Did you know?
- Almost no plant has been cultivated longer by humans.
- Americans eat more bananas than any other kind of fresh fruit, averaging about 26.2 pounds of them per year, per person (apples are a distant second, at 16.7 pounds).
- For nearly everyone in the U.S., Canada and Europe, a banana is a banana: yellow and sweet, uniformly sized, firmly textured, always seedless. Our banana is called the Cavendish.
- In the densely populated countries around Lake Victoria-Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda-bananas are primary nutrition, accounting for near-total carbohydrate consumption in some diets (in Uganda, the word for food, matooke, translates from Swahili as banana).
- The fruits grow in spiraling groups called hands (they’re the bundles you buy in the store; an individual banana is called a finger). A banana plant can have up to a dozen attached hands; together, a plant’s entire output is called a bunch.
- Bananas grow from an underground root structure; what juts out of the ground is more like a stem than a trunk.
- Bananas have always been a technology incubator. Because they’re a time-sensitive product-they need to be harvested green, then delivered to market just at ripening time-systems had to be developed to bring precision to the picking and shipping processes. Leonel Castillo, a banana-production consultant who grew up in Chiquita’s corporate compound near the city of San Pedro Sula, on Honduras’s northern coast, explains that the old way was “to wait until you could see the ship coming over the horizon toward port.” Then banana workers would engage in frantic nonstop harvesting and rush the crop to the boats. Chiquita engineers developed the first radio networks in the tropics as a way to bypass this antiquated system.
- That sameness is the banana’s paradox. After 15,000 years of human cultivation, the banana is too perfect, lacking the genetic diversity that is key to species health. What can ail one banana can ail all. A fungus or bacterial disease that infects one plantation could march around the globe and destroy millions of bunches, leaving supermarket shelves empty.
And that is what is happening. Banana plantations in Southeast Asia have been wiped out by a variety of Panama Disease. Africa and Central America could be next… Get your Cavendish while you still can and read more here.
