Find and replace with sed in directory and sub directories

Your find should look like that to avoid sending directory names to sed:

find ./ -type f -exec sed -i -e 's/apple/orange/g' {} \;

For larger s&r tasks it's better and faster to use grep and xargs, so, for example;

grep -rl 'apples' /dir_to_search_under | xargs sed -i 's/apples/oranges/g'