QUARANTINE BLOG # 292

January 16, 2021

Today we begin a two-part story of bananas (taken from my favorite cruise talk).

Banana experts say that the average American, about 40 years old, has eaten more than 1,000 bananas (which means someone is eating a lot of bananas because after my Mom fed me my last banana baby mush, I may have eaten 6 bananas, and 5 of them were covered with ice cream). 

In many parts of the world, bananas – more than rice, more than potatoes – are what keep hundreds of millions of people alive. 

The story of bananas is also about a disease spreading throughout the world’s banana crop. As of yet there is no known cure.

The banana that is dying, the Cavendish – the most popular single variety of fruit in the world – may have as few as 10 years, or as long as 100 years. A disease discovered in Panama and named after that country is threatening a new generation of bananas.

Every Cavendish is a clone, a genetic twin of every other, no matter where it is grown. Billions of identical twins means that what makes one banana sick makes every banana sick. 

Since 2007, banana scientists have been trying to modify the fruit to make it disease resistant. Researchers are combing remote jungles for new, wild bananas; melding one banana with another and adding genetic material from altogether different fruits and vegetables.

Even if genetic engineering succeeds, there’s an excellent chance people won’t want to eat or won’t be allowed to eat bananas that gain newfound strength from the insertion of genes originally found in everything from radishes to fish. Such products are currently banned in much of the world. Right now, no one knows if the Cavendish can be saved.

And God Created the Banana

Our story properly begins when people – and bananas – were born. In the beginning, God spent a week creating heaven and earth. 

Fruit appeared on day two. Man arrived after the sixth dawn. God created a companion for his progeny, and Adam and Eve became a couple. Their Eden was utopia. There was one significant warning: “You may freely eat of every tree in the garden,” God said, “but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat it, you shall die.”

When she encountered the serpent, Eve was easily convinced that the prohibited fruit was not poison, but a source of power selfishly guarded by God. Tradition holds that Eve’s temptation was an apple, a piece of which lodged itself in Adam’s throat, giving that particularly male anatomic feature its name.

It may come as a surprise to learn, that Hebrew text never identifies the type of fruit they consumed. In fact, the Hebrew uses a generic word for “fruit.” The now-common representation of “apple” emerged around AD 400, when Jerome created the Vulgate Bible, a version of the book in Latin. 

In 1455 Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type and published Jerome’s version.  When Jerome translated the Hebrew for fruit, he chose the Latin word malum, which can be translated as “apple.” When Renaissance artists referred to their Gutenberg bibles, they began painting apples into their Gardens of Eden.

The Koran also situates the banana in the sacred garden. There, Eden’s forbidden tree is called the talh, an archaic Arabic word that scholars sometimes translate as “banana tree.”

The Bible locates Eden between four rivers. Two – the Tigris and Euphrates still exist today, flowing through Iraq and Iran. A Middle Eastern Eden would have been hospitable to bananas. Even today, the region is a growth center for the fruit. The same area is not terribly friendly to the apple, which grows there in limited quantities, and with the assistance of modern agriculture.

The Traveling Banana: Asia

The earliest human efforts to grow bananas in prehistory, travels the equator from India to Taiwan and coastal southern China before turning south. It include all of Southeast Asia, the Malay Peninsula, and the Philippines. The curve terminates at northern Australia, just west of the Great Barrier Reef. 

India has more varieties of the fruit found than anywhere else. Hindus call the fruit kalpatbaru, which means “virtuous plant.”

India grows 20 percent of the world’s bananas – about 17 million tons – each year. That’s three times more than the number two banana-producing nation, Ecuador. 

More than 670 types of bananas, cultivated and wild, grow in the country. Thirty-two forest bananas are so rare that only a single plant or two has been discovered.

The Traveling Banana: Africa

According to African lore, Kintu – not Adam – was the first human being.  Kintu and his wife, Nambi, carried a banana roots on their travels, planting them as they went.

The Eden of Kintu and Nambi is modern Uganda, the nation that relies more immediately on bananas than anywhere else. Uganda grows 11 million tons of the fruit each year –  more than 500 pounds per person annually – twenty times more than we peel and eat in the United States. 

The Traveling Banana: The Americas

Portuguese sailors discovered the banana in their travels to the African continent in the early 16th century and populated the Canary Islands and then the Caribbean islands with their first banana plantations. By the early 1800s, the plantations were shipping the fruit from the Caribbean to Europe and the Americas.

