All types of Ripening explained – Tree Ripening, Natural Ripening, Ethylene Ripening and Carbide Ripening

All types of Ripening explained – Tree Ripening, Natural Ripening, Ethylene Ripening and Carbide Ripening

You would have definitely felt strange sometime while having a fruit. At times the taste feel strange though color of fruit looks perfect. At times there are black spots (nowadays are usually washed away using strong detergents) and taste around those black spots in particularly awful. And You would have worried whether there is carbide or something else harmful in what you just ate or tried to eat. We will try to explain details heres including some myths.

What is ripening
Trees collect starch (carbohydrates) in their fruits. This happens slowly over time where tree transports its excess production via dandi (peduncle) into fruit being formed. Fruits thus formed are hard, bland in taste and without aroma. Ripening is process where starch (carbohydrates) collected by the tree in its fruit, convert to sugars and thus become sweet and soft. Fruit also looses a lot of bitter acids in ripening process.

Tree Ripening
Trees don’t produce sweet fruits for you, they are just producing attractive covers to their own seeds so that seeds are dispersed over larger geography. As said earlier, tree collect carbs (and few other nutrients, acids etc) in their fruits. Pulp is formed around seeds and there are complex signals involved in telling a tree that seeds in a particular fruit are mature. It then shifts its focus to other fruits. At this point, some quick actions are triggered inside a fruit which produce ethylene gas inside a fruit and then ethylene triggers some enzymes which start converting carbs (complex and bigger sugars) into simple sugars like fructose, glucose and sucrose. During this process inside a fruit, its weight reduces, its volume reduces, and it turns soft and colorful. Most importantly, dandi starts drying out as a ripe fruit is supposed to fall down.

Tree ripened fruits or daal ke pake fruits as we call them, are harder to transport over longer distance as these are soft so compression is highly likely. Spoilage due to over ripeness also goes up so most fruits you get are not tree ripened, some are. (We offer such fruits sometime (including mangoes) but generally it is not possible to serve completely tree ripened fruits.

Natural Ripening
Fruits are mostly capable of ripening on their own after a certain stage. If a fruit is allowed to be on tree after this stage, it mostly receives only water from plant as everything else including micro nutrients has already been deposited. We get our fruits harvested only after this stage. Since ripening of a fruit is a process taking place inside the fruit, it doesn’t need much from anyone to ripen (See how to ripen fruits at your home). In natural ripening as practiced by us, we ensure that there are moderate temperatures around the fruit boxes and semi ripe to unripe fruits are mixed in some proportion. Once ripening starts, it has its own pace which varies with temperatures and humidity.

Essentially, natural ripening is a do nothing approach. In this method, we incur much higher weight loss as fruits will take longer to ripen and hence dehydrate more. Spoilage goes up as natural processes cant be controlled or measured from outside. But final outcome is a fruit that is much richer in taste, aroma and nutrition.

Ethylene Ripening
As you know by now that nature uses Ethylene to ripen fruits. So market decided why not to we give ethylene ourselves and ripen fruits. When used properly, it is considered completely safe and widely practiced. Most of the bananas and papayas you get thru usual channels are ethylene ripened. A lot of nutrition is actually very micro so while Ethylene ripening of fruits will not harm you, the question remains whether these contain adequate amounts of micro-nutrients and not just sugars and fibers. Apart from nutrition, key differences between naturally ripened fruits and ethylene chamber ripened fruits are two

1. Fruits are ripened from outside (versus ripening begins inside in case of natural ripening) which generally results in better looks as ethylene exposure converts entire green in a fruit peel into yellows. But Fruit may not ripen till deep inside. At times, you will find fruits that ripe on outer pulp but unripe/bland inside.

2. Unripe fruits can be forced to ripen somewhat and appear ripe while in case of natural ripening, if a fruit doesn’t have materials and conditions for the first kick-off, it won’t ripen.

Carbide Ripening

Calcium carbide ripening is an illegal, hazardous method of artificially ripening fruit (like mangoes and bananas) using acetylene gas, which mimics the natural ripening hormone ethylene. When Calcium Carbide reacts with moisture on the fruit, it releases acetylene gas. This process is dangerous due to toxic arsenic and phosphorus residue.

Calcium carbide, often called "masala," is placed in boxes or wrapped in paper with raw, unripe fruit. The chemical reacts with ambient humidity or moisture on the fruit to produce acetylene gas, which triggers the ripening process. Carbide-ripened fruit is highly toxic. It can cause severe health issues, including dizziness, headaches, sleeplessness, memory loss, and in severe cases, cancer due to the presence of arsenic and phosphorus impurities.
By Manu Digvijay Singh & Varun Goyal