Fruits and veggies rotting before you can eat them? Here’s how to keep them fresh
As the coronavirus continues to spread like wildfire across the country, staying at home is the best protection from the disease.
This might amount to fewer trips to the grocery store, meaning your fruits and vegetables are rotting faster than you can enjoy them.
If you can relate, experts say you might be storing your produce in a way that makes them ripen faster than usual, turning them into brown, mushy blobs that attract fruit flies, cost you money and add to food waste.
“Fruit ripening is the start of decay,” Harry Klee, a fruit genetics and biochemistry expert at the University of Florida, told NPR. “We happen to pick it and eat it at one stage, but it is on its way to being a bag of mush.”
That’s because of a hormone called ethylene. Fruit and some veggies expel it when they’re ready to turn into the sweet and tender food you love.
But while the hormone causes quicker ripening for some, it can lead to unwanted spoilage for others, chef and registered dietitian Abbie Gellman told Well+Good.
Ethylene is also released when a plant is stressed, according to NPR. Studies into this activity started in the late 1800s when scientists noticed that gas from street lamps made the leaves of nearby trees wither.
Today, produce distributors release the hormone in warehouses full of almost ripe fruits to ensure they are ready to eat once they land in a grocery store, NPR said.
But how can you make the most of your produce, especially when trips outside your home can lead to a coronavirus infection? Here are some tips and tricks.
Storage is everything
Certain fruits and vegetables release the needed ethylene gas to ripen, while others are sensitive to it, so if you enjoy the aesthetic or convenience of a large bowl of colorful produce in your kitchen, get rid of it, experts say.
Produce like avocados, apples, bananas, tomatoes and peppers are all ethylene producers, according to the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine.
You’ll want to store these separately from ethylene-sensitive fruits like kiwi, lemons, onions, mangoes and peaches.
“Most ethylene-producing produce should always be left out on the counter and not stored in the refrigerator,” Gellman told Well+Good, which can also help you prevent waste by reminding you of the food you have.
Once your avocado, for example, is soft and almost ready to eat, then you can put it in the fridge to make it last longer, experts say.
If you desperately need and are accustomed to your big bowl of fruits and veggies, consider these less ethylene-sensitive foods for your array: blueberries, potatoes, garlic, oranges, strawberries and yucca, according to UC San Diego.
But if you missed your chance to save your produce, there are creative ways to turn mushy food into new products or give it a new purpose.
Try turning your bananas into bread, apples into applesauce and your berries into a jam.
You could even put rotting oranges, strawberries, apples and bananas on plates outside as a tasty treat for butterflies suffering from habitat destruction, according to Tree Hugger.
This story was originally published May 7, 2020 at 4:09 PM.
