10 Facts about Bananas that you probably didn’t know
by Jaden Tse from 4F
Ah Bananas🍌: one of the most popular fruits around the world. I mean who doesn’t like bananas? We eat them for snacks, our daily portion of fruits, desserts and fiber. Here are 10 of our favorite fun facts about these yummy delights.
Bananas are actually berries.
That’s right! Your favorite yellow fruit is a berry! Bananas have pulp with seeds and sprouted from a flower. In other news strawberries🍓 aren’t berries!
The world's most expensive banana is the "Taiyo no Tamago".
"Taiyo no Tamago" translates to "Egg of the Sun"and costs almost $120 Hong Kong dollars!
Bananas don't grow on trees.🤔
Have you ever seen a banana tree before?
Probably not. Banana trees are actually HUMONGOUS herbs. A tree’s stems must be made of wood, but the banana trees are made of fibers so banana trees are HERBS.
There’s a Museum of Bananas in the U.S.A.🤯
The museum is called The I.B.N. Or The International Banana Museum. It is located in Mecca, California🇺🇲.
The museum is home to over 25,000 Banana related products. That’s right, there’s a place where people go bananas… for bananas.
Bananas have built-in ripeness indicators.
Yeah, bananas have LITERALL built-in ripeness indicators. Those little brown splotches, are sugar freckles! The more spots, the riper (and sweeter) the banana is so if your banana looks like it just got baked in salt, it’s probably at absolute peak flavor.
Bananas are naturally a little radioactive.
The bananas contain small amounts of potassium-40🤢, a radioactive isotope. But don’t worry, you’d need to eat 274 bananas every day for 7 years straight to even feel the slightest symptoms of radiation poisoning.
Bananas are one of the first fruits ever cultivated by humans.
Archaeological evidence shows bananas were cultivated in Papua New Guinea as early as 5000 BCE! That makes bananas older than most major civilizations!
The banana plant dies after producing fruit.
Indeed, each banana “tree” (which, remember, is a herb!) only blooms once in it’s entire life-time. After the bananas are harvested, the plant withers away and is replaced by a shoot (For example: a bamboo shoot) from the same root system.
The Cavendish banana is the only banana most people eat...and it’s in trouble.
The Cavendish variety of bananas makes up nearly 98% of the bananas sold in grocery stores but it’s highly vulnerable to disease because they’re all clones. Because of this, a fungus called Tropical Race 4 is spreading and could wipe the Cavendish banana race out, which would be… ap-peeling, get it? To absolutely no one.
Humans are 50% genetically identical to bananas.
Wait… That's the wrong title!
Humans are NOT 50% banana. It is just a popular science "factoid" that gained popularity, but it only refers to the proportion of genes that have a counterpart, not the overall DNA sequence identity.