fruit · The Trophy Room
Banana
The most familiar fruit on Earth, and yet the wild and regional bananas of Southeast Asia look nothing like the single supermarket clone the West knows. Small, stubby, sometimes seeded, often intensely sweet — the local varieties are a reminder of how much diversity got bred out.
Identifying
- the classic curved finger of fruit in a hand off the stalk, but here small and stubby
- grows in a huge hanging cluster from a purple flower bud on a tall herb (not a tree)
- soft, sweet, starchy flesh; some local kinds carry small hard seeds
- skin ripens green to yellow to freckled brown
Facts
- the banana "tree" is actually the world's largest herb — no wood, just a stalk of leaf bases
- the global export banana is a single sterile clone (Cavendish); Asia grows dozens of seeded and wild kinds
- picked green and ripened off the plant, since a plant-ripened banana splits and spoils
