How old is fruit in supermarkets

According to our reader, Melanie, supermarket staff should be wearing gloves and personal protective gear like a hair net or hat before handling ready-to-eat produce, though if you look around your local store, it's clear that that often doesn't happen. Like with any establishment that pays low wages, it's risky to count on employees to follow health standards, like frequent hand washing. We've heard some pretty horrific accounts of customers spreading germs at the grocery store.

From letting kids touch items, then put them back, to grown adults coughing or sneezing into their hand, then continuing to rummage through the produce, there are just too many factors out of your control that could lead to food contamination. The staff counts on customers being drawn to central displays with top sale items, so they place regularly priced items on the "wings" to spark other purchases that you may not have planned on to begin with.

The same produce director also mentioned that stores aim to buy from producers that can supply year-round, so when it comes to chain stores, "in-season" items aren't really stocked anymore.

They won't purchase locally grown produce that's only available for a few months out of the year, so chances are that even during peak stone-fruit season, your peaches, plums and nectarines are still coming from South America. Tons of Reddit users have complained about the mark-up on fruits and veggies at local supermarkets, even though they're plentiful in their hometowns. One user said, "I live in peach mecca [South Carolina]. I can go to my local market In some stores, lettuce and other greens that are going bad in the produce department are sorted by employees and chopped up to sell at the in-store salad bar.

Sure, there could be some salvageable parts, but if the greens are so wilted and mushy that they wouldn't sell whole, do you really want to be eating them? Before filling up your shopping cart, check the Environmental Working Group's " Dirty Dozen " list of popular fruits and vegetables with high pesticide levels. The optimum controlled atmosphere storage temperature is C, with O2 levels reduced from 21 per cent-3 per cent; though CO2 can damage it, lettuce keeps for a month with CO2 levels raised.

Typically, lettuce is sold in supermarkets days after packing, which can be extended to 10 days. In the Caribbean, say, the bananas are washed in water, packed in cardboard boxes and loaded on to refrigerated ships at 14C within 36 hours. This inhibits ripening. The journey by sea to Britain typically takes 6 days.

Collected from the docks by refrigerated lorry, the bananas - which are bullet-hard and emerald green - are loaded into ripening rooms when their pulp temperature is 11C. The room is sealed and heated for hours until the pulp temperature reaches 17C. Ethylene gas is discharged from cylinders or cartridges, catalysing the hormonal process of ripening.

The room is kept closed for 24 hours. The room is ventilated with extractor fans to clear the ethylene, then resealed for a further days at 17C. The temperature inside the fruit reaches twice that, and large volumes of C02 and other gases are produced as the bananas ripen. In Britain, greenhouse tomatoes are harvested from March to November, with imports from Spain, Portugal and the Canary Islands plugging gaps at other times of the year.

When ripening, temperature is critical: too high, and the intense red colour will fade; too low 10C instead of 12C , and the tomatoes will lose flavour and aroma, ripen slowly and suffer chilling damage, like frostbite.

Shelf life in the UK for softer, fruitier varieties is five days, rising to seven days for thick-walled, ribbed types. In America, mature green tomatoes in CA storage low oxygen, high nitrogen have been kept successfully for up to six weeks. Most potatoes will keep for up to a year if they are first 'cured', by storage at moderate temperatures 20C and high humidity per cent for weeks. Those harvested in a British winter are often colder than this, so they have to be warmed up to cure them - the process known as 'sweating'.

The temperature is then lowered to a maintenance level of C. Now that you're not so freaking out about your apples, use 'em to make Julianne Hough's yummy post-workout smoothie or this baked parsnip and apple latkes. Your official excuse to add "OOD" ahem, out of doors to your cal. Become an Insider. Enter Email Address. Facebook Pinterest Twitter Youtube Instagram. T here are some foods that seem to go bad the second you get home from the grocery store. Looking at you, mushy brown bananas.

But others, like apples, seem to last forever. And actually—you ready for this—it turns out that apples at most supermarkets can be over a year old. Related Stories. Tags: Food and Nutrition. Loading More Posts