If you've been to the grocery store in the last few days, or weeks, it's highly likely that you picked up some fresh fruit while you were there. Fruit is an essential part of a regular shop, and we spend more on it per year than you might think: In 2022, US households spent, on average, almost 1,100 dollars each on fruit and vegetables, per . That's a lot of money, which provides a lot of opportunity to get things wrong — and unfortunately, you're probably more likely to buy poor-quality fresh fruit than any other item at the store, if you ignore the red flags waving at you from the produce section.
Fresh fruit is uniquely vulnerable to being substandard due to the very thing that makes it so appealing: Its freshness. Because it's unprocessed, there's way more scope for inconsistent quality, which makes being able to spot its red flags so much more crucial. Luckily, for a lot of fruits, the red flags can be fairly similar: You can largely tell whether you should avoid them by looking at their physical appearance, smelling them, or testing their firmness.
Because what's normal and what's not can vary from fruit to fruit, though, we decided to line all those red flags up, to show you what you should and shouldn't look for. 1. Overripe bananas may have loose stems Telling whether a banana is fresh or not by just looking at it can be surprisingly tricky.
Between its early stages, when it will have a pale green skin, and its overripe stages, where it will be dappled with brown s.
