Mindless individual’s relative mostly eating fruit (9)
I believe the answer is:
automaton
'fruit' is the definition.
The definition and answer can be both man-made objects as well as being singular nouns.
Perhaps there's an association between them I don't understand?
'mindless individual's relative mostly eating' is the wordplay.
'mindless individual's' becomes 'tomato' (I am not sure about this - if you are sure you should believe this answer much more).
'relative' becomes 'aunt' (aunt is a type of relative).
'mostly' means to remove the last letter (most but not all of the word).
'eating' means one lot of letters goes inside another.
'aunt' with its last letter taken off is 'aun'.
'tomato' going into 'aun' is 'AUTOMATON'.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for automaton that I've seen before include "Zombie" , "Mechanical man" , "Mechanical figure" , "One doesn't think" , "being worked invariably" .)