Chatting Bananas on ABC Afternoons

Karen Martini’s Sisterly Banana Bread is a real favourite of mine. Get the recipe.

Every two weeks I chat on ABC Melbourne radio about food. This time it was about bananas – and it was a lot of fun. For some reason, bananas provoke a lot of passion, usually positive but sometimes negative. Listen in for lesser-known banana facts and some fabulous banana suggestions from our listeners.

BANANA FACTS

• They are the most traded fruit in the world, with a value of around US$10 billion a year.
• Australians eat 5 million bananas a day
• Our bananas are harvested year round, almost all from plantations in north Queensland. Almost all are Cavendish bananas, along with some Ladyfinger. There are 1000 varieties of banana but Cavendish is the most traded all around the world, which makes our crops worryingly susceptible to disease.
• Bananas are picked and packed green and ripened with ethylene and humidity.
• Wax-tipped bananas are grown without chemicals but are still picked green.

WEIRD BANANA FACTS

• Do you know why they are curvy? It’s a phenomenon called negative geotropism – the fruit starts growing downwards, then as it peeps out from under its leaf it turns towards the light and the sky, making it curved.
• They are a herb! They’re the largest plants without a woody stem, are in same family as lilies, orchids and palms and can grow up to 15 metres tall.
• You’ve been peeling them wrong – peel the end, not the stem to open without squishing. This is what chimps do and they must know a thing or two about bananas!
• Bananas are radioactive due to their potassium content. The dose is tiny dose but it’s used as a handy measurement to explain relative radiation exposure. The measurement is Banana Equivalent Dose [BED]. A chest Xray is 70,000 BED. Permitted leakage for a nuclear power plant is 2500 BED per year. Lethal radiation is 30 million BED – so you’re pretty safe unless you eat 30 million bananas.
• You can polish leather shoes with the inside of a banana peel – I tried it and it sort of works!