What you see: Tiny, white-ringed holes in your mango.
What it is: Air bubbles in trace amounts of starchy, immature tissue.
Eat or toss: Eat! Depending on how much white tissue you see, you may want to eat around it.
So, is it OK to eat a mango with little white circles inside? Here’s the story
Back in June we wrote about this strange mango character, with its rugged, hole-y interior.
The mango pictured at the top of this post has the same condition, just a far milder case.
In both situations, the mango was harvested before all of its hard, starchy tissue had converted to sugary, soft, fruity flesh. When the mango was immersed a hot water bath to kill any fruit fly eggs or larvae, the harder, immature tissue found itself needing more energy so it started to ferment. The fermentation produced carbon dioxide, which couldn’t escape and instead formed air bubbles inside the mango. The white areas, remnants of the mango’s younger, starchier days, remained around the little bubbles because the hot water stunted their ripening.
The upshot for you is that there’s nothing unsafe about this mango. While the more severe case pictured in this earlier post would mean eating around the so-called cavitation sites because their texture would be icky, with such a minor incident as this, you may want to take a nibble to decide how you feel about the taste and texture of the white rings and then go from there.
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