[Sca-cooks] bananas are herbs?

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Stefan li Rous:
>Christianna commented:
>>So how do we reconcile that
>>with the fact that the banana is the world's largest herb?
>I've been reading the thread about how to define spices vs. herbs, 
>but this is escaping me. Why would you consider the banana an herb 
>rather than a fruit?

The fruit is a ... fruit. However, the plant itself doesn't have a 
woody stem, and on a botanical/anatomical level is a bush rather than 
a tree, and that green stem is one criterion for describing an herb.

Now, you being Stefan, and immediately about to launch into a series 
of questions on why rosemary is considered an herb and not a 
coniferous "tree", I have to stress the fact that definitions are 
based on usage, and that the criteria for a culinary definition and a 
botanical definition vary. So, yes, a banana plant is an herb in the 
botanical sense, but a fruit in the culinary usage. Similarly, cumin 
is still a spice, regardless of what the OED says; it was not written 
by cooks, but by volunteer readers who sometimes check the wrong 
documents, and they fail to distinguish (often) between different, 
but similarly named, terms.

Adamantius