A viral Instagram Reel is sharing tips on how to keep your avocados fresh for longer.
The advice comes from Too Good To Go (@toogoodtogo.usa), a food-sharing app that aims to reduce food waste in shops and restaurants. If you've ever cut an avocado open to spread on some toast, used half, and then come back to find a brown mush the next day, then these tips are what you need.
The scoop
The first tip from Too Good To Go is to store whole, ripe avocados in the fridge to stop them from over-ripening. Of course, you need to wait until they are ripe enough to eat before doing this — otherwise, you'll slow down the ripening process and never be able to eat them.
Once it's time to dig in, the second tip is to slice the avocados crosswise instead of lengthwise along the fruit. This exposes as little flesh as possible to the air and prevents as much of the avocado as possible from drying out. From there, try to only scoop out what you need, leaving the rest of the green fruit inside its protective skin.
If you've already chopped your avocado, the video also shows how you can store the excess in an airtight container in the fridge with onion and a squeeze of lemon juice for extra freshness.
How it's helping
Americans waste more than $218 billion each year on food — according to the nonprofit Feeding America — which is between 30 and 40% of all food production. For the average American household, this equates to $1,600 of waste each year.
Avocados are one of those foods that can go bad rapidly, so using these tips to reduce how much of them ends up in the trash can go a long way. Otherwise, all the energy and water that was used to create our precious food has gone to waste.
What's everyone saying?
Plenty of people in the comments were sharing their own tips on keeping avocados fresh, with one Instagram user writing: "I'm always telling my friends about the onion trick! I stumbled upon it unwittingly one day and felt like Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin."
"What worked the BEST for me is spraying it with avocado oil," added another person.
However, many were also pointing out how one common tip shared in the comments — storing whole avocados in water — can actually be a breeding ground for bacteria. So that might be one "hack" to avoid!
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