Napoleonic & ECW wargaming, with a load of old Hooptedoodle on this & that


Tuesday 14 September 2010

Hooptedoodle #2 - Bananas - what's the story?


As it happens, I live in Scotland - a beautiful country, to be sure, but not noted for growing bananas. I like bananas very much - I eat a lot of them, they are good for you, contain a lot of useful minerals and all that, and come with an ingenious built-in hygienic packaging which makes them ideal for snacks and lunch-boxes. And - proverbially - they have no bones.

Recently I was on holiday in Italy, which was terrific for a lot of reasons, but one day we bought some bananas from a market stall.

Hey.

Fantastic. I was suddenly reminded how bananas used to taste when I was a kid. That banana flavour that you get in sweets and banana ice-cream, you know? Banana. It's been so long that I'd forgotten.

Now the thing that puzzles me is that they don't grow bananas in Italy, either, so presumably their market stalls are supplied by the same sort of refrigerated articulated wagons that we use in Britain. And - presumably - their bananas are also grown in the same parts of the world as ours.

So what is going on? This is not a trivial matter - bananas may never be the same again for me, and moving to Italy is probably not a possibility - I just need to understand why...

6 comments:

  1. This is going to look a little sad but follow this link

    http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=2190

    It may be the breed of banana we have to eat in the UK now, seedless but tasteless? Plus food always tastes better on holiday!

    Matt (I like bananas too!).

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  2. Thanks very much, Matt, that really is a great link. Italians are very particular about their food, so it's possible our British Cavendish nanas would not be accepted there.

    Reading about the Banana Shortages reminds me that my mum told me that, during the war in Liverpool (my birthplace), one of the greengrocers got hold of a single banana and put it on display in the window (not for sale) and there was a queue of people just to look at it. Mind you, it doesn't take much to draw a crowd in Liverpool.

    Thanks again

    Tony

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  3. That's funny, I thought bananas were invented by the Scots - Kingdom of Fyffe?

    Clive

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  4. One word for you - organic - organic bananas still taste like the real thing.

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  5. Well, that's interesting. I've tried organic bananas and found them little different to the others. Since this is important I shall buy some tomorrow and report back here!

    Thanks - Tony

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  6. Organic bananas - update....

    I bought 2 lots of organic bananas - 1 from a national supermarket chain and 1 from a specialist organic store. I have to report that they taste the same as the non-organic ones.

    A farmer friend of mine reckons that organic farming just means that you do your spraying at night. I don't believe him, of course.

    Thanks anyway

    Tony

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