When other fruits have vanished, the banana is always for sale, even
in the smallest village fruit stores. But it was not always so. A
few decades ago the banana was a rarity in the United States and a
luxury. How did it happen to get its present vogue? Was it because the
public discovered that there is a great deal of nourishment in this
fruit--that millions in the tropics live on it? Not in the least; I
doubt if one banana-eater in a hundred knows or cares whether or not it
contains even as much nourishment as a cucumber or a watermelon. What
has given the banana its great vogue is simply and solely its delicious
Flavor. In its Flavor lies its commercial value; its Flavor has put
money--often a fortune--into the pockets of hundreds of thousands
of planters, shippers, and wholesale and retail dealers. There are
whole fleets of steamers for carrying bananas to American ports, and
other fleets carry them to Germany, to England, to France, and other
European countries. In Germany, 320 tons supplied the demand in 1899;
in 1911 the imports exceeded 30,000 tons, and the demand grows like an
avalanche.
Banana flour, made from the dried fruit, also has a great future as a
breakfast cereal. A few years ago a new source of profit was opened.
Have you ever eaten any "banana figs"? If not, try them at once; they
are deliciously sweet, and they can be freely eaten by those who have
to avoid figs because of their innumerable small seeds. Within a few
years seven factories sprang up in Jamaica, all of them coining money
by making and exporting "banana figs" as well as "fig bananas," which
differ from the others in being dried whole.
In 1912 the people of the United States consumed over six _billion_
bananas, or more than five dozen for every man, woman, and child, the
value of them exceeding fourteen million dollars. Yet this enormous
demand is a trifle to what it will be when the public has learned
how to eat them. Few know how delicious they are fried, or cooked in
other ways. As for raw bananas, most Americans still eat them with the
eyes, selecting those which are bright yellow (or red) and unspotted,
ignorant of the fact that the most luscious by far are those that are
spotted or almost black; the pushcartmen sell them at a cent apiece,
or two for a cent. These are not rotten, but simply ripe, as long as
they are white inside. They are much more digestible, too, than the
unspotted ones. To make them still more so, follow the advice of "Tip"
of the New York "Press," who writes:
I have had men and women tell me they couldn't eat bananas at
all without suffering from indigestion, and to them I always
pass on the recipe told me by a great lover of the fruit who
said that invariably he scraped off the little fuzz remaining
on the banana after the skin is peeled off. Before he began to
do this the fruit disagreed with him; afterward he ate as much
of it as he pleased.
Unlike bananas, the citrus fruits--oranges, lemons, and pomelos
(grapefruit) have no nutritive value worth talking about. You might
eat a hundred of them a day and--well, if they didn't kill you they
wouldn't keep you alive either. Consequently the fortunes made by
growing annually twenty million boxes of these much-coveted fruits
and distributing them throughout the country, once more attest the
Commercial Value of Flavor. And in the long run the best flavored are
sure to survive, even though for a time greenhorns may be fooled into
buying inferior kinds because of size or color.