Hompeage

The banana is a fruit like none other. It's the world's most consumed fruit and spans generations as a staple food.It's soft, sweet, and easy to digest. It crosses historical eras, has been responsible for entire governments rising and falling, and has propped up beleaguered economies. As well as being one of the most popular fruits worldwide, bananas are also one of the most nutritious of all foods. Bananas are a source of energy-producing carbohydrates, potassium, vitamin B6 and B group vitams, vitamin C, dietary fibre and antioxidants. Bananas have no fat, cholesterol or salt. Because they provide sustaining energy, bananas are a favorite food for active children and adults, including athletes and sports players. In many nations, a special variety of bananas are a major staple food crop. Known as Plantains or Cooking Bananas, they are a starchier variety of banana cooked green in ways similar to potatoes.The banana is a superfood that can be used in many meals and recipes.

Bananas may be the world's oldest cultivated crop. There is evidence that bananas were cultivated in the highlands of New Guinea at least 7,000 years ago and that Musa varieties were being bred and grown in the Mekong Delta area of Southeast Asia as long as 10,000 years ago.
In the first or second millennium B.C. Arab traders carried banana suckers from Southeast Asia back home and introduced the fruit to the Middle East and the east coast of Africa. Swahili people from the coast of Africa traded the fruit with Bantu people from the interior of Africa and they carried the fruit to western Africa. The introduction of the banana to Africa occurred so long ago that areas of Uganda and the Congo basin have become secondary centers of genetic diversity.
Bananas were discovered by the Portuguese on the Atlantic coast of Africa. They cultivated the fruit on the Canary Islands. From there it was introduced to the Americas by Spanish missionaries. Documenting the arrival of bananas in the New World a Spanish historian wrote: “This special kind [of fruit] was brought from the Island of Gran Canaria in the year 1516 by the Reverend Father Friar Tomas de Berlandga...to the city of Santa Domingo whence the spread to the other settlements on this island [of Hispaniola]...And have been carried to the mainland, and in every part they have flourished."
Americans have only been eating bananas since the 19th century. The first bananas marketed in the United States were brought from Cuba in 1804. For many years they were regarded as a novelty. The first large shipments were brought from Jamaica in the 1870s by Lorenzo Dow Bake, a Cape Cod fishemen who later founded the Boston Fruit Company which became the United Fruit Company.
Panama disease ravaged Caribbean and Central American banana plantations in the 1940s and 1950s, resulting in the Gros Michel variety being virtually wiped out and replaced by the Cavendish type. Gros Michels were tough. Enormous bunches of them could carried untouched from plantations to stores. Cavendish are more fragile. Plantation owners had to build packing houses where the bananas could be broken down into bunches and placed in protective boxes. The transition to the new banana cost millions and took more than a decade to complete.
The Banana Wars were occupations, police actions, and interventions on the part of the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish–American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934. They lasted for 16 years and won the distinction of being the world's longest trade dispute. It finally ended in 2010 with a deal between the European Union and Latin America, and was approved by African, Caribbean and Pacific countries and the United States. Under the deal duties would be lowered from $176 a ton in 2010 to $114 a ton in 2016.

All About Bananas

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