THE BANANA

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19731, 28 December 1926, Page 3

THE BANANA

LAZY MAN’S FRUIT. FULL OF NEGATIVE GOOD QUALITIES. Prizes were recently awarded in Great Britain for the best essays on the nutritive qualities of the banana. The winners were given. £lO<J each. “What interested me most in the report of the competition, however,’’ (writes “ Y.Y” in the “New Statesman”), “was the announcement that a Jewish schoolboy from the East End of London sent in an essay 13,000 words long, for which he was given a consolation. prize of half-a-guinea. This surely deserves to be placed on record as an amazing feat of composition. Most of us would find it difficult to write even the briefest essay on such a subject as the nutritive qualities of the banana. A broomstick itself seems a subject richer in pssibilities for the essayist. If you write an essay on a broomstick you need not mention the broomstick. But, if you write an essay on the nutritive qualities of the 'banana, you cannot very well avoid de-

voting a part of the essay to the nutritive qualities of the banana. Your title suggests, not fancy, but fact—not divagation, but information. And how little information could you or I fish out of the depths of our minds on that particular subject! ‘1 am convinced that the banana owes its comparative popularity among us, not to any good qualities it possesses, but to certain bad qualities in ourselves. .It is the lazy man’s fruit all the. world over. Nature planted it abundantly in those parts of the earth in which it is impossible not to be lazy; and, if you see anyone eating a banana at an English table, you may generally be sure that he is one of the laziest persons in. the company. Wo eat bananas, not because we like them, but because they give us lebS trouble than any other fruit. One has to peel an ' apple or a pear carefully, but the ' banana almost peels itself. In grapes ! there are pips and skins to be got rid of, and endless inconvenience; but after all the first stripping of the banana there is no further labour. A date has to be cut open and stoned. An orange contains all sorts of inedible matter, and no quite decent way of eating it in public has yet been discovered. Even the strawberry, which is the easiest of European fruits to eat, the disadvantage of having been touched by hands other than the eater’s. “The banana, on the other hand, is free from nearly all the objections that can be taken to a fruit, except on the score of its taste. It is clean; it has neither pips nor core; it has a skin that comes off as easily as ou overcoat; it can be eaten, if necessary, without the aid of a knife; and not even a child has ever been known to eat it to excess. It may not have a single positive good quality; but it has all the negative good qualities. That is why it should be almost impossible to introduce it into a lyrical poem. The church bells may chime the praises of oranges and lemons, but not of bananas. The literature of the banana, indeed, never rises above the level of low comedy. Compare the literature of the vine to the literature of the banana, and you will see at once the gulf that divides them. The ■ apple appears in beautiful legend after ; legend, and the pear in nursery rhymes. Cherries are poets’ fruits, and BrownI ing brought even the melon into poetry. But, apart from ‘Have a Banana’ and ‘Yes we Have No Ba~nanas,’ the banana, I fancy, has not a single association with literature. “There may, it is true, bo something to be said for the banana in the countries in which it is grown. Travellers declare that the banana that is to be obtained in a London fruit is widely different in flavour from the banana that is eaten in its natural surroundings* They even use the word ‘delicious,’ and there is no need to dis-

believe them. I doubt, however, whether the adjective ‘delicious’ has even been seriously applied to the English banana. If anyone attempts to describe its flavour, it is usually by comparing it to cotton-wool or blottingpaper. The nearest thing to praise of the banana that I have ever heard spoken was the statement that bananas with snub noses have a better flavour than bananas with pointed ones. That, it must be admitted, is but a mild essay at praise. There is no rapture in j it, such as we expect when human beings speak of food that they like. “I trust that the schoolboy who wrote the 13,000-word essay found something more delirious than this to say in appreciation of bananas. I fancy he must have incorporated a his- | tory and description of Jamaica or the i Canary Islands in his essay. Even so, [what a feat in an essay called ‘The iNutritive Qualities of the Banana’! CVhat a fruit, and what a subject! And, at the end of it all, a half-a-fTuinoa! ’’