Tired of waiting for green bananas to turn yellow? Wondering if there's a way to make your tomatoes and avocados ripen faster? Here's a simple trick to speed up the ripening process when you don't feel like letting nature do the work.

Unripe fruit can take up to four or five days to come to peak ripeness while sitting on your kitchen counter. To accelerate this process, place the unripe item in a brown paper bag with a ripe apple, tomato, or banana for a day or two. What exactly does this do? Some fruits—including apples, bananas, peaches, pears, plums, tomatoes, and avocados—produce a substance called ethylene gas as they ripen. Ethylene gas acts as the trigger that starts maturation—without it, ripening would not occur.
Because of this, ethylene gas has become an important part of produce distribution.

Many fruits sold in our grocery stores come from South American and Central American countries where they are picked before they have a chance to mature. This allows them to be transported without spoiling. Once they reach the distribution center in the United States, they're placed in a room filled with ethylene gas to start the ripening process. The produce is then sent to supermarkets so consumers can buy it at the peak of ripeness.

When you place an unripe piece of fruit in a bag with a ripe one, you are taking advantage of the ethylene gas emanating from the ripe fruit. The proximity of the ripe fruit to the unripe fruit stimulates the production of ethylene gas in the unripe fruit and allows it to mature quickly. One warning—pay close attention to the fruit when it's in the bag. If the ripe fruit starts to spoil, it could contaminate the other piece of fruit. 

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