BETTER THAN DATES.

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 226, 24 September 1927, Page 8

BETTER THAN DATES.

If our neighbours, the planters and traders in New Zealand's South Sea Islands, only I realised it, there is a valuable new line of export, a sure and certain profit-bringer, to be built up with dried bananas. Very few New Zealanders know how great a dainty the banana really is in its sun-dried and sugar-preserved form. An attempt has been made to open a market for dried bananas from Rarotonga, but the difficulty has been the method of packing. The fruit so treated has been packed in coverings of leaves, which is not quite satisfactory. Properly desiccated and packed in jars or other airtight receptacles in sugar, the fruit does not go soft; it will keep for months and can be cut up in slices. I know of no dried fruit so delicious as those bananas we used to get from Niue Island per schooner, packed in stone jars. With bread and butter they made a satisfying meal; thev were more delicious than either preserved dates or figs, and certainly more healthful than the very dubious article that comes from Smyrna and Arabia. Everything depends on the method of drying and packing. Niue Island, Samoa and Rarotonga have great supplies of bananas, which have to be picked green if they are to reach the New Zealand market. The best kind of bananas, in fact, cannot be exported at all; under present conditions the New Zealander never tastes them. If Eome capital were devoted to the drying and packing of choice bananas on methods that would ensure delivery in New Zealand in as perfect* a condition as those schooner-shipped jars used to come to us from Niue, Island-dried fruits would become famous. It would be possible, once the merits of the food became known, to substitute bananas almost entirely for the Asiatic fruit of doubtful hygienic quality now so largely imported. There is no doubt there is a great business in it for some one enterprising enough to start the undertaking with the thoroughness the Californians devote to their fruit trade. » i--¥mi*m%s^.^^ V t. f^il _ __. —TALOFA.