Building Good Consumer Skills: Tips for Buying Fruit

We are starting up a series of tabling events aimed at helping UNL students become better consumers. To complement our tabling events, on this blog we are including answers to our students' consumer skills FAQs. One of these questions is, "How do I get the best bang for my buck at the grocery store - especially in the produce section?"

Navigating the produce section is often frustrating for students. Ever dropped a pretty penny on your favorite fruit and had it go bad the next day? 

Following are some easy-to-use tips for choosing fruit:

Check the stem of the fruit.  
The stem is the natural indicator of when the fruit was picked. Green stem with ripe fruit = A winner. Green stem with very hard fruit = Picked early and will possibly become mealy when ripened. Shriveled dry stem = Picked a long time ago and lacks the flavor of fresh fruit.

Feel the fruit. 
Firm fruits like apples and pears should feel firm, but peaches, plums, and other "soft" fruits should feel slightly soft.

Smell the fruit. 
Some fruits have a "ripe" odor, like cantaloupe and honeydew melons. Some fruit may have a sour odor if it's starting to spoil.

Pick the fruit up. 
If it's heavy for its size, then you have found a good piece of fruit!

Select fruit that is in a bin or open storage box, not in bulk bags or boxes. 
The old saying, "One rotten apple will spoil the whole lot," is usually true. You will almost always find some damaged fruit in bulk bags or boxes. 

Tips for choosing specific types of fruit:

Strawberries - Choose the right size. 
The giant strawberries may look tempting, but the smaller strawberries usually pack the most flavor.

Grapes - Look at the colors of the grapes and stems. 
The stems of the grapes should be beige to brown. Green stems mean the grapes are not ripe and they will tend to be sour or tasteless. Look for a slight pale-yellow hue on green grapes. Red grapes should be deeply colored with no sign of green.

Peaches - Smell them. 
If you walk by a whole bin of peaches or nectarines and don't smell anything, they will be flavorless. A peach should smell like a peach.

Watermelon - Thump the watermelon and listen for a hollow sound. 
Scratch the skin with your thumbnail. If the rind is white just under the green skin, it's ripe.

Tips for storing common fruits:

Apples
Apples can be refrigerated for as long as 6 weeks.

Bananas
Store bananas at room temperature away from direct sunlight and heat. Refrigerating bananas will turn the skin black.  Bananas become yellow, soft, and sweet as they ripen. If you want to speed the ripening process, put bananas in a paper bag along with an apple overnight.

Berries
Berries are picked ripe and should be consumed as soon as possible. For overnight storage, they should be refrigerated.

Oranges
Oranges can be refrigerated for up to several weeks.

Resources:  
http://fruitguys.com/almanac/2012/07/02/fresh-fruit-storage-and-ripening-tips
http://www.wikihow.com/Choose-Fruit