{"id":19494,"date":"2022-07-24T08:36:15","date_gmt":"2022-07-24T15:36:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=19494"},"modified":"2022-07-24T08:37:42","modified_gmt":"2022-07-24T15:37:42","slug":"refrigeration-bananas-and-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2022\/07\/24\/refrigeration-bananas-and-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"Refrigeration, bananas, and truth"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>When I was a kid, anytime the subject of bananas came up, my father would sing a little jingle, to which the words were:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<div class=\"stanza\">\r\n<p>Chiquita Banana says you<\/p>\r\n<p>must never never<\/p>\r\n<p>put your bananas in the<\/p>\r\n<p>refrigerator.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>And so my entire life, I have taken as absolute fact the idea that bananas must never go in the fridge. Never never!<\/p>\r\n<p>I never questioned that until this morning.<\/p>\r\n<p>I was looking at a bunch of bananas on my kitchen counter that have once again gone from green to spotted-brown almost overnight, and I was thinking about avocados, which I leave on the counter until they ripen and then I put them in the fridge.<\/p>\r\n<p>And I thought, <i>Wait, what if I did the same thing with bananas?<\/i><\/p>\r\n<p>So I poked around online a bit, and found out some interesting things:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>I think Peter may have misremembered the words and the tune to the Chiquita jingle. (Or it\u2019s possible that <em>I<\/em> have long misremembered Peter\u2019s version of it.) There\u2019s an old minute-long animated Chiquita commercial that has a similar line in it, but neither the words nor the tune are the same as what I remember Peter used to sing, and a quick web search isn\u2019t turning up any evidence of a different version of it.<\/li>\r\n  <li>The original Chiquita ad also says that bananas taste best (and are best for you) just after the brown spots appear on the skin. That\u2019s a matter of taste, I guess; I prefer them in the slightly firmer stage just <em>before<\/em> the brown spots appear on the skin.<\/li>\r\n  <li>One page that I saw said that it\u2019s best to store bananas in a relatively cool environment\u2014not refrigerated, but also not (for example) exposed to direct sunlight. I don\u2019t know whether that\u2019s true or not, but seems worth a try.<\/li>\r\n  <li>It turns out that you <em>can<\/em> refrigerate bananas, but should do so only after they ripen, because refrigeration slows or stops the ripening process. I wish I had known that! Many bananas have lost their ripeness over the years due to my not having that information.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Apparently after a couple days in the fridge, the skins are likely to turn brown.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Sources disagree on what happens after that. One page I saw said (I\u2019m paraphrasing from memory) ~\u201cThe skins turn brown, but that\u2019s not a problem, the bananas still taste good.\u201d~ The other said ~\u201cThe skins turn brown, at which point you have to throw them out because the bananas start to taste bad.\u201d~<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>Anyway, it\u2019s always startling when I learn that something that I have unquestioningly believed my entire life turns out to be not entirely true.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19494"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19497,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19494\/revisions\/19497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}