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Bananas aren't
grown on trees. They're part of the lily family, a cousin of
the orchid, nothing but a very yellow and plump member of
the herb family. With stalks 25 feet high, they're the
largest plant on earth without a woody stem. |
They are
thought to have originated in Malaysia but spread throughout
Asia, India and Africa before Columbus discovered America.
Unknown in this hemisphere before then, bananas came to the
New World in 1516 when Spanish missionary Friar Tomas de
Berlanga brought over the first root stocks.
The word
banana is African, though, a word carried to the New World
by Portuguese slave traders. In Alexander the Great's time,
bananas were called “pala” in Athens.
North America
got its first taste of the tropical fruit in 1876 at the
Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. Each banana was wrapped
in foil and sold for 10 cents.
Today the
average American consumes about 25 pounds a year of the
mellow yellow, every one of them imported from Latin
America, where the climate favors the warmth-loving plants.
Rich in potassium, vitamins B, A and C, bananas are not only
popular but considered healthful by most of us. In fact,
there are funny numbers reported in the New England Journal
of Medicine that a banana can cut the risk of death from
strokes by as much as 40 percent in certain cases.
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