The Bottom Line: Quick facts about bananas!
The Full Story:
- If you shouldn’t eat a calf in its mother’s milk, should you eat two bananas that are clones? Yes! In fact, all the bananas you eat are the clones of one, perfect banana: the Cavendish. They used to be all clones of the Gros Michel banana, but with lack of genetic diversity come susceptibility to global plagues of fungus. Oh well.
- People go bananas over bananas! They are the 4th largest agricultural product in the world, after only wheat, rice, and corn.
- The average American eats 27-pounds of bananas a year, but that’s nothing compared to Uganda, where people consume 500-pounds per person. In fact, the Ugandan word for food, “matooke,” also means banana.
- In India, a man once ate 81-bananas in a half hour.
- The technical name for a cluster of bananas is a “hand.” Unfortunately, this name will not help you to hold these bananas as you walk home from the grocery store. One might ask, however, what The Beatles really meant when they wrote the song “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
- Bananas are actually berries. Who would have guessed?
- “Banana Republic” is not just the place you buy your boyfriend’s collared shirts. The term originally refers to states run by large banana companies who support dictators in order to protect their own interests.
- A man ran the Barcelona marathon in under three-hours while dressed as a banana.
1 of 1