Nutgraf

I do love an infomercial. The worse the economy gets, the more stridently these ads pitch food storage systems to Save You Money. Stop Throwing Your Money Away, they shout. Look at these 3-month-old strawberries! I bought this cheddar during the Clinton administration!

Vacuums bags, vacuum canisters, special polymers, carbonite, whatev. The ones I find really captivating are the green plastic bags. You know the ones - Green Bags. They’re plastic. And green. And kind of trading on this environmental green movement thing, but not so’s you’d notice. And who is this Debbie Meyer person anyway?

Pictured, is the new experimental array. Strawberries are the most volatile fruit known to man. If you don’t sit down and chug the whole batch the instant you get home from the store, they will be wrinkled and moldy within hours.

On the left, we have the official, card-carrying lifesaving Green Bags. In the middle is our fresh air trio. On the right, a plain plastic bag leftover from my last dozen bagels.

Pertinent Details

• The instructions state frequently and in bold face that fruit must be dry before being enveloped in the Green Bags. All pictured berries are dry and unwashed.
• The instructions also suggest that the bags should be folded to “loosely seal out air.” Both bags are so folded.
•  These berries are all on the “thoroughly” end of the ripe spectrum, so we should see results briskly.
• All are now in the fridge, on the same shelf.

What’s Supposed to Make the Green Bags So Damn Special?

The theory behind the bags is that they absorb the ethylene gas released by fruit - whisking it away from your precious produce. The site includes a legend about  some caves in Japan made of a naturally occurring clay which has the same effect, but the site never says explicitly that this clay has come anywhere near the bags.

Ring Update: 

Frankly, the rings aren’t doing much these days. I check them once in a while, take a photo that shows not much new and then decide that they bore me. I should have chosen my first experiment more wisely. Something with more instant gratification. These were supposed to take months. Months, in internet time, is an era.

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