My favorite banana story is the Potassium. Mildly radioactive. So containers of bananas are supposedly always setting off the radiation detectors set up around ports and cities. Kind of sad that our homeland security setup can’t tell the difference between a bunch of bananas and a nuclear weapon.
Also, the anemic yellow banana popular in the US is a passing and soon to be extinct fad. Turns out that variety of banana is a clone. It was developed in the 40s in response to a fungus that essentially destroyed the then popular variety of banana. It is immune to that fungus but as always happens fungus and diseases evolved. Unfortunately being a clone there is no way to improve the banana as the US knows it. Now almost half the cost of growing one goes to chemicals needed to keep it alive long enough to be harvested. Eventually the fungus is going to win. And according to real banana people, it can’t happen fast enough. Bananas, 100s of varieties, are a staple in tropical East Africa. The commercial yellow banana is so bad compared to local varieties that even if they could afford to grow them, no one would stoop so low. The Western banana industry is caught in a bind. If they try to introduce new varieties of bananas to the Western market, demand for the old ones will go down while costs continue to rise. Bad for business. But they have to do something-one day a new fungus will wipe the industry out overnight and the consumers will not be taught any alternatives. So, rather than being proactive, the industry keeps hoping the inevitable holds off for one more quarter.
I was under the impression that bananas like virtually all food crop grown now are in fact the results of intelligent design. Humans through years of selective breeding grafting etc. have created crops that are quite different from their wild fore bearers. Does that mean god messed up the initial design and things had to be turned over to someone competent?
So a bad banana might be no more? You call that a problem? I call this a real problem:
The cacoa tree, from which cocoa comes (hey, I don’t make up these spellings) is facing three diseases that could send chocolate into the land of the dinosaurs.
>raises hand querulously< Ermmm…bananas are closely related to plantain, and plantain does make a good poultice for wounds and sores. No official cite, just personal experience. So, the mosquito-bite thing may have some truth to it.
The other variety was the Gros Michel. Whether it actually tasted any better, it was easier to ship, which is the reason it was chosen as the variety to export to non-tropical regions. Personally, I like the little red jobs, but I don’t find them that often.
BTW, on a previous occasion when we discussed the creationist banana (along with the segmentation of oranges), I thought a picture of a wild banana was instructive. The cultivar we eat is seedless and sterile, probably originally cultivated by cutting from the occasional natural seedless hybrid.
They’re impregnated with bananas.
Sorry, couldn’t resist. The green bags are impregnated with a variety zeolite to trap the ethylene. My coworkers claim that they do work marvelously at preventing produce spoilage.
(I save my money by eating bananas before they spoil; any that don’t make it go into the freezer for banana bread - previously frozen bananas look horrible but mash very easily)
No kidding. Apparently I have a lot to learn about banana’s. I didn’t even know that ethylene gas had anything to do with it. What a weird decomposition product.
