Fruit should never be wrapped in a tray meant for ground beef. Especially bananas. This excessive packaging is just ludicrous, unless there are people who actually eat peels and want them super sterile. Also, who's in the back on wrap duty? An intern? Since Flickr user alison*h spotted this madness in Dundee, Scotland the grocery store started applying sticky labels directly to bananas. [via Food-Notes]
The piece was filled with utterly fascinating banana food-culture info, like the fact that Americans eat as many bananas as apples and oranges combined. Serious eaters, did you know that? I didn't.
Koeppel rightfully professes astonishment that bananas are so cheap: "They're grown thousands of miles away, they must be transported in cooled containers, and even then they survive no more than two weeks after they're cut off the tree."
And they're still less than a buck a pound in the stores. What gives? How can that be?
Most of you have probably seen this video before, but if not, behold the atheist's nightmare: the banana. Yes. ...Wait, what? This video explains how bananas are obviously God's creation, reasons including the way they fit perfectly in the grasp of a human hand, and how they have built-in "tabs" at the top that makes them easy to peel. Well, ignoring the thousands of years of banana cultivation by humans, I'm totally convinced!Watch the video after the jump.
I hope this lip-synching woman is someone's grandmother so that her grandkids can see this video and go, "My grandma is awesome!" If the lip-synching isn't enough for you, there are also googly eyed-bananas and a banana-wielding teddy bear at the end to amuse you.
There are cases to protect wholebananas from turning into bruised, mush-filled bags, but what about when you want to just protect the cut end of half of a banana? The NANA Saver™ Banana Holder is designed to grip onto the exposed end of your half-eaten banana and keep it fresher for longer by reducing its exposure to air. And since it's shaped like the missing half, It's kind of like a prosthetic for your banana. Make your banana feel whole again! [via The Presurfer]
Brighten up your living room with a...banana wall? View the fruit-bearing wall and more installations at Stefan Sagmeister's exhibition Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far, now showing at Deitch Gallery in New York City.
"True love is more powerful than peer pressure, social norms or any other of mankind's laws. It is especially true when you're talking about hot dogs- those suckers shouldn't even exist." Superstar indie web comic Diesel Sweeties is phasing out their Forbidden Love of Hot Dog & Banana t-shirt on April 15th, so if you like hot dogs, bananas, love and pixel art, plus the idea of wearing food on your chest, consider this a friendly exhortation to buy one before it becomes an unattainable collector's item. Shirts are $18 mens/19$ womens, + shipping.
My favorite blog post I've read so far this week is by far the a risk vs. reward analysis of fruit by Justin of Guardedly Optimistic. Here's what he has to say about the humble banana:
fruit: banana risk: low reward: moderate analysis: Never a bad choice, the banana is the .290 hitter of fruit. When was the last time you had a surprisingly bad banana? Never, that’s when. More importantly, the banana offers the most easily interpreted warning signs in the fruit family: if it’s slightly green or covered in brown spots, you know you’re rolling the dice. You will most likely never eat a memorable banana, but for a low-risk fruit that pays out solid dividends, you can’t do better. If you don’t like surprises, the banana might be the fruit for you.
I think his analysis is spot on, except for that he forgets that you win no matter what state your banana is in; green ones you can curry, brown ones are even better because you can turn them into banana bread. Is any other fruit as versatile in its varying stages of ripeness? (Having said that, my favorite fruit by far is a Philippine mango. Clementines come in a distant second.)
Dutch supermarket staff find millions of dollars of cocaine stashed in banana boxes; "There probably must have been a logistic mistake," says befuddled Limburger spokesman. This never happened while I was stocking shelves.
There are cases to protect 
Dutch supermarket staff find millions of dollars of cocaine stashed in banana boxes; "There probably must have been a logistic mistake," says befuddled Limburger spokesman. 
