Why the apples in your shopping may be 3 years old!
SUPERMARKET apples can be up to three years old when purchased, according to an expert on the fruit.
Food writer Pete Brown said apples are being kept in airless chilled warehouses to stop them from ageing or ripening.
He said shoppers are ‘ horrified’ when they learn that the fruit they buy today could have been picked in 2014.
Supermarkets do it to keep up with year-round demand for the perfect-looking shiny varieties which customers prefer over ‘scabby’ British types, he said. Tesco and Asda last year admitted they use companies that keep apples in this way. The average storage time is thought to be six months to a year.
Most shoppers are unaware that fruit stored this way can lose much of its nutritional value, Mr Brown said, although he doesn’t believe the practice is sinister or harmful to the public.
Speaking at the Hay Festival, he said: ‘ We want apples all year round, and we want them perfect. We get upset if they’re not there.’
The only way supermarkets could guarantee supply was to store them in climate-controlled warehouses, Mr Brown said.
‘They get these big warehouses where they suck the oxygen out and replace it with nitrogen. It’s like a fairytale – the idea of Sleeping Beauty. These apples are in there, and they’re not ageing. As and when demand is ready, they are sent to supermarkets.’
He added: ‘When people find this out, often they’re horrified they’re eating year-old fruit … it could be two or three years old.’
Apples are usually harvested in May, so when
‘Tastes both old and unripe’
purchased during other months, the fruit is unlikely to be fresh, he said: ‘How do you think you’ve got them in July if it hasn’t been aged in some way? We don’t think hard enough about where our fruit has come from.’
Apples sent for long-term storage are usually treated with SmartFresh, a synthetic ‘produce enhancer’. This has the effect of halting the release of ethylene, a chemical produced by fruit and vegetables when they ripen, effectively putting the fruit ‘to sleep’.
However, this resulted in food ‘which tastes old and under-ripe at the same time’, he said.
A regular contributor to Radio 4’s Food Programme, Mr Brown has written a book on the history of apples and spent seven years investigating how the fruit is grown, picked and sold.
While there had been a ‘revival in British apple growing,’ most varieties grown in the UK today originated abroad, he said.
He was told by a supermarket that the reason for this was because consumers demanded perfect-looking fruit. ‘The three or four varieties we have now are shiny and green. They look lovely but they don’t taste of much,’ he said.
On the other hand, British apples such as the russet ‘look a bit scabby and rusty but taste much sweeter and richer and honey-ish’, he said, adding that shoppers were ‘missing out.’
Tesco, Asda and Morrisons were contacted for comment. A spokesman for Waitrose said they did not freeze their apples, while a representative for Sainsbury’s said: ‘Our apples are not kept dormant for years as this would affect quality.’