DIFFERENCES BETWEEN FRUIT AND VEGETABLES

In his chapter Salad the Silent Killer, (The Man Who Ate Everything) Jeffrey Steingarten gives one of the main differences between fruit and vegetables: unlike vegetables (which do not want to be eaten), ripe fruit loves to be eaten and have its seed widely dispersed. That’s why all ripe fruit generates chemicals – flavours, sugars, dyes and softeners – to entice animals to eat them.

In the chapter Ripeness is All, Steingarten adds: “The dream of every plant is to propagate its own genes and species. Fruits do this by becoming plump, juicy, brilliantly coloured, sweet, perfumed and irresistible.” He goes on to say that, unfortunately, most farmers seem determined to harvest fruit earlier and greener every year. They grow fruits that are uniform in size; that mature all at the same time; that are over-fertilized to increase yields and over-irrigated to increase the fruits’ weight shortly before harvesting; they harvest early to be the first on the market, and they use mechanical harvesting machines that pick everything in sight, from hard green, barely mature to unripe.

And he adds that most fruit do not get any sweeter or more flavourful after they are picked from the tree, vine, bramble or bush.


Ripening

Ripening is a tightly structured, programmed series of changes that a fruit undergoes as it prepares to seduce every gastronomically aware animal in the neighbourhood. Most fruit tastes best when it is ripest, which is often just when its seeds are ready to germinate.

Ripening only begins after a fruit has reached its physical maturity, that is, after it has achieved its full size and intended shape. Fruit picked earlier will never fully ripen.
A ripening fruit is a mature fruit that sweetens, brightens, becomes juicy and aromatic, grows less acidic and less astringent. The ripening hormone ethylene exudes a protective wax to slow the loss of water when it finally plops from the tree and is cut off from fresh supplies. It takes the average fruit a week or two to go from full maturity to perfect ripeness. Since the acids are used up in this ripening process, early picked fruit is more acidic than ripe fruit.


Colour Versus Flavour

People, meanwhile, buy with their eyes. This is why fruit breeders concentrate on aspects such as colour at the expense of flavour, sweetness and texture. Most fruits change to a spectacular, attention-getting hue as they ripen. The colour of strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and cherries honestly betrays whether they were picked ripe, or not. But some apples redden before they begin to ripen and oranges can remain green at the peak of ripeness when grown in tropical or subtropical climates without the chilling temperatures that turn the fruit orange. In response to consumer demand, perfectly sweet and flavourful oranges are dyed orange or treated with ethylene to de-green them on the way to the shops.

The background colour of mature peaches, nectarines, plums, and apricots, on the other hand, should show no trace of green (except for green varieties). Steingarten counsels against paying much attention to a red or rosy blush on these fruits – new varieties have now been bred to turn red long before they are fully ripe. The purpose is to let growers pick immature fruit and dupe the consumer.
Ripe bananas are soft inside, and yellow with brown spots on the outside.


Aroma

Aroma is another way to tell how ripe a piece of fruit was when it was picked. While attached to its parent, fruit synthesises a bouquet of volatile compounds. At the same time, bitter and astringent compounds begin to fade away – their main purpose was to discourage animals and micro-organisms from eating the fruit before its seed was ready. Neither process happens normally after the fruit is harvested. In contrast to vegetables, which have weak, uncomplicated aromas, the aroma of fruits can reach the thousands of odour receptors in the roof of our nasal passages.

Some fruits continue to ripen to an extent when they are harvested. But they do not ripen nearly as well as they would on the tree, vine, branch or bush. These are, what Steingarten calls, climacteric fruits like peaches, apples and bananas. Unlike non-climacteric fruits, they ripen in a frenzied climax of respiration and activity, and they will continue to ripen to some extent, off the parent plant. Non-climacteric fruits like cherries and oranges ripen gradually and decorously, but only on the parent plant.


Bananas

Bananas, as a matter of interest, ripen in nearly every way after harvesting. They go from 1 per cent sugar and 25 per cent starch to 15 per cent sugar and 1 per cent starch during ripening. Even the simple banana aroma develops off the tree, though it is not the same as the more complex perfume of a nearly tree-ripened version. Commercially grown bananas are mostly mature but still completely green, i.e. not ripe yet! In the unlikely situation that you can lay your hands on them, you should buy green bananas and allow them to ripen yourself. Hard, green bananas are less likely to have been injured in handling than those that have softened and yellowed on the way from the field to the shop. And in the even more unlikely event that you find them with their stems still attached, you buy them with the stems fully attached and without splits in the skin. You ripen them in a paper bag until fully yellow with little brown specks. You now have 15 per cent sugar and 1 per cent starch. Refrigerate what you cannot immediately consume but expect them to turn black.


Storing

In fact you store all climacteric fruit in paper bags at room temperature. This enables them to continue to ripen.
Non-climacteric fruits should be eaten immediately or refrigerated (to slow respiration) in a plastic bag (to prevent water loss). But don’t seal the bag too tight, and don’t leave the fruit in the fridge too long, or the fruit will ferment and mould, thereby creating toxins that can make you very ill. Given enough time, chilling will injure all tropical and semi-tropical fruits both before and after ripening. This implies that you avoid buying chilled fruits in your supermarket!

* Article based on the book by Jeffrey Steingarten, The Man Who Ate Everything, Headline Book Publishing, ISBN 0 7553 1520 0.

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Author Details: Leni Hurley