Raise your hand if you ve ever had an avocado that was too hard and under ripe one day and become too squishy seemingly overnight. Or maybe you wanted a sandwich for lunch, but the lettuce that seemed fine at the supermarket was suddenly soggy and old.
Post-harvest researcher Tie Liu, an assistant professor with the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, knows the struggle. And he wants to help.
Liu is studying the possibility of creating a handheld or wearable device to test food freshness beyond what human senses are capable of finding. I ve seen this many times in my refrigerator. Sometimes you just bought a vegetable and then forget it, and just a few days later, it s all yellow, he said. Personally, I feel very wasteful. We need to have a better idea of how to manage it and reduce vegetable waste.