Bananas: It’s Not All Elementary

Most people know of Charles Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, and of the scientific discovery that was it's outcome.  Few people, however, know how that journey was the result of parental care and concession.  Charles's father first objected to Charles's joining the voyage, but soon gave in, even paying his son's way.  Two sentences in a letter of the father to his son on the journey caught my eye.  From England, the father reported to his son some thousands of miles to the south, "I got a Banana tree.  I sit under it and think of you in similar shade."  It might seem an unusual topic, but knowing, as I did, how Charles was not especially close to his father, I heard in those lines an expression of the father's love for his son by means of sharing news on a topic that would interest the young Charles -- Nature.

Exotic in England and the U.S. in Darwin's day, imported bananas are now common in the U.S., and are an easy means for parental care.  Being soft and sweet, a banana can be more appealing to a small child than an apple or an orange might be.

I got a kick out of seeing some banana trees when, as a child, my family moved to the South, but I was disappointed to find that its variety of fruit was not the kind we bought in stores. Grocery-store bananas, despite being now so commonplace, are nonetheless oddities of Nature.  Just to start with, a banana "tree"  is not actually a tree.  The definition of "tree" is usually a plant with a woody stem, but a banana plant's stem is instead formed out of the stems of leaves, and made strong by the pressure of water.  (A banana plant is really in a way a giant herb, being in the same group of plants that produce cardamom, ginger, and turmeric.)

A second thing that makes the matter of bananas not so elementary is that the banana fruit we eat is sterile and seedless.  The sterility is caused by cultivated banana plants having three sets of chromosomes.  That violates the normal course for sexual beings, by which a species is usually perpetuated by each parent contributing one set of chromosomes, the offspring having two sets, and thus being fertile.  Long before the word "cloning" captivated our popular imagination, banana growers had figured out how to, in a sense, "clone" new banana plants from the suckers of an old plant.

The seemingly simple banana is thus an example of the long story of humans' lives being intertwined with the lives of domesticated plants.  Although we in the U.S. encounter banana plants mostly through their fruit, in other countries, the banana plant's leaves are used in a variety of ways, from making a plate for a meal to creating shingles for a thatched hut.

That parent lovingly feeding her small child bright bananas probably has no idea that she is also introducing her child to a word that will eventually allow the child to expand its vocabulary in multiple ways.  That child, besides learning the simple, rhythmic word "banana," might in time graduate to "banana split," "banana seat," and "banana republic."  Not to mention the colorful exclamation that a person "has gone bananas!"

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In what way is food you share or eat along with others a way of caring?

(The quotation from Charles Darwin's father's letter is

 dated 7 March 1833, and is No. 201 in the on-line Darwin Correspondence Project.)