[Sca-cooks] bananas

[Mark.S Harris]

Bear commented:
> Banana seeds are sterile.  Banana trees reproduce by growing shoots from the
> root.  Individual stalks die after producing one crop of bananas.
> Transplanted shoots account for bananas in the Canaries and in the New
> World.  This is the first account I've seen of transporting a full banana
> stalk.  I would think transporting a fruiting plant might be more difficult
> than transporting bunches of bananas, which may be why commercial production
> didn't appear in the 17th Century.

Okay, but are you referring to a modern hybrid? or to period bananas?
Here are two messages from my fruit-bananas-msg file. Of course, it is
also possible they are really talking about the plantain.

Stefan li Rous
stefan at texas.net

> From: ayotte at milo.NOdak.EDU (Robert Arthur Ayotte)
> Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
> Subject: Re: Period fruits?
> Date: 8 Dec 1993 08:02:24 -0500
> Organization: North Dakota State University ACM, Fargo ND
>
> :   But no bananas or pineapple unless you get to Africa.
>
> : My secondary source research (Tanahill, and the Encyclopedia Britannica)
> : told me that Bananas were exported to the New World at the end of period by
> : the Spanish and Portuguese, where bananas themselves are indigenous to Asia
> : and not Africa.  Do you have more information? I found these sources to be
> : sufficient to convince me to work with banana, but I could be convinced
> : either way.
>
> 	According to McGee, bananas were native to india and malaya, it arrived in Africa around 500 AD.  Europeans knew it as the indian fig.
>
> 	Bananas originally had fairly large seeds, and in some
> parts of the world they can still be found growing wild with the black
> seeds taking up nearly 1/3 of their interior.
> 	Somewhere I remember hearing that bananas were known in Rome, but
> were not considered fitting food for humans.  The date would have been
> sometime around the time of the first Ceasers.
>
> : It is safe to say, however, that modern bananas are not even close to period
> : ones, its true. But they are closer to period bananas than, say modern pears
> : would be...
>
> : 	Tibor (ever-learning)
> : --
> : Mark Schuldenfrei (schuldy at math.harvard.edu)
>
> 	The seeds in bananas are rock hard and vary from 1/4 inch to
> almost 1/2 inch.  How the seedless varieties were found is unknown.
>
> Horace
>
>
> From: hrjones at uclink.berkeley.edu (Heather Rose Jones)
> Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
> Subject: Re: Period fruits?
> Date: 8 Dec 1993 16:44:52 GMT
> Organization: University of California, Berkeley
>
> Robert Arthur Ayotte <ayotte at milo.NOdak.EDU> wrote:
> >	Bananas originally had fairly large seeds, and in some
> >parts of the world they can still be found growing wild with the black
> >seeds taking up nearly 1/3 of their interior.
> >almost 1/2 inch.  How the seedless varieties were found is unknown.
> >
> >Horace
>
> The "seedless" varieties are modern polyploid hybrids. (They actually do
> have seeds, but they are small and infertile.) I learned something
> fascinating in this regard in my university genetics course: statistically
> speaking, something like one in every thousand (exact number forgotten)
> bananas ought to have large, fertile seeds due to the proper combination
> of ploidy in the gametes involved. Why don't we ever see _any_ in the
> markets? Because fertile bananas are easily identifiable visually and
> are removed from the bunch before being shipped. To get this back
> more on topic, specialty groceries around here carry about a dozen
> different varieties of non-standard bananas, but I have no idea whether
> any of them are ones that would have been available.
>
> Keridwen f. Morgan Glasfryn