White, spongy holes in your mango?

What you see: White holes in your mango; it might seem like the pit is taking over the rest of the mango.
What it is: Starchy mango tissue with air pockets.
Eat or toss: Eat around! The texture of the white stuff won’t be nice, but the rest of the mango is edible. It may not, however, be as flavorful as you’d like.

Is it safe to eat mango with white spongy tissue?

Yes. These white holes in your mango aren’t a food safety issue. Rather, they’re starchy mango tissue that didn’t ripen properly. The mango was probably harvested when it wasn’t yet mature and then had a bad reaction to the hot water dip that helps clean mangos and kill fruit fly larvae.

Does your mango look a little different? This post is about a more mild version of this issue; and this one shows white tissue in a different pattern.

Why does this mango have white stuff inside?

Let’s journey back to the mango tree.

At harvest, mangos are ideally mature and starting to ripen, but pickers can only make educated guesses when they pull them off the tree. Some immature fruit inevitably winds up in the harvest crates. Mangos ripen from the pit outward, so the center of the fruit could be mature and ripening, while the flesh closest to the skin is still very starchy and immature.*

(And yes, maturing is different from ripening — mangos must mature before they can properly ripen.)

So what exactly does the ripening process look like in a mango? The main event is turning hard, acidic, starchy mango tissue into soft, sweet, flavorful tissue. Before a mango ripens, its insides are harder and lighter colored–almost white.

Hot water treatment can cause white areas in mango

So, back to our mango tree, where a picker has just grabbed some mangos that we hope are mature enough to ripen into delicious, candy-sweet mangos.

After they’re picked, the fresh mangos are sent to what I like to think of as the Fruit Fly Prevention Spa. The mangos are submerged in a giant pool of 115-degree water for at least an hour to kill any fruit fly eggs or larvae.

So far so good, but a number of things can go wrong in the hot water, which brings us to the mango pictured at the top of this post.

If a mango isn’t mature enough, the high temperature confuses its inner systems. Its metabolism speeds up, but the fruit can’t take in oxygen (being underwater and all), so it switches to anaerobic respiration, which generates carbon dioxide and alcohol. With no escape, the carbon dioxide builds up, eventually creating white holes like those you see in the pictured mango. The hot water inhibits the enzymes that prompt the starch to sugar reaction, so the mango never reaches fully ripened glory. And, despite appearances, the white area has nothing to do with the mango pit.

A mango with white spongy areas should still be safe still safe to eat, but will probably be less flavorful

Despite its off-putting appearance, the rest of the fruit can still be perfectly fine. Since it was harvested too early, it might not be the most flavorful mango you’ve ever met, but it’s still certainly edible. I ate and enjoyed the other side of this mango, but it was just OK. I didn’t taste any alcohol resulting from the fermentation back in the hot water bath, likely because it had escaped as vapor.

*For a cool visual of that internal ripening over time, check out pages 3 – 5 of this presentation from the University of California – Davis.

Uh oh. We’re really in hot water this time…

Updated January 2024