She specifically recommended leaving the peel intact and using a wide-mouth jar large enough to accommodate the banana half.
It’s important to treat this as an individual storage experiment rather than a guarantee. A controlled experiment involving many bananas and standardized refrigerator conditions would be needed to establish that bananas consistently remain fresh for exactly 16 days.
Still, the underlying idea—using cooler temperatures to slow ripening—is consistent with how fruit storage works.
If you want to test the glass jar method yourself, the process is incredibly simple.
Start with a banana that is yellow and firm, preferably one that hasn’t developed many brown spots yet. Beginning with fruit at this stage gives the storage method a better starting point than using a banana that has already become heavily spotted or soft.
The banana in Cross’s experiment was cut in half, with its peel left intact. One half was then placed inside a glass jar with a metal lid and stored in the refrigerator.
A wide-mouth jar is particularly useful because it needs to be large enough to accommodate the banana half without requiring you to remove its peel.
The room-temperature comparison is also an important part of what made the experiment interesting. Rather than simply refrigerating the fruit and checking it later, Cross had banana samples outside the refrigerator for comparison.
That comparison showed a visible difference after 16 days: the refrigerated banana half retained relatively bright yellow skin, while the room-temperature banana had considerably more brown and dark spotting.
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