Bananas are a tropical fruit, so widespread around the world that it is customary to see it on the shelf of the store, even somewhere in a small town near the Arctic Circle. Once, even in Soviet times, bananas cost a lot, now this nutritious fruit is inexpensive. Bananas are not only very tasty and very useful – they are also an important ingredient for traditional dishes in a variety of countries.
Bananas grow on the trees in whole bundles. One such bundle can include up to three hundred bananas and weigh up to 55-60 kilograms.
From the point of view of botany, bananas are berries, like, for example, watermelons. However, all the same, everyone has long been accustomed to consider them fruits.
There are about a thousand kinds of bananas, and not all of them are edible.
Most of all bananas are eaten in the African country of Burundi – here their consumption on average is a little less than 200 kg per person per year.
Bananas by weight of the annual harvest in the world are on the second place, giving way to the palm of the oranges, which are grown even more.
The first place in the world for the production of bananas is occupied by India.
In dried bananas, calories are about five times more than in fresh ones.
Every year around 100 billion bananas are consumed around the world.
Banana is one of the most popular crops in the world. It ranks fourth in popularity, behind the first three places of rice, corn and wheat.
In Honduras, in the town of La Lima, a collection of nearly five hundred varieties of bananas is kept.
The first written sources mentioning bananas as an edible plant were written a little less than three thousand years ago.
A banana tree, strictly speaking, is not a tree, but grass.
Bananas are the most radioactive fruit on Earth, they contain a large amount of radioactive isotope of potassium. However, it is great only in comparison with other cultures, so you should not worry – even if you eat all your life with bananas, you can not eat them so much that this radiation harms you.
Bananas taste better if they ripen, being ripped off even more green.
Ecuador delivers the most bananas to other countries. Most likely, those bananas that you buy are grown in this country.
From one hectare of a banana plantation, up to 40 tons of bananas are sometimes collected.
Bananas ripen very long – from ten to eighteen months depending on the variety. That’s why bananas, although growing in the south of Russia, in the vicinity of Sochi, do not ripen, as Sochi winter is too cold for bananas.
Of bananas, even produce such foods as flour and ketchup. Banana ketchup became widespread in the Philippines during the Second World War, when real ketchup became an expensive rarity.
Banana peel is used in making soap.
Once the most popular varieties of bananas were virtually extinct in the 20th century due to the spread of diseases that affect these plants.
