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Lychees – rich in vitamins but what about the sulphur?
With their translucent and deliciously juicy flesh, lychees are a wonderful treat for the taste buds. This cocktail of vitamins does, however, have a drawback: its shell. Very often this is treated with sulphur to retain the fine red colour of the skin. So, if you are allergic, you need to be careful.
The lychee is a very fragile fruit. In just 24 hours it loses its red colour and becomes brown – making it far less attractive to consumers. So, as soon as they are harvested, lychees undergo sulphur fumigation in order to restore the original colour. This treatment also has an antifungal effect, helping to strengthen the shell and thus reduce fungal penetration of the fruit.
However, because of the particles that can be deposited on the fruit, this technique is now being challenged. Its use has been prohibited in the United States precisely because of allergy problems. It is also very likely that European legislation will follow suit within a few years.
When shopping for lychees, be especially careful. The fact that lychees have been treated with sulphur should, theoretically, be clear from the product label. If not, check the price: a cost of €2.50 (£2.25) per kilo means that you are definitely looking at treated lychees harvested three weeks earlier and shipped by boat from Madagascar. Untreated lychees are shipped by plane and are generally only one or two days old at most. But the price is 7 to 8 times higher…
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