Go Bananas!!

This FYI moment is brought to you by… my curiosity

I love bananas. On their own, in bread, even mashed up over ripe ones mixed with cocoa – seriously, try it!

I also love watching them as they grow. I became facinated with the banana flower stage while on my horseback ride in Cambodia. We rode through the grove and it took my a few minutes to realize what I was seeing. The flower simply does not look like bananas are in there. But they are.

Then I made banana flower salad during my cooking class in Phnom Penh. I got to see the flower up close and basically dissected. Then I could see the beginnings of the bananas.

And banana flower salad is 👌 I made that! And ate it too.

So that is a quick background to help explain why I ended up researching bananas this weekend.

I learned some cool facts!

The bananas that we eat are a human invention from as far back as 5000 B.C. Originally, bananas were full of seeds, but because people are picky eaters, banana hybrids were created, making the fruit seed-free. There are still tiny little seeds in banana, but they don’t serve any function.

Yikes! GMO way BC!

And the banana tree, well, isn’t!

“Is a banana a fruit or an herb? Believe it or not, both terms apply.

Consider this: have you ever heard of banana tree wood? You haven’t because that banana tree is technically a tree-like herbaceous plant as the heavy “trunk” holding the leafy topknot is composed of tight leaf bracts. No wood. The banana plant itself is a perennial where the leafy crown dies back for a sucker offspring from the rhizome root to take over the following year”

That is a very tall herb!!

Each plant/tree/herb, only bears friut once then it dies. It shoots a new “eye” (a baby plant) before dying, and the entire process only takes about ten months. So it does not grow from seeds.

I guess that is good since we apparently bred the seeds down to uselessness 🤷‍♀️

Final fun fact – origins

Bananas were originally found in South East Asia, mainly in India. They were brought west by Arab conquerors in 327 B.C. and moved from Asia Minor to Africa and were finally carried to the New World by the first explorers and missionaries to the Caribbean.

So ends my tribute to the lovely yellow fruit my daughter hated until her twenties.

Oh, I took the picture below wondering what the heck it was. Pretty sure its what is between the banana bunch and flower in the picture right above it. Yes?

Finally, I wrote this on my back deck in front of, you guessed it, banana,’trees’

Bonne nuit!