Am I going bananas?
Doesn’t do to mention anomalies as you can be accused of all sorts of things but how about this one this morning?
I was reading a dead tree book of strange facts and the one that caught the eye was about bananas.
After reading, I thought they didn’t seem all that nice to eat after all and was planning to post on it, though it would have to be transcribed and so I didn’t at that time.
I checked this site just now, before writing anything and guess what the advert was.
Now is that uncanny or is that uncanny?
Anyway, the book, The General book of Ignorance, had this to say about the popular fruit – the main parts, not word for word:
1. Herbs usually die above ground after flowering.
2. With bananas, a new stem grows, slightly further along so it gives the effect, over a few years, of the plant having “walked”.
3. Bananas are native to SE Asia and the wild variety are pollinated by bats. They have stones at the centre of the fleshy pulp.
4. The cultivated variety we eat are sweet and tasty but sterile, i.e. they can only propagate with human help, i.e. from suckers whose genetic material has not changed for a hundred centuries.
5. This makes them extremely vulnerable to disease, like black Sigatoka and Panama disease, which are impervious to fungicides.
6. Europe’s solution is to grow them over Icelandic thermal springs and the bulk of Europe-distributed bananas is Iceland. Fyffes, the banana international, which buys the entire crop of Belize each year, is Irish.
Filed under: Earth and cosmos
I was an AB on Fyffes, the banana boats for a few trips to the Central Amerigas.
The women was fit and would perform miricles for six pence.
We loaded porn in Sweden and swapped it for Rum in Jamaca,
and any left we swapped for porn in Sweden………….
The babnanas were green so we never ate the fuckers.
At one port hte dusky nig nogs had thrown the mechanical lodder into the ogin as they had all lost their jobs carrying by hand the banabbna boxes onto the ship.
I did this once and got a one cent token which I gave to a lass.
I expect they are all factory farmed these days.
yes!
Ah yes, the Icelandic banana industry, right up there with the Welsh clarets.
Pure sophistry James.
The framing is, ‘Of the countries in the EU which grow bananas and thus are banana producers, Iceland is the biggest.’
Otherwise known as stretching the tropics to 65N.
This mighty industry consists of one experiment.
The largest EU producer is actually Spain, mostly in the rather more appropriately situated Canarias, followed by several other Med countries.
And it didn’t tell you that if you eat too many you will end up glowing blue.
Radioactive K-40 if you are interested.
The EU apparently stops Madeira shipping their bananas to us; they are allowed to sell them only in Portugal. Or so I have been told – in Madeira. Happily they can ship their grog to us.
Well I never.
I eat one a day , have done for more years than I care to remember – with yogurt for brekkie. I’m not glowing blue yet.
I think most of ours come from S. America.
Found this on the NBC website:
BANANAS
THEN: Higher in calories than most fruits, bananas were considered carbs that packed on pounds.
NOW: Bananas contain a type of dietary fiber known as resistant starch that your body can’t absorb, so it fills you up temporarily without the risk of filling you out permanently. Other research has linked resistant starch to an increase in post-meal fat-burning, says Janine Higgins, Ph.D., nutrition research director at the Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. One of the by-products of the unabsorbed carbohydrates in your system is butyrate, a fatty acid that may inhibit the body’s ability to burn carbs, forcing it to incinerate fat instead.
Bring it back: Choose a greener banana; once it has turned totally yellow, the starch inside has broken down and is no longer resistant to digestion. If you don’t like to eat bananas when they’re that firm, toss one into the blender for a hunger-dampening smoothie. And take a deep whiff before sipping it: Research from The Smell Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago shows that the smell of banana helps reduce appetite, so you may not want to eat as much anyway.
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/44943530/ns/today-today_health/t/bad-foods-you-should-be-eating/#.UONjCORZWGM
The thlot plickens.
Neither am I Twilight and bananas are not the only foods that contain radioactive K-40, there are potatoes and several others I can’t remember at the moment.