My uncle lived in Sylmar, CA, and had a banana tree beside his house which actually produced fruit! We gaped at it like ninnies, having grown up outside of Chicago, where such growing was impossible!
I try to eat several bananas a week. I've been keeping them on hand since I've been sick, because my uncle died from (in part) a potassium deficiency, so ever since then I've been taking supplements with potassium in them. I like the baby bananas when they're yellow. I don't like them when they're hard, but I also don't like overripe bananas, although I try to time it so it I'm going to let them get overripe, I have two or three, so I can make a banana bread.
Well son of a gun, I did not know all those facts about bananas Joe Riley! I think I am going to eat one now! Bananas are relatively inexpensive, so I am sure that is the reason people eat so many of them. ALso, they are stocked just about everywhere, so they are a product that most people will eat over the course of the day. So, it is an item that many people tend to have in their home. I believe that Walmart sells more bananas than anything else. That was a statistic I heard once.
@ Diane Lane my dad likes bananas when they are green. He is the only person I know who is like this. I mean, I think he likes them with a hint of yellow in them, but I like mine somewhere between ripe and over ripe. I would say fully ripe, just before they get any brown spots on them. I guess that is the question that needs to be asked..How do you like your bananas?
Ahh, the little yellow fruit that does a lot the banana. I like crispy and love Red Delicious apples and don't care much for bananas much until your post. I'll start eating more of these yellow fruit we call the banana. Locally we have what is called apple bananas that's sweeter and not as bland as Dole bananas. from http://pinterest.com/pin/13229392628632348/. Apple bananas are smaller than Dole Banana's, and is always expensive. Dole banana's go for 1.19 on sale while apple banana's are 1.69 a pound on sale.
@Diane Lane You can use "No-Salt" on your food and greatly increase your Potassium intake thusly, while making foods which should taste pleasingly salty do so. No-Salt is Potassium Chloride, instead of the usual Sodium Chloride, which causes water retention, which causes blood pressure to increase. When excess water is present in tissues, it squeezes the blood vessels, causing their pressure to rise. Frank
Good ol' Harry Belafonte made millions off of bananas so I guess it was definitely a healthy thing for him. And let's face it, a few thousand tarantulas can't be all wrong. But yeah, my wife picks me up a bunch just about every other day. That said, I can include them heavily in my diet because of my workout regimine (zinc is particularly good for building muscle) and because I take furosemide (uh, diuretics) which gets rid of the electrolytes through the urinary cycle. Because of things like bananas I can pretty much do without the potassium pills and a couple of other substitutions. Wanna have some fun? Find a good sized plantain and give it to someone who really really loves bananas. Just sit back and watch!
We are so proud of our banana in the backyard for they are very prolific. The usual harvest has 12 clusters and each cluster has at least 20 bananas. You can imagine the glee of our neighbors upon receiving a cluster each. I also bring some to the office for dessert of my colleagues. This fast-growing banana bears fruits after 8 months of planting unlike the native big bananas that takes 18 months to fruiting time. Maybe the farmers here should shift to this Thai variety. The fruit is a hybrid of plantain and banana so it can be eaten as it is or it can be fried or even boiled. By the way, boiled banana plantain is a traditional snack here which is mostly patronized by laborers - they need the energy that the banana can supply. We also have the snack food called banana cue which is fried banana plantain in syrupy oil. Until now that banana cue is still a favorite.
When my son was a Summer Missionary in the Philippines many years ago, as a teen, he said that they had over 100 varieties of bananas. One was red about an inch long.