Whether bananas or the Bible, some things never change
On my way to buy bananas, I bumped into a clergyman. If asked to name a fruit, seven people out of 10 say banana. The other three say apple because bananas are too suggestive. Bananas, in other words, are fruit at the front of the mind. They’re also fruit at the front of the supermarket. And that’s because they are, by some margin, the most popular fruit in the world, unless you count tomatoes and I don't.
Part of their appeal is the peel. A banana's the snack that needs no wrapper. Yet, unlike products that boast of being “easy peel”, bananas are easy to peel. And that peel is delightfully subversive. Down on the floor it goes and head over heels goes the two-legged ape, his hubris upended.
I know a supermarket that displays a guide to banana ripeness. But bananas are their own guide to ripeness. Though we’ve long since left the jungle, we all grasp the progression from green, via pale yellow, dark yellow and mottled, to black. It tells banana time like a watch.
I have never lived anywhere that grew bananas, but nor have I lived anywhere I couldn't buy bananas. To get them from the hot places where they grow to the cooler places where I’ve bought them, bananas have had to be picked when green, chilled, shipped, gassed with acetylene and promptly distributed.
It’s quite a procedure, but it has happened without hitch around the world throughout my life. We apes can be clever when it’s in our interest.
None of which I said to the clergyman. Rather I asked him how he was. He said he was well, even though the world was a hot mess, what with the horrors of Trump, Ukraine, and in particular the Middle East. I asked him when, in his long lifetime, the world hadn't been a hot mess, and he admitted I had a point there, especially in the Middle East where the feuds and schisms went back to Abraham. “Really?” I said.
“Really,” he said, and would I like to hear about it because at Theological College he'd got an A for Biblical History? “Bananas can wait,” I said.
Now I had a blessedly secular upbringing so it was news to me that God told Abraham he’d be the father of many nations. (Back then God did a lot of talking to people, unlike today when he talks only to the Republican Speaker of the US House of Representatives.) But when Abraham’s wife Sarah passed the age of child-bearing without bearing a child, she suggested to Abraham that, in order to fulfil God's prophecy, he should sleep with Hagar, a slave. (A likely story, but let that pass.) Hagar bore Abraham a son called Ishmael.
However then, at the age of 90, Sarah too became pregnant and bore Abraham a son called Isaac. Now there were tensions between the two mothers and the two sons. The stories vary according to whether you read the Torah or the Christian Bible or the Koran, but essentially a schism occurred and Ishmael became the progenitor of the Arabs, and Isaac of the Jews. And the rest, as they say, is history.
“So the Middle East looks likely to remain a hot mess.”
“I fear so,” said the clergyman.
And as I went on my way to the supermarket I reflected that the clergyman wasn’t the first person to survey the world and judge it a hot mess. Voltaire had done the same 250 years ago and concluded that all one could do was to tend one’s own garden. Especially, he might have added, if it has bananas in it.