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Comment by simonblack | Hacker News Reader

I recently bought a batch of six bananas from a local farmer's market - they were very fresh and very green and smaller, having just been picked. I let them ripen at home over the next 3 days.

They tasted very much better than my usual rather tasteless supermarket-bought bananas. I'm going to try the exercise again tomorrow to check whether this was a one-off or not.

After reading the article, I'm going to check with the grower whether or not these were Cavendish bananas which are the norm around this banana-growing area, or something else.

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Might be dwarf Cavendish which is what they grow on the Canary Islands in Spain. It's abut 1/2 the size of the full Cavendish and to me taste slightly better.

Went back to the market this morning:

Those bananas were dwarf Cavendish. And the farmer said " .. and we don't treat them with (ethylene) gas."

it is not a one-off. this is commonly done in India. in fact people even put a branch of bananas into a steel storage drum full of raw rice to help them to ripen. I don't know the science behind it.

Ripening fruit/veges give off ethylene oxide which causes further ripening.

If you trap that ethylene oxide by putting the fruit or veges in a closed plastic bag, they will ripen even faster.

Here in the tropics fruit ripens very quickly (chemical reactions proceed faster with increased temperature). I try to slow that down by keeping the stuff cold in the fridge. (But the fridge traps the EtO anyway!)

interesting. I think I remember reading that fruit producing companies use ethylene gas to artificially ripen some types of fruit. but I did not know that it can also happen naturally.

good to know. I guess that explains why the traditional Indian method works.

>If you trap that ethylene oxide by putting the fruit or veges in a closed plastic bag, they will ripen even faster.

but why would you want to do that? trap that, I mean? i would have thought you would want to use a fan to blow away the naturally occurring ethylene gas, so that it does not cause the fruit to ripen fast / further.

btw i said ethylene gas but you said ethylene oxide. need to google if they are the same or not.

a few minutes later:

I just checked it. they are different.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethylene

You're quite correct. It's ethylene and not ethylene oxide that does the ripening.

Sometimes you don't want to have to wait days for a fruit to ripen, that's why it's faster to use the plastic bag trick.

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