Bananas and America

time flies

it's been well over a week since Alex and I returned to our island paradise in Pentecost. We are facilitating a four-day workshop starting next Wednesday, we've been busy becoming as prepared as we can be going into the workshop.

They have these big fatty bananas here that they call cooking bananas. They are often baked when they are green and the kind of taste (sort of) like a white potato. There are lots of different kinds of bananas here. Ones that are longer and thinner, and the bananas we buy in the grocery store all the time in the states, and bananas that look like American store bananas but half the length, and tiny little bananas. The bananas we buy in the grocery stores in America are not our favorite. I presume they are the most popular in America [probably] because they are the easiest to ship or store well or some similar attribute that is unrelated to how good they taste. It's sad, uh? The locals here will often give us the American grocery store variety because they think it's are our favorite (why else would they fill our grocery stores?), they sometimes refer to them as 'white man's bananas'.

The short little bananas that are only a couple inches long and thin are my favorite. I've seen them in stores in America, but never bothered to purchase them, assuming perhaps there was a taste reason the other banana was so dramatically more popular.

Do you think most of the food in our American stores are there for reasons other than good eating?

And if you do happen to find some short, little bananas, please don't eat them until they are ripe, cause they are nasty when they are green.