By Joel Denker
At the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, an unusual fruit, wrapped in tin foil, was on sale for 10 cents. Marketed as a “Curiosity of the Indies,” the banana was being promoted to fair goers.
The odyssey of the banana, assumed by many to have originated in Africa or in Latin America, actually began more than 7,000 years ago in the tropical rain forests of Southeast Asia. Imagine fruits the size of your index finger filled with large, stony seeds. These are the wild ancestors of our supermarket banana.
They lacked the succulent pulp of today’s fruit. Their flesh was “thin” and “mealy,” the botanist I.H. Burkill writes. Their buds, stems, and flowers were probably eaten as vegetables. But the plant was most serviceable for practical tasks. Fibers were woven into nets and clothes. Food was baked in banana leaves and houses were thatched with them.
When variations in the original plant emerged that made it more appealing, the forest dwellers seized on the new types. Mutants that were seedless and that contained a rich pulp, scholars surmise, began to be cultivated. Farming the tastier banana and other root crops like yams gradually led to more settled village life.
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To learn more about bananas, see The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat, coming in October from Rowman & Littlefield: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442248861/The-Carrot-Purple-and-Other-Curious-Stories-of-the-Food-We-Eat.
