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Bananas—America's Favorite Fruit
Plants & Gardens News Volume 15, Number 2 | Summer 2000
by Niall Dunne
There's a small deli on the corner of Washington Avenue and Montgomery Street, almost directly opposite the business entrance to Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It's the only convenience store in the neighborhood, and we at BBG refer to it, with hushed reverence, as "the Bodega."
The Bodega is famous for friendly service, cheap sandwiches, and walls littered with even cheaper swimsuit posters. It's not a bit famous for its selection of fresh fruit. Apart from wafer-thin slices of tomato buried in the cheap sandwiches, all you'll find are bananas.
Now, if a store's only going to sell one kind of fruit, its best bet is the banana. Bananas are the number one fruit in the United States, with roughly four million tons consumed annually—about 29 pounds per person.
What's more, the banana has a reputation for being an all-in-one food item. Apparently, Alexander the Great encountered sages in India whose diet consisted entirely of bananas. This (probably apocryphal) story inspired Linnaeus to name the banana Musa sapientum, "fruit of the wise men."
Okay, they were wise men, but were they happy? I'm guessing even circus chimps are allowed a little variety in their diet. All I know for sure is that I'd be a happier herbivore if, every now and then, the Bodega would rustle up a few gooseberries or rambutans to go with the bananas.
The genus Musa is made up of 40 herbaceous plant species that are more or less native to southeastern Asia, where the banana's been an important cultivated crop for thousands of years. All of these species produce edible fruit. However, most banana cultivars are derived from just two species: M. acuminata and M. balbisiana.
Over the centuries, these cultivars acquired an ability to produce seedless fruit. "The female flowers of domesticated bananas don't need sperm to form fruit," says Peter Bernhardt in The Rose's Kiss: A Natural History of Flowers. "As their ovaries age, they just keep adding layers of fleshy tissue."
Those little black dots in the middle of the banana are not seeds, but rather the remnants of unfertilized seeds; propagation of the seedless varieties is vegetative—by cuttings or transplanted rhizomes. (Now if only someone would take the pips out of the pomegranate!)
The Spanish introduced bananas into North America in the early 1500s via their colonies in Florida. However, because of the banana plant's susceptibility to frost, major commercial production has never been established here. Our favorite fruit comes to us courtesy of tropical climes like Central America and the Caribbean.
As I finish typing this, it's noon. I fancy I hear Harry Belafonte singing in the distance: "...six-foot, seven-foot, eight-foot bunch." My Bodega banana beckons!
If only it were an organic red 'Macaboo' from a family-owned farm somewhere in Costa Rica. But out of the roughly 500 known varieties of edible bananas in the world, a few brand-name, bulk-imports, like the 'Cavendish', are all that ever make it to the Bodega (and virtually every other store in the country.)
The banana has become a sleek, corporate fruit, bred to survive a long, refrigerated boat and train ride without so much as a scratch. Still, great ape that I am, I find it impossible to resist.
Niall Dunne is Associate Editor of Plants & Gardens News.