Are Banana Peels Funny?

The growing popularity of bananas in America can be traced to August 25, 1904, and 23 year old David Strickler, a pharmacist and soda fountain operator at a drugstore in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

Strickler began serving a concoction made of three scoops of ice cream nestled between halves of a banana. He charged ten cents, and had special boat-shaped dishes manufactured for serving the sundae. His recipe was one banana, cut lengthwise; scoops of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry ice cream; a drenching of chocolate, pineapple, and  strawberry sauce; and a final sprinkling of nuts and a trio of whipped cream dollops topped with cherries.

In 1907, a version of the delicacy appeared at a restaurant owned by E. R. Hazard, 275 miles away, in Wilmington, Ohio. Hazard called his creation a “banana split.” Both towns now claim to have been the birthplace of the confection.

Led by the banana split, a disposal of the remains of the popular fruit was in the early 20th century, becoming a problem. There was no place, other than the gutter, to discard the peel, and they quickly became a gooey mess. People actually did slip, fall, and sometimes injure themselves when they stepped on them. 

Over time, the sidewalk pratfall became less of a genuine hazard and more an element of slapstick comedy. Watching someone fly into the air and then go sprawling was funny – if it wasn’t you. The gag was reprised to the greatest and most chaotic effect in 1927 movie, “The Battle of the Century” featuring Laurel and Hardy, where a banana peel launched the greatest pie-throwing melee in cinema history. 

Charlie Chaplin, who featured a slip in The Pilgrim, released in 1923, understood that the joke got old quickly. A director once asked him, “How could I make a lady, walking down Fifth Avenue, slip on a banana peel and still get a laugh? It’s been done a million times. Do I show first the banana peel, then the lady approaching, then she slips? Or do I show the lady first, then the banana peel, and then she slips?” 

Chaplin replied, “Neither. You show the lady approaching. Then show the banana peel; then show the lady and the banana peel together; then she steps OVER the banana peel and disappears down a manhole.”

No Bananas Today

There were few signs in the grocery stores of a banana shortage. The fruit had become so beloved that people began to sing songs about it.

It began in New York City’s Tin Pan Alley. Most of the tens of thousands of songs produced by Tin Pan Alley are long forgotten. Those that remain in memory are classics: Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” and “God Bless America” along with George M. Cohan’s “Give My Regards to Broadway.”

“Yes, We Have No Bananas” will never be viewed with such piety. But it was a much bigger sensation.

The song appeared in 1923 from composers Frank Silver and Irving Cohn. The New York Times lamented that “97.3 percent of the great American Nation devotes itself zestfully and with unanimity to singing ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas,’” and suggested the cause was “infantile regression,” and “mob psychology.”

Listen to the original recording.

The 1954 film, “Sabrina,” starring Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn featured “Yes, We Have No Bananas.”  In this clip, watch the sarcasm in Bogart's face as he describes the lyrics.

The melody was adapted from an 1860s sheet-music hit called “When I Saw Sweet Nellie Home,” which in turn was derived from Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” (you can actually hear traces of the classical work in the banana song if you hum one, then the other, in the same key: hal-le-lu-jah . . . yes- we-have-no).

The song asks, “Are bananas available?” The answer was, “Yes – they’re not.” A grocer with plenty of onions and cabbages as well as “all kinds” of fresh produce was unable to meet demand for what had become America’s favorite and most widely available fruit. “Yes, we have no bananas” was on its way to being the story of the grocer’s stock, not just a hit song.

Next week, we’ll conclude the banana’s story with the disease that wiped out the original banana – the Gros Michel, or “Big Mike” – and threatens its replacement, the Cavendish.

The category for Final Jeopardy! is FOOD. 

👉  Today’s close is by Phil Ware.

In John 8:31-32 Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.  Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

There are few things more coveted than freedom.  People die for it.  People pray for it.  People strive for it.  True freedom comes from knowing truth.  Knowing truth only comes by living in obedience to Jesus.  Truth is not something you merely think about or believe.  Truth is something you do, you live.  Jesus’ teaching always ends with the exclamation: Blessed are you who do these things!  Only by doing will we ever know the truth that liberates us.

Prayer:

To the only true God be glory, honor, power, and praise.  Father, I seek not only your presence in my daily life, but also your pleasure in the choices I make.  Please teach me more of your truth as I pledge to live today in obedience to your word and your will.  Through Jesus the living Word I pray.  Amen.

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