Fresh Fruit and Vegetables

Fresh produce is the part of a stored-food diet that keeps people healthy and keeps them eating, and more of it keeps without a refrigerator than most kitchens use. The old storage crops, potatoes, onions, squash, cabbage, roots and apples, were bred to sit in a cool cellar from harvest to spring. The rest is days, and belongs in the fridge or in a jar. This page is which is which, and how to keep the keepers.

For storage: firm, unblemished, unwashed, with the stem or the skin intact, bought in season when they are cheapest and freshest. Potatoes and onions that have been stored cold at the store sprout sooner at home. Winter squash with a hard rind and a dry stem. Apples of a storage variety (the tart, firm ones) rather than the soft summer ones. Garlic with tight papery skins. For eating this week, anything; wash it when you use it, not before.

The storage crops want three different rooms: cool, dark and dry for potatoes, onions and garlic (but not together, since onions make potatoes sprout); cold and damp for roots and cabbage, which is a bin of damp sand in the coldest corner of a basement; and cool and dry for squash and pumpkins on a shelf where they do not touch. Apples give off ethylene, the ripening gas, and so do bananas, pears and tomatoes; keep them away from everything you want to last. Check the bins every week and pull anything soft before it spreads. The fridge crisper for greens, berries, celery and anything cut.

Soft spots, wrinkling, mold and a fermented or rotten smell are the signs. A potato that has gone green or sprouted has made solanine; cut away green and sprouts and eat the rest, but a soft, wrinkled, heavily sprouted potato goes to the compost. An onion soft at the neck or with black mold under the skin is done. Squash with a soft spot can be cut, with the spot removed, and cooked that day. Berries with one moldy one go through, the moldy one out, the rest eaten today.

A cellar of potatoes, onions, squash and cabbage is the vitamin C and the bulk that make beans and rice a diet. Eat the short keepers first and the storage crops in order of how they are holding. What will not keep gets preserved: sauerkraut and fermented vegetables, dehydrating, freezing, and canning for the high-acid fruits and pickles. Seeds for next year's storage crops are the long-term plan.

Fresh produce barely notices an outage. Greens and berries in a warm fridge are a day or two; everything in the cellar carries on. In a long outage the garden and the cellar are the only fresh food there is, which is the reason to know the storage crops before the day you need them.

Shelf-life figures are from the Survival Foods field guide; fridge, freezer and pantry times are from the USDA cold and pantry storage charts. Run the look, smell, taste check before eating anything past its date.