Shady areas inside your eggplant?

What you see: Brownish coloring inside your eggplant.
What it is: Oxidation.
Eat or toss: Eat! This eggplant likely had a traumatic experience (most likely cold temps; possibly it was dropped), but the brown coloring doesn’t signal that any harmful microbes have moved in.

So, can you eat an eggplant if it has brown areas like these on the inside?

Amy K. of Washington, D.C. got things right when she stored this eggplant (aubergine) on her countertop and not in the fridge (eggplants don’t like being cold).

And yet, when she sliced it open, these discolored spots stared back at her.

She often has this problem with eggplants from her local grocery store. So, I consulted Chris Gunter, vegetable production specialist at North Carolina State University.

He suspected the eggplants are likely being kept too cold en route to the store.

What causes brown areas inside eggplants?

Cold temperatures can damage cells, causing their membranes to leak compounds and enzymes that spur chemical reactions. Those reactions ultimately leave behind oxidatin and this unattractive look.

An impact like being dropped or the pressure from sitting at the bottom of a pile of eggplants could, like the cold, have a similar cell-damaging effect. But, it doesn’t mean that anything unsafe is growing inside the eggplant; it’s still perfectly fine to eat.

Check out our other posts for more examples of enzymatic browning, including on potatoes, avocados, apples, mushrooms, bananas and cauliflower.

Fresh eggplants have a short shelf life

The lesson for your eggplant parmesan and baba ganoush is simply to act quickly.

Too long in the fridge and the eggplant could get weird spots like this. In the short term, many people recommend storing eggplants on the counter, but there they can shrink and wrinkle as the room-temperature air leads to water loss.

If you can minimize the time between harvest and dinner, both you and the eggplant will be fare better.

“In our homes we don’t have ideal storage conditions for eggplant,” Gunter said. “Our refrigerators are too cold; the counters are too hot. It’s a stressful environment.”