Bananas are my go-to breakfast fruit, whether I’m mashing them onto toast or stirring them into oatmeal. However, I used to avoid buying them because they’d turn brown and mushy so quickly, even when I’d just brought them home from the grocery store.

I hate wasting food, so I almost stopped buying them altogether, until one day, I accidentally left my bananas on the kitchen counter instead of putting them in the fruit bowl. The next morning, they looked fresher and more yellow than any other fruit I’d bought recently. That’s when I realized the fruit bowl is actually one of the worst places to store them.

Upon further research, I learned that bananas are highly sensitive to ethylene, an invisible gas produced by most fruits. While ethylene helps fruits ripen and develop flavor, too much of it in one area causes nearby produce to spoil instead.

Bananas release a significant amount of ethylene, and when stored near other ethylene-sensitive fruits like apples and avocados, this accelerates spoilage, according to the Express.

While it might seem logical to store bananas in a fruit bowl, this often leads to them softening and ripening too quickly. I’ve started keeping mine on a corner of the kitchen countertop, where they stay fresh for up to a week longer.