Comment on YSK: A simple trick to keep your bananas ripe for a lot longer.

• mushroommunk@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Have you tested it? Thoroughly? Side by side in controlled conditions? Tell you what, I’ll post my sources. You post yours, and we’ll compare.

  [Source one] (youtu.be/cHu10C1DAds?t=13m) - Ann Reardon tracked down the origin of this myth and put it to test. She’s got an actual degree in food science and makes it approachable for people without a science background. She shows clips of the bulk gassing. I got curious and tested it at home with a similar method to her except I used entire bunches of bananas and gave each bunch their own room to control the process more. I did control for sunlight and temperature as best I could do those were equal across the bunches. The fridge banana was indeed the only one that didn’t ripen at the same time as the rest.

  Source two - a paper discussing how ethylene gas works to trigger ripening and that bananas (and other fruits) are picked green and then gassed with ethylene to control the process. It talks about how this gassing kicks off the process and once it starts there’s no stopping it because the enzymatic processes have begun and enough ethylene gas has already permeated the membrane. It also mentions needing hypobaric conditions to stop mature fruit from speeding up the ripening of immature fruit. Which a fridge although not negative pressure is closer than ambient.

  Source two - External application of ethylene to induce ripening suppresses a bananas internal production of ethylene gas. It’s already producing less than it would on a vine because it doesn’t need to.

  Okay now where’s yours?

  source
• panda_abyss@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I think we need to buy 4 bunches of bananas from the same grocery store, split two, leave two out but apart. Then record the results

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