The meal with a peel
Bananas and banana plantations figure quite a bit in my novel Blood of the Dragon Trees. During a visit to Tenerife, we visited a banana plantation, and gleaned much information from there; and also took several photographs. Here is a brief article I wrote, previously published, about the banana.
For the last ten years the banana has been the
UK’s favourite
fruit and it isn’t surprising to understand why.
It’s easy to eat, comes in its own bio-degradable
packaging and is good for you.
Driving virtually anywhere in Tenerife
you’ll see the sun glinting off what look like huge man-made lakes – yet in
fact they’re covered enclosures devoted to these exotic plants – the biggest
plants in the world.
One eighth of
Tenerife is covered in banana plantations.
Banan is the Arabic word for finger,
which is what the fruit resembles – and, what’s more, a clutch of bananas is
called a ‘hand’... The Spanish call them
platanos, although this means
“plantain”.
The banana
was probably the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden; the Tree of Paradise in
the Koran is also a banana.
Bananas
were originally found in Java, South East Asia
and India
and this is where Alexander the Great encountered them in 327BC. The fruit moved with primitive commerce and
was established in Africa by AD 500. By the first millennium it was in Polynesia where the people believed that human beings
come from unripe bananas and gods from ripe ones. As a creation belief, that’s pretty ripe...
Learned men
in India
used to rest in the shade of banana plants while they refreshed themselves with
its fruit; thus it’s also called “the fruit of the wise men”.
The first
banana plants were taken to the Canaries in 1402 by Portuguese mariners from
the
Africa.
In 1516
Thomas de Berlanga, a Dominican Friar, took the banana plant to the Caribbean
and it soon spread to central and south America.
Its first
British appearance was in 1633 at a herbalist’s shop in
London.
In 1836 the
Royal Horticultural Society presented a medal to Sir Joseph Paxton who
developed a new variety of banana, naming it the Cavendish – the family name of
his employer, the Duke of Devonshire.
Late in 1882 Sabin Berthelot
introduced into the Canaries the Chinese or Cavendish banana originating in the
Himalaya valleys, often called the ‘dwarf’
banana.
In 1887 the
Canaries were a popular place for health cures of the rich. While recuperating, a woman took a fancy to
the fruit and her husband, Scotsman Edward Wathen Fyffe, noticed that the ships
of the Elder Dempster line were returning to the UK empty, having delivered their
cargoes. So he used the ships to import bananas. In 1901 the first refrigerated shipment
arrived in UK;
the fruit was still considered a luxury.
The United
Fruit Company of New York
eventually became a majority share-holder in Fyffes. Unfortunately, at the time of the Wall Street
Crash, United Fruit decided to close down the more expensive Canary banana
export business in favour of the cheaper “local” Caribbean
and Central American banana exports to Europe. Fyffes’ operations in the Canaries were wound
down, closing completely in 1936.
Ten years
later, on 30 December, 1946,
the first post-war shipment arrived in Britain. The Land Army distributed one banana to every
child and it’s highly likely that several older readers can still remember that
little luxury today.
Also just
after the Second World War, General Franco – who had been Captain General of
the islands – introduced a mandatory regulation into the food rationing scheme
throughout Spain. One kilo of Canary
bananas was to be purchased by every card holder each month. Until then the banana was not widely known on
mainland Spain. This dictatorial move not only supplemented
the country’s diet with a healthy food product, it saved the Canarian banana
business from collapse. Today Spain is the
principle market for Canary bananas.
This most
popular fruit is not a tree but a giant herbaceous plant. It’s hermaphroditic, that is possessing male
and female flowers on the same stalk and reproduces without pollination taking
place.
The rhizome
(like a large bulb), from which the plant grows, takes about eighteen months to
produce the first bananas. It needs well drained ground, lots of water and it’s
very susceptible to wind, hence they’re very often kept in breeze block covered
enclosures.
When the
plant flowers it’s in the form of a large spike growing out of the centre of
the trunk and it quickly turns downwards as it opens. The male flower, a red bud at the end of the
spike, quickly dies. The female flowers
clustered around the stem form the actual bananas. The pistils are removed from
the tips of each banana which then gradually turn up to the sun to fatten. Each plant produces a bunch of bananas
weighing an average of thirty kilos.
The plant’s
rooting system is constantly producing new offshoots and when the original or
parent plant is four months old these new shoots are cut away with the
exception of one which is allowed to grow alongside the parent. After a further four months this procedure is
repeated and two months later the parent plant flowers and produces fruit. After harvesting, the parent plant is cut
down leaving the first and second generation offshoots which are now two and
six months old respectively and the cycle’s repeated.
Within
hours of leaving the plantation the bunches of bananas reach the local packing
stations where they’re washed, graded, cut into hands and boxed and sent en
route to dealers.
A banana
contains about ninety calories and is exceptionally rich in potassium, a
nutrient which promotes energy, protects against strokes and other diseases,
and vitamin B6, which is good for the nervous system, and folate, essential for
proper tissue growth. So if you
want to boost your energy level, unzip a banana rather than take a glucose
drink.
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