Bananas on the table, strawberries in the fridge . . . investigating the mystery of keeping fruit fresh

It's a rotten job: Reem Bushara investigated the process of decay in fruit as part of her recent science project.

Reem Bushara

April 15, 2010 — Anything is possible! Investigating topics from seeing whether music affects memory to creating your own solar powered car is what the annual Somersfield Academy science fair is all about. Every year students in M1, M2, and M3 participate in the science fair by choosing a topic that they are interested in and sharing it with the community on the day of the fair.

Science fair is an exciting day for not only the students, but also for parents, teachers, friends, and judges who come to see the wonderful displays that the students have created, and hear about experiments that have been conducted and researched over many weeks of hard work.

The topic that I chose to focus on for my project was whether light had an effect on the preservation of fruit. Like most students, I chose this topic because I wanted to learn more about it, specifically I wanted to learn about how light could damage, or help a fruit stay fresh. I also wanted to know why you leave bananas on your kitchen table and strawberries in the fridge.

Before the day of science fair students go through many weeks of 'behind the scenes' work to make sure that information that they have gathered is accurate. There are many parts of a science fair project but for most students the most fun part is conducting the experiment. For my experiment I kept three groups of strawberries in different types of light, without refrigeration. I then observed these three groups over four days in ten-hour increments. And finally I graphed the results of my testing.

In most science fair projects there are things that might surprise you, which makes your project more fun to observe and more fun to explain to people who come to your project on the day of the fair. In my project I found that fruit that stays in direct light rot up to four days faster than fruit in the dark, which is part of the reason why the light goes off in the refrigerator once the door is closed. When I explained this to people the most common response was, "So that's why we put our bananas in paper bags", but the answer is actually no. Fruits release a gas called ethylene, and when that gas gets trapped inside the bag, it gets sent back to the fruit, which makes the bananas ripen faster.

Science fair is fun for many different reasons, but many students look forward to prize giving after the fair. During the fair, judges go around to look at the projects, and speak to the students about their observations. These judges come from the science community to judge each student's project. There are many prizes offered to students; including aesthetic prizes for each year level, and science prizes for each year level. This year I was excited to receive the science award for the M2 grade level.

Originally published in The Royal Gazette