Some of you may have seen my post a couple years ago when I pointed out a table from Cook's Illustrated containing recommendations on how to store a gamut of fruits and vegetables. The problem was you had to get a copy of the magazine or join their online WWW site.
Today I ran into a table from some folks at UC Davis, which is quite the place for "agriculture, viticulture and enology, the biological sciences and veterinary medicine." The PDF table, by Adel Kader, Jim Thompson, and Kathi Sylva, is called "Storing Fresh Fruits and Vegetables for Better Taste." It's served off UC Davis's California Backyard Orchard WWW site, but still has plenty of entries for non-orchard fruits and vegetables.
The table also points to UC Davis's Postharvest Technology Research site, itself ripe with plenty of juicy information about what can and does happen to your plant foods in the time between when they're harvested and when you eat them.
I'm reminded of a quotation I heard once from a spiritual leader in a community where I used to live. The quotation is from at least as early as WWII or the Great Depression, but I'm sure the sentiment is much older:
Use it up,
wear it out,
make it do,
or do without.
I need hardly point out that if you practice the first three, the last is less of a burden. And with food prices going up faster than the core inflation rate, saving on food and saving food itself seems like a smart way to provide more for yourself and others.
Q.v. http://jhv.blogs.com/eatatjoes/2008/06/when-produce-go.html
Heather and I tried to follow some of the general "where to keep produce" guidelines, but we ran into a problem almost right away. We are members of a local farm co-op, so we get one of those big, wood-slatted baskets of produce every two weeks from them. Lots of fresh produce, but the problems were a) we couldn't eat some of it fast enough before it went bad out of the refrigerator and b) it was hard to tell how "close to ripe" stuff was (we had cases where we put out what seemed like a "hard" peach, only for it to go bad in two days!). On top of that, we've found that we get fruit flies spawning at times around the stuff that we keep out of the fridge (which, we speculate, is a function of the organic nature of the co-op, since we never had/have this problem with normal grocery produce). So, in the end, we still try to keep a limited amount of produce out of the fridge, but we've just had to learn to be realistic about it.
Posted by: Jack | 24 October 2010 at 12:29 PM