensive, you know?”
Controversial columnist Piers Morgan also criticised the move, which was inspired by a school cafeteria worker in the US who wrote messages for children in the same way.
“Giving schoolchildren an ’empowering’ banana with their lunch is one thing. Giving prostitutes an ’empowering’ banana after they’ve spent the night subjecting their bodies to often vile, sexually depraved men, is quite another,” he penned in his Daily Mail column.
“And what were they supposed to do with these signed bananas, exactly? Feel a moment of Meghan’s wondrously regal empowerment, then eat them and try to sell the skins on Ebay? Or perhaps keep them as a souvenir for a few days until they mould, blacken and stink?” he added.
The Duchess of Sussex had the idea to write on bananas after seeing a US cafeteria worker do the same thing for children. (Image: Instagram @kensingtonroyal)
Are the bananas offensive? (Image: Instagram @kensingtonroyal)
This isn’t the first time Piers Morgan has criticised the royal mum-to-be. In December, the journalist shared an account of how the former Suits star ghosted him when better opportunities arose.
“Meghan Markle is a self-obsessed professional actress who has landed the role of her life and is determined to milk it for all she’s worth,” he wrote for The Daily Mail.
“She’s spent most of the past 20 years cosying up to people until they serve no more use to her, then airbrushing them out of her life without so much as ‘goodbye, Loser!’ I know because I was one of them.”
WATCH: Meghan Markle on working on projects she’s believes in. Post continues…
But it hasn’t all been criticism on the banana front.
One25 CEO Anna Smith told Bazaar.com that the gesture really touched her, and she’s “not even a royalist.”
“She was just watching the food being packed up and suddenly decided she wanted to write these beautiful messages on every banana they had there. She had clearly listened and heard what we are all about—that we don’t judge, we simply offer the service and unconditional love. She totally got it.”
One volunteer and former sex worker added, “It sounds really cheesy, but little things like that when you are out—especially tonight, we can see the cold weather—just to get that little thing … Meghan took her time out to write that one. It’s lush.”
