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You're Using the Crisper Drawer Wrong-Stop Doing This With Your Vegetables

EW Eleanor Whitfield Senior Correspondent August 13, 2026 2 min read № 033
You're Using the Crisper Drawer Wrong-Stop Doing This With Your Vegetables

It’s a quick fix. As tempting as it might be to store cans ofsparkling wateror oddly-shaped items in your refrigerator’s crisper drawers, your best bet is to use them for what they’re meant for: storing fresh produce. Knowing how to properly store your produce will help keep those precious fruits and vegetables fresher for a longer period of time. Different types of vegetables have different humidity requirements. The general rule of thumb is “rot, low; wilt, high.” In other words, foods that rot as they spoil, such as mushrooms and asparagus, should go in the low-humidity drawer. Foods that tend to wilt, such as salad greens andfresh herbs, should go in the high-humidity drawer. Vegetables that should be stored in the low-humidity drawer include those that produce ethylene gas, like peppers and tomatoes. Allowing this gas to escape helps to prevent the produce from rotting too quickly, allowing it to stay fresh longer. How To Use the Crisper Drawers Depending on your refrigerator model, the crisper drawers will have a “low” and “high” or “open” and “closed” slider setting. Changing the setting typically opens or closes a vent in the back of the drawer. When set to low humidity, the vent is completely open; when set to high, the vent is completely closed. Changing the setting regulates the amount of air that can circulate within the drawer. What If Your Crisper Drawers Don’t Have Different Settings? If the crisper drawers in your refrigerator don’t have different settings, consider them to be high-humidity drawers. You can use them to store leafy greens such as lettuce, arugula, and spinach, and fresh herbs. Store ethylene-producing produce on the shelves of your refrigerator, allowing plenty of room for air to flow around them. How To Keep Produce From Going Bad In addition to using

It’s a quick fix.