One single plant, cloned thousands of times. Easily devastated by disease.
If you live in a northern climate, you have to rely on a very complicated and expensive delivery system that will supply you with this fruit that can only be grown in the tropics. And the only way to keep it economical is to create an economy where food prices are artificially kept low because first world countries systematically suppress developing countries that grow bananas into becoming stable economies that would actually provide better wages for farmers and workers who would raise the price of bananas.
We have cheap bananas because we don't mind living in a world where we abuse farmers and workers to work for pennies to supply us in the first world with cheap bananas.
And just to rub salt into the wound, someone created a clothing store named after the political corruption imposed on those countries to accomplish this: Banana Republic.
I can't think of what an equivalent would be in terms of offensive marketing, Starving Irish brand potatoes? A Saudi demolition company named after September 11th? A clothing store inspired by antebellum southern US clothes? I guess some companies still use imagery of indigenous people for tobacco products. That seems like it's in the same vein.
Generally, I try to focus on how beautiful life can be, but damn if there isn't a crowd trying to make it ugly for others.
I've always assumed I misunderstood the brands name but no one has corrected you yet...
To the rabbit hole!
Twin Towers wholesale outlet: our prices are coming down fast!
Pearl harbor casual clothing.
Jim crows bar and grill.
So they can feed disease too? Is there anything bananas can't do?
Do the 16p and 14p bananas taste better than the 13p bananas?
Oh, these aren't meant to be eaten. They're 'for scale' bananas and the price is based on manufacturing accuracy.
...zero mess? What exactly are you doing with the "wrapper?" You know you're not supposed to eat it, right?
Throw it on the ground as a trap for the one walking behind you
You can eat it. Proof: me.
I'm calling the cops.
Get out.
Bananas are a monoculture. One good, hard hitting, lethal pathogen could extinct them.
There are SO MANY bananas, but most people have only eaten the Cavendish. Awhile back, I got a box of assorted bananas from a farm that specializes in growing unusual fruit. I ate about twenty pounds of bananas in three weeks. So many fucking nanners spread across my entire kitchen countertop for weeks, ripening in stages.
My life has been a lie. Yours too. We've all been hoodwinked. We are getting fucked, and not in the good way, because Cavendish is a straight up garbage fruit. There are tiny tart toothsome Thai bananas, chunky Cuban, alluring Apple, beauteous burro, pleasurably plump Pisang, orally outstanding orinoco, mouthwatering Mysore, and the gustatorily magnificent Gros Michel, the OG mass production bananer, which was replaced by Cavendish in a mycological midlife crisis (I'm drunk and if I was a dinosaur, I'd be a tiny tenacious thesaurus tenuisi). Plus more. So many more. Fucking. Bananas.
They all taste like bananas, but each is a little different, some more than others, but they all had more taste that those Cavendish fuckers. So get fucked Chiquita, Dole, and Del Monte. My banana bread sucks because of y'all.
...again.
The monopoly that supplies most bananas to the "western" world has long been known to be a murderous corrupt corp? That's the one major drawback to that chewy sweet banana fiber.
They'll be gone in 10-15 years? The current popular version anyway. A fungi is destroying them.
It happened before back in the fifties with the last version. Except there's nothing really close this time. The other types of bananas aren't close at all
That old version "Gros Michel" is what artificial banana flavour is based on. Bananas used to taste like that. The newer "Cavendish" variety is firmer and lasts longer, but doesn't have the same flavour. It seems like both are being wiped out by disease though, yay monoculture.
Cavendish seem to be especially vulnerable because they're all clones. They don't produce viable seeds, so they're grafted to new plants.
One bad thing: it's all just clones so now it's extremely vulnerable to one kind of fungus, much like the gros michel banana it faces near extinction
Cheap
Except when some genius at your local Walmart changes the price from $0.87/pound to $1.56/banana.
My store went from number 1 in sales of bananas in the country to dead last in just under a week because whoever set the prices was an idiot.
Also genetic diversity is in the crapper. One epidemic and we won't have bananas anymore.
name one bad thing about it.
Okay, the wages and working conditions of plantation workers (modern slaves). The cost of bananas in first-world countries is ridiculously low, and is demeaning to those who work hard to enable this privilege for us.
The taste. I've tried to like them. Had them in smoothies and banana bread, had the is savoury and sweet things. I even made myself eat one everyday while hiking cross country, thinking I'd learn to associate the taste which much needed energy. Nothing worked, they just taste like garbage smells. And the texture! Firm and soft each have their unique horrors.
They have strings and the little brown tip.
That “little brown tip” is called the bananus.
Fuck you, that snort I made when I read that almost woke up my toddler. Fucking bananus 🤣
I love bananas. About three years ago, I started having one banana and a spoonful of natural peanut butter for breakfast every day. It was easy and I loved it.
I put on 15 pounds before I noticed.
🤔 I'm skeptical that it was just the banana and peanut butter that did it.
How big was the spoon?
The spoon
Except for there is like a 1 hour window when they taste really good and have a good texture. In between when they're green and taste like chalk and when they're full yellow and taste like mushy baby food.
Right in that 1 hour window? Delicious.
A bad thing about bananas is that they look like Homer Simpson's penis
Nothing beats that time when Kirk Cameron & Ray Comfort were praising God about the brilliant design of bananas.
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