The banana is a tasty fruit, technically it’s a berry! It can be identified by its yellowness and boomerang shape. Sometimes it’s not yellow though.
Plantains are also bananas, but we call them plantains because they are cooked.
Dole bananas are grown in Costa Rica. It takes about three months for banana plants to go from sprouting to shooting out bananas. A banana tree is ready to be harvested only if the banan fingers have at least a 2 inch diameter.
Bananas are harvested while green; shipping takes too long. They use a machete to chop it off and then a “banananero” carries it on his shoulder to the banana truck.
Banana plants put out bananas once and then die.
All the bananas from American grocery stores are genetic clones. Many plants reproduce with pollination or whatever for sex, but bananas just clone. This is nice for stores and things, but it means they are vulnerable to disease. If a fungus can kill one banana then it can kill them all!
Fifty years ago, we had a different kind of banana that we used for everything, then it got almost wiped out. Our current banana is its replacement, but it may get killed too!
Public Domain Dedication.