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Want to know how to make bananas ripen faster? Or how to stop them from ripening too quickly? Read on.

You know when someone mentions something or says a word you’ve never heard before and you feel like an idiot? And then you suddenly notice that word or thing everywhere? Well, that happened to me last week. Sort of.

Twice in as many days, two separate people, randomly, out of the blue, told me that bananas ripen at different speeds depending on whether you leave them in a bunch of separate them.

This was obviously a sign from the fruit Gods. At the very least, the Chiquita banana lady. I needed to find the truth about this. Was it possible? Did bananas really ripen differently depending on whether or not you pulled them apart?

This wasn’t information I could just accept without some kind of proof.

This needed some detective work. So I put on my overcoat, my see-behind-you sunglasses which I got in a magic kit when I was 12 and went straight to the grocery store. I bought a bunch of completely green bananas all the while watching the guy behind me trying to slip a roast into his pants.

I separated two individual bananas from the bunch. So now I had 2 individual bananas and a bunch of bananas. Would one group ripen faster than the other?

Here are the results in technicolour video.

Bananas Ripening-Time Lapse Time lapse photography of bananas ripening to see which ripens faster. Bunched or separated.

The results? Bananas in a bunch ripened about twice as fast as the ones that were separated.

The other results? Realizing the only thing harder than herding a bunch of cats is keeping one out of a banana box.