How old is that apple you’re eating?

By David Wall
Guest Columnist

When shopping for apples, one rarely questions the age of an apple; only whether it appears fresh.  Apples go through a ripening stage of reddening and converting starches to sugars. A young, unripe apple is full of starch.
While this may not sound like much, suffice it to say the apple, if picked and eaten, wouldn't taste very good. As the apple ages, however, it begins to produce  a compound known as ethylene gas which triggers the ripening process, and the starch begins converting to sugar. By the time it's considered ripe, all the starches have been converted to sugar.
A fully ripe, non-GMO apple, unfortunately, will soon turn mushy. If the apple tree is in your back yard, you simple leave the apple on the tree until full red and ripe. Commercial growers, however, don't have this luxury.
Due to the handling, storage, and shipping time necessary to put that apply where you're ready to purchase it, they must pick the fruit while still green and full of starch. Growers have a simple dye test that tells then how far along toward full ripe an apple has come. When just starting to turn, the apples can be put into cold storage, which slows down the ripening process.
Green apples will keep in cold storages for as long as 30-60 days, but the apples will eventually begin to ripen. To allow the apples to stay in storage longer, they're put in a room capable of reducing the air's oxygen content down to 2.5%. The lack of oxygen really slows things down, thus allowing the apple to last several months from picking to eating.
Once out of storage and back to regular air, the ripening process beings anew, so the apples can become ripe just after they hit the grocers' shelves.