I'm confused. You want create a new function every time you encounter an object of type 'apple'? Also, it seems the subroutines for each object take a parameter (unless you mean to use & to preserve @_, but he said it should be maintainable ;^) so the new sub would have to be:

*apple_proc = sub { 
        my $item = shift; 
        apple_wash($item);
        apple_core($item);
        apple_pulp($item);
        };
# same for bananas here.
[download]

I don't think you can avoid the lexical block here since we still need to test for the type of object before executing the appropriate subroutine:

foreach my $item (@items) {
    SWITCH: for ($type) { # not sure from the writeup where
                          # $type is supposed to come from 
        /apple/ && do {
          apple_proc($item);
        };
        /banana/ && do {
          banana_proc($item);
        };
      warn "Unknown thingy: $type\n"; # Default case
    }
}
[download]