Banana spots can help tackle food waste, study finds

Reducing food waste can be achieved by using banana peels. A new study shows how this staple can be explained and modeled.

A team of researchers at Florida State University have created a new method of simulating spot patterns on bananas, which will provide new insight into how this fruit browns over time. Many fruits turn brown when they are cut, damaged, or stored for a long time. 50 million tons of food waste is caused by this process as stores and consumers throw out banana fruits due to their appearance.

According to Oliver Steinbock, lead author of the research, the total production of bananas was estimated to be 118 million tons in 2019. The process of how these spots are formed, grow, and their resulting pattern remained poorly understood until now.

Steinbock studied how the spots form and evolve through time lapse videos. They found that the spots appeared during a two-day window, but then mysteriously stopped.

The root cause of the spot stalling was looked at by the team and it suggested that the browning process could be mitigated by storing the fruit in cooled containers or under a modified atmosphere. The spots can be slowed by decreasing oxygen levels in their tiny formation sites.

Fruit browning is a challenge for the food industry. Steinbock concludes that the study offers a model for banana spotting which is capable of capturing their evolution in a physically meaningful context and which can be applied to procedures to mitigate food waste.

More information: Oliver Steinbock et al, Front-like expansion and arrest of programmed cell death in brown banana spots, Physical Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1088/1478-3975/ac664d Journal information: Physical Biology Citation: Banana spots can help tackle food waste, study finds (2022, May 11) retrieved 11 May 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022-05-banana-tackle-food.html This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.