Cool bananas

Beloved by people the world over, bananas are delicious and nutritious. But are they in danger of extinction? Will eating too many kill you? And are banana peels really that slippery? Imma Perfetto takes a peek inside the fleshy yellow crescent…

Whether you prefer them in a smoothie, smooshed on toast with a bit of peanut butter, split and smothered in ice-cream and your favourite sticky topping, or just peeled and eaten plain, bananas are a universally crowd-pleasing fruit. Except, strictly, they’re not a fruit (we’ll get to that in a moment).

Cultivated bananas are the fourth most important crop in developing countries – after rice, wheat, and corn – and about 100 megatonnes are produced globally each year. To get an idea of what that looks like, they reckon the Great Pyramid of Giza weighs a little less than 6Mt. That’s a lot of banana splits, yes? For some reason bananas seem to attract more myth and rumour than most cultivated objects.

Have you heard that bananas are all clones of each other? How about that they’re going to go extinct one day because of a wickedly infectious banana disease? Let’s peel back the skin on these, and some other, big banana facts and rumours...

For the full story on the b-berry – is it safe? Is it radioactive? Is it going extinct? – head below to Cosmos 98 | Beyond the Palaeo