The Great Banana Debate

Bananas, one of America's favorite fruits, originated in the region of South East Asia, down India way sometime in prehistory and didn't arrive in the US until 1870 or so before eventually (though it took time) becoming a staple of the American diet. I know it became a staple of my mother's diet from an early age. She ate them, morning, noon and night.

Fascinatingly enough, it is said that it takes eating 195 bananas in one setting to obtain a lethal dose of KCl (Potassium chloride) contained in the fruit, but for the most part bananas are quite nutritious and safe .  Though given a chance my mother could have ingested a lethal dose in  a little more than ten minutes... oh, she loved her bananas... banana crazy and would gobble them down.

My mother was "quite bananas" so to speak and later in life when she developed diabetes, we had to ration the bananas with her and hide them occasionally from their perch on top of the entrance-way fridge. 

My father was the complete opposite of my mother!

Bananas he detested with a cold, merciless New England winter themed-Hot French Temper. "Get them away from me!" I remember him saying on an occasion or two. He wanted no part of them. Just the smell of a banana, made him nauseous, a fact he frequently related to us kids growing up.  Of course certain smells do have a nauseating effect on all of us and for him it was the lowly banana. In all my years, I never recall seeing my father eating a single banana.

Why this was so, is a very interesting story and reaches back to the "good old days." In the time during the very early Twentieth Century when his mother, my French grandmother, affectionately known as Meme' (I can never get the right accentif mark in there) was living with her husband Emilien (yes, that was his very unique name and early in childhood, I used to get his name confused with "a million") on Kearsage Avenue in New Bedford, Mass.

Kearsage Avenue had a strong dominant, French, French-Canadian immigrant population and my grandparents fit right in being French/French-Canadian and looking to start a family in a very quaint, yet robust, nice and secure neighborhood.

My father was my Grandmother's firstborn child and it was during his pregnancy that the family found itself so bone dry poor, that the only food they could afford in any quantity was bananas, which were cheap and plentiful, thanks to New Bedford's location as one of the premium sea ports in Massachusetts. So, like my mother, my grandmother ate bananas every day, in multiple quantities and survived quite well to eventually give birth to my father.

But apparently being infused with so much essence of banana while in his mother's womb was too much for my father after being born and he completely swore off of them during the rest of his life, which stretched into his 90s. Though, in his later years, I recall him having banana split ice cream a time or two and surviving it. I guess the chocolate and walnut flavors were too irresistible to resist even with the evil bananas present.

 Source: Banana History, “History,” http://home.wlu.edu/~dennisp/intr132/Project/history.html (accessed October 9, 2018)

Image Credit: http://www.funny-potato.com/funny-bananas.html