The Debbie Meyer Green Bag Raspberry Challenge!

Now that I'm a Costco member, I can get six little containers of raspberries for, like, the cost of two little containers of raspberries at my grocery store. Which is cool because, yes, I can suck down six containers of raspberries before they go bad.

Now, when I first bought all those raspberries a couple weeks ago, I thought I'd test out the ol' Debbie Meyer Green Bags (which I use on all my fruit, in the belief that they actually work) by putting five containers of berries in one great big green bag and leaving one container in its little ventilated plastic box.

Result: A tie. Or, more precisely, experiment called on account of improper experimental method. The five bags worth in the green bag started to turn to juice at the bottom -- I figured it was the weight of all the berries on top squashing the berries on the bottom. And I'd kept the Debbie Meyer berries in the main fridge compartment, while the plastic box was in the produce bin, where it (by the very definition of the produce bin) was collecting less moisture. All things considered, the berries in the bag became too squashed to eat right around the time the berries in the box were going bad, so there wasn't a clear victor either way.

I went to Costco again this weekend and got six more little containers of raspberries. This time, I did the following:
Two (2) Debbie Meyer Green Bags, each with the contents of one box of berries, in the fridge
Two (2) Debbie Meyer Green Bags, each with the contents of one box of berries, in the produce bin.
One (1) box of berries in the produce bin.
One (1) box of berries in my stomach. (Hey, science makes you hungry.)

That was Saturday. By Sunday night, I could issue a preliminary result, which was:

Keep your Debbie Meyer Green Bags in the produce bin.

The liquefication which I'd noticed in the first experiment was not, in fact, a result of too many berries squashing each other. It was a result of no ventilation in the Debbie Meyer Green Bag. To be fair, the directions on the Green Bag direct you to go into said bags on a regular basis and wipe out the condensation which forms on the inside of the bag. When I went in there last night (to consume some berries), I wiped out all the bags -- the bags in the bin were much drier than the bags not in the bin -- and it was apparent that the berries in the bags which were not in the produce bin were already starting to, well, stew in their own juices. Science requires that I consume the worst-performing berries (to keep the better ones in the competition) and this was a bag of non-produce-bin berries. They were definitely edible, but not as firm as the berries I ate on Day One.

In the interest of not ruining more berries, I actually moved the remaining bag to the produce bin. These mixed location berries were consumed on Monday. Result: soggier than the day before. A few berries in the bag may be safely classified as "going, but not yet gone," due to excess moisture.

So, our battle is now down to two green bags in the produce bin and one box in the produce bin. More updates as they happen.