If you have noticed that certain fruits and vegetables go bad too soon, you may be storing them together with other ‘harmful’ foods that are accelerating their deterioration.
If you are one of those who usually save all the fruit and vegetable in the same place, either in the refrigerator drawer or in the traditional fruit bowl, it is possible that without realizing it you are causing an acceleration of its ripening time.
And is that proper food storage is one of the keys to prolonging its shelf life.
The culprit is called ethylene, a gas that certain fruits and vegetables naturally generate as they ripen.
Most plants produce ethylene, but the amount generated varies by species, and generally fruits tend to produce more ethylene than vegetables.
This is itself does not represent any problem, as long as we don’t jointly store “unsupported fruits and vegetables”.
We can classify fruits and vegetables into two types: ethylene producers and ethylene sensitiveIn this way, all we have to do is save the first ones away from the second ones, as simple as that:
Ethylene producers | Sensitive to ethylene |
---|---|
Apple | Asparagus |
Avocado | Broccoli |
Plantain | Brussels sprouts |
Cantaloupe | Carrot |
Mango | Cauliflower |
Pear | Cucumber |
Peach | Lettuce and leafy greens |
Plum | Onion |
Potato | Pumpkin |
Strawberry | |
Tomato |
In this way we will make the fruits and vegetables last longer, then depending on the type of food we can decide and it is more appropriate to store them or not in the refrigerator and even how to do it in the most appropriate way.
The usual thing is to store foods that produce a lot of ethylene in the fruit bowl at room temperature, and foods sensitive to ethylene in the refrigerator, although there are always exceptions.
It is very important to always take into account which foods produce ethylene and which are sensitive to it so that incompatibilities do not occur.
Thus we will know which fruits and vegetables you should not store together, thus helping your food last longer and the maturation times of the same do not accelerate.