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.
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!)
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.
a few minutes later:
I just checked it. they are different.
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.