What you should know
- Nearly one in five avocados is wasted because they turn brown before they are eaten.
- Researchers in Columbia and Ontario have developed a technique to predict when avocados will ripen to reduce waste.
- They also tested edible coatings that retard the ripening of avocados.
Artificial intelligence
Image provided by Angie Homes
Researcher Angie Homes in a lab at the University of Guelph, Ontario
In her native Colombia, Angie Homes lived in the rhythm of lawyers. “It’s my biggest export, even more so than coffee,” says a doctoral student from the University of Guelph in Ontario. “In my study, I quickly realized there was a big problem: Almost one in five avocados goes to waste, and they are usually returned to the country of destination, because they are such a fragile fruit that it is hard to tell if they are ripe or not. Their skin is opaque and thick. When I got to Ontario, She set out to work with “hyperspectral imaging.” The goal is to determine exactly when an avocado is ripe. Our lab results are very good. » Colleagues MI Homez at the University of Tolima, west of Bogota, continues to work now to develop marketable technology. says the lady.I Homes.
oysters
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Avocados have been cultivated for 6,000 years.
In the study, which I published at the end of May in the journal ACS Food Science and Technology When predicting avocado ripening using hyperspectral imaging, she also evaluated two edible layers that delay ripening. “One of the coatings is already used for apples and strawberries,” says the master.I Homes. The other is made from oyster shells. It was proposed with the aim of reusing leftovers. Finally, there is no advantage to one or the other in terms of performance. In both cases, ripening was delayed by just under a week, by six weeks instead of five weeks after the fruit was picked. The window in which an avocado will ripen without turning brown, about five days, couldn’t be bigger with the coatings. Once again, agronomists from the University of Tolima continue to work on commercializing these coatings.
mushrooms
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Shiitake mushrooms
The Columbia-born researcher will now, as part of her PhD in Guelph, turn to mushrooms. There is also the problem of waste there. The big difference with avocados is that mushrooms are generally domestically produced in Canada. They travel less. According to a 2016 study by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), 17% of mushrooms are wasted at the supermarket stage, which is relatively high for a vegetable. The most wasted vegetables are green beans and endives, with more than 40% lost at the supermarket level.
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Image provided by Angie Homes
Angie Homes is in the experimental field at the University of Tolima, Columbia
Avocados have been cultivated for 6,000 years in Mesoamerica, and the topic of genetic improvements through crossbreeding began at the beginning of our era. But it was an American, Rudolph Haas, who invented the modern avocado in the 1930s. He was an amateur gardener, grazing Mexican and Guatemalan avocados and patenting the Haas variety, which now accounts for 80% of global production, according to a Mexican study published in 2019 in the journal PNAS. Mexico produces more than a quarter of the world’s eight million tons of avocados, followed by Colombia with less than one million tons, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The avocado’s name is derived from the Aztec term for “testicle,” ahuacatl.
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- 1.2 million
- The amount, in tons, of edible food that is wasted in Quebec
Source: Government of Quebec
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- 1.9 million
- The amount, in tons, of food waste that can be recycled in Quebec
Source: Government of Quebec
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