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by Jedd
2158 days ago
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Goodness, that is interesting. It's not clear why this matters from the paper, in that it sounds like (but not spelled out) that they are perhaps trying to refrigerate fruit for transport, where the transport itself is not actively refrigerated, merely insulated, so the reduction to target temperature has to occur before shipping. However this was published in 1970, and I'd assume in that part of the world refrigerated shipping and (large) storage was not uncommon? Aside #1 - undamaged grapefruit will happily store at room temperature for 6 weeks or more, and be the tastier for it. Aside #2 - received wisdom is that grapefruit, and perhaps most citrus, benefit from one or more frosts to 'sweeten up', though I have never understood the mechanisms for this claim, or how high-water fruit does not burst its vesicles and then deteriorate rapidly. TFA and this paper you cited may speak to the latter (the fruit content does not freeze overnight as the thermal inertia is so high), and might partially debunk the former. |
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Harvest time is extremely hectic. There's a very small window to get months worth of produce picked, sorted, cooled, packed and shipped. Cooling is a major bottleneck, because capital for refrigeration is not unlimited. Likewise any delay can be a major issue- if a truck is slow to load, how do you know whether or not you need to re-cool your produce first?
It's well known what temperatures produce does well at (can't be too hot or too cold without MAJORLY affecting end margins) because it's easy to test by setting a fridge to a given temperature. It's much harder to know, for a given type of produce, how fast it will cool or heat, and how long you need to spend doing that. It's not as simple as sticking a thermometer in it, which will create paths for heat to move into and out of the produce. Even then you still don't know what the heat distribution inside the produce is so you can optimize the temperature over as much of the plant as possible.
It's really quite tricky and stuff like this helps farmers a lot. IMO farmers do more actual number math more than almost any other occupation (ex: [1]). Much of it is rules of thumb and guesstimation, but they still are constantly balancing dozens of figures to make choices every day. They're always doing mental calculations in economics, biology and physics. Even if the job wasn't so physically and technically taxing, I would respect the hell out of them just because of the mental workload.
[1] https://youtu.be/ywBV6M7VOFU?t=630