Best Before by Nicola Temple

Author:Nicola Temple
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

The fresh-cut time bomb

This is my experience every June when the first strawberries of the season start making an appearance. I am overjoyed to see them on the shelf after a winter of citrus and last season’s apples. I examine all of the punnets in the store, staring through the clear plastic to determine which bunch is the most ripe and shows no signs of rotting. I give them a place of privilege in my shopping basket so that they don’t come to any harm by touching a rogue avocado or, heaven forbid, canned goods. I purchase my carefully selected strawberries and put them in the top of the shopping bag so that there is no fear of mishaps on the 15-minute walk home. Once in the kitchen, I pull the strawberries off the top of the bag and as I place them on the counter, I notice one or two have already passed their prime and are in a state of decay. Sigh. This is what has become known at my house as the strawberry time-bomb.

It is as though I am in some culinary version of the crime thriller 24, where every time I enter my kitchen I can see a clock counting down to the moment when my strawberries are going to implode, and I am agent Jack Bauer trying my best to defuse the situation, yelling at all family members within earshot to ‘eat the strawberries’. I have even been known to lash out at people caught eating other fruits! I exaggerate ... but only slightly.

Strawberries are not alone in having a brief window in which they are at their peak quality. This is when a fruit’s colour and smell sends out signals to everyone that it is time to be eaten. The fruit’s sugar content is usually at its highest, luring animals in to take advantage of this energy reward in exchange for some seed dispersal. This is how birds know to eat all of the cherries or blackcurrants or other soft fruit you have nurtured in your garden on the very morning you intend to pick it. This window obviously varies depending on the fruit or vegetable in question. The goal is to deliver them to consumers as close to this window as possible, having processed the fruit and vegetables and got them to consumers so that they can eat them without going all Jack Bauer on their families. This is a significant challenge.

Some plants, including tomatoes, avocados, bananas, mangoes, plums and apples, start to produce large quantities of the gas ethylene at different stages of their lifecycle. These are known as climacteric plants. Ethylene acts like a general chemical signal within the plant – much like a hormone in animals – which triggers changes, including the opening of flowers or shedding of leaves, and, important in this context, the ripening of the fruit. Climacteric fruits reach full size before ripening; this growth is known as maturing. As they mature, the fruits store starch. Once

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