News
Gone Bananas, Part Two
September 16, 2009
Bananas are both an herb and a fruit. Here’s a silly fact and some more trivia for your next family picnic: the so-called banana tree is actually the largest herb in the world, and is not a tree at all. Yes, like parsley and basil, the banana plant is an herb, and the banana we eat is either a very large seed or fruit—you decide. So if Eve ate a banana in the Garden of Eden, technically it wasn’t the forbidden fruit per se, but the forbidden herb. That makes for an interesting revision to the old story.
More fascinating banana trivia? There are over 1,000 types of bananas on earth and they come in a large variety of colors and sizes—some as small as your pinky finger. Some wild bananas have seeds that are hard enough to break your teeth, while most cultivated bananas have been modified to produce no seeds. Some bananas are not yellow but green and require cooking to be edible. These bananas are known as plantains, or plátanos, in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and South and Central America, where they are popularly served with rice and beans.
Our “seasoned citizen” readers who have at least 50 years of experience in eating bananas may recall the bananas of our youth as being much larger then the bananas we consume today. It’s true! This is one of those rare cases in which something that we remember as being larger when we were young actually was larger. Fifty years ago, the Gros Michel was the banana variety consumed in the United States. However, in the early 1970s, the Gros Michel was devastated by Panama disease, a fungus, and Americans began eating the Cavendish variety, which is what we’re still eating today. In fact, the average American eats about 100 Cavendish bananas per year.
The Cavendish is a perennial hybrid that is seedless and sexless. You may be wondering how a banana with no seeds can reproduce. The Cavendish is reproduced from a corm, which is bulb-like offshoot (often referred to as a “daughter” in banana speak) from the mother plant. Corms can be moved easily from the mother plant, which grows up to 30 feet tall. Banana plantations are maintained and perpetuated by digging up corms and replanting.
We hope you enjoyed Part One of our two-part newsletter article on the magnificent banana. In our next installment: the banana barons! Find out how these intrepid, insane entrepreneurs created such things as “banana republics” and “banana splits”, and eventually developed the technology that provided us with the banana we eat today. It’s truly exciting!
In the meantime relax and have a banana. It has three types of natural sugar that provide an energy boost, the natural stress-reliever and mood booster tryptophan, a great deal of iron, lots of B vitamins, and blood pressure-reducing potassium—all for 100 calories.
See you next month!