Comments on: You don't have to be bananas to post here, but it helps.

You don't have to be bananas to post here, but it helps.

TedW — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 05:42:08 -0800

Metafilter's own soulbarn recently had his new book on bananas favorably reviewed at Salon. I look forward to reading it.

By: jmnugent

jmnugent — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 06:07:29 -0800

I had an idea a while back of writing a childrens book w/ a monkey (main character). various adventures the monkey has (a la curious george). Print the book on banana pulp paper and cut the cover/pages to the shape of banana leaves. Unfortunately never found the resources to do it. :(

By: boubelium

boubelium — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 06:21:36 -0800

I heard soulbarn interviewed on Fresh Air a couple months back and he really had a fascinating story to tell. I do recommend!

By: burnmp3s

burnmp3s — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 06:25:16 -0800

Hopefully the book covers the government's secret development of bananaphone technology.

By: Pater Aletheias

Pater Aletheias — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 06:26:38 -0800

Some biblical scholars argue that the fruit Eve tasted in the Garden of Eden was not an apple, but the much more suggestively shaped banana. (From the Salon review.)

I would really love to see a reference for this. Because there's no way that an actual scholar, meaning someone with an earned, accredited doctorate in a relevant field, is arguing this. Someone may have fancifully suggested it somewhere, or made a joke of it, but if there is a single article in a Biblical studies journal where someone makes the case for a banana being the forbidden fruit, I'll eat my hat. There are tons of real Biblical scholars doing real linguistic and historical research, but you'd never know it based on the nonsense that comes from the the never-named, amorphous "Biblical scholars" of this and other articles.

/pet peeve filter

By: spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints

spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 06:59:05 -0800

My wife heard that Fresh Air interview and has been telling everyone about it. Goon on ya, soulbarn. Fascinating stuff.

By: jack_mo

jack_mo — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:00:33 -0800

The very thought of the dreaded banana makes me feel sick to my stomach, but this book sounds absolutely fascinating, and good fun to boot. Bit of a conundrum for me, that. I suppose reading something that would make me feel a bit vommy every time its central subject was mentioned could at least be an interesting experience...

By: cortex

cortex — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:16:07 -0800

GOON ON YOU

By: boubelium

boubelium — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:30:50 -0800

One of the things mentioned in the interview was the variety of local bananas grown around the world. Anyone here tasted anything exotic and care to share? I am afraid my experience is entirely Dole-based.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:38:40 -0800

I heard soulbarn interviewed on Fresh Air a couple months back and he really had a fascinating story to tell.

Same here. Congrats, soulbarn! Any admins care to fix the munged link that presumably is supposed to go to his userpage? Goon on you!

By: goo

goo — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:48:07 -0800

Fantastic! I thought a few years ago that a book about bananas and their spread would be a great read - thankyou for writing it for me! I really look forward to reading it.

Boubelium: ladyfinger bananas are my favourite (I think aka sugar bananas). They're small and delicately sweet. Would you count plantains as well? Fried up with sugar, mmm.

By: cortex

cortex — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:50:05 -0800

Unmunged!

By: mediareport

mediareport — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:51:35 -0800

That book looks great, soulbarn - congrats! And thanks for posting this, TedW.

From the book's blog, here's the original article in Popular Science.

*wipes goon off monitor*

By: Plutor

Plutor — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:58:50 -0800

Pater Aletheias: "I would really love to see a reference for this. Because there's no way that an actual scholar, blah blah blah blah"

Besides, everyone knows it was a daikon radish.

By: cybercoitus interruptus

cybercoitus interruptus — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:01:14 -0800

boubelium, I tried some bananas in Tanzania recently. No idea what kind they were (I should have asked the guide, who'd picked them up at the market). They were small, anyway, not much longer than the length of my palm, and incredibly fresh. Definitely more depth and complexity of flavour than what I'm used to getting in Canada or the US, even organic. Not sweeter, but the sweetness was accentuated by sort of citrusy-pineappley undernotes. Mmmmm...

By: cortex

cortex — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:01:48 -0800

Some scholars hold that it was, in fact, a durian.

By: cortex

cortex — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:02:41 -0800

And also that Adam and Eve ejected themselves from the garden after eating it, just to put some distance between them and the smell.

By: TedW

TedW — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:15:33 -0800

This scholar would like to suggest the Peter Pepper.

He would also like to thank cortex for fixing his link.

By: cortex

cortex — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:31:51 -0800

Picked by packs of pickled pikers?

By: exlotuseater

exlotuseater — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:37:15 -0800

Bananas: White Turds.

(congrats on the book though)

oh, and to all those people that whine "oohhhh, I need my potasssssiuummmm," eat a kiwi.

By: iamkimiam

iamkimiam — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:39:20 -0800

I have the banana book and am waiting until dreaded finals are over so I can begin to read books for purely enjoyment purposes again. I bought the book after hearing the NPR interview, and then seeing his name pop up in the recent Metatalk post about MeFi authors among us. I love it when things come together.

By: mediareport

mediareport — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:40:47 -0800

We've already done the love bananas/hate bananas discussion in the xkcd fruit chart thread. No need to repeat it so soon.

By: i_am_a_Jedi

i_am_a_Jedi — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:59:39 -0800

Awesome. I didn't know that was a MeFite on Fresh Air. It was a really entertaining interview. I had a driveway moment. I was just pulling in when you started singing the Chiquita banana song so I couldn't turn it off. Congrats! I'll have to pick it up.

By: Plutor

Plutor — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 09:17:29 -0800

cortex: "Some scholars hold that it was, in fact, a durian."

Proof, verbatim:

16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying: 'Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. 18 Because it smells like my ass.'

By: AwkwardPause

AwkwardPause — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:52:39 -0800

In Soviet Russia, bananas goon you!

By: soulbarn

soulbarn — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:06:39 -0800

Pater Aletheias, you and your "Pet Peeve Filter" should have googled. Now you have been goongled.

The banana/bible reference is from the Winter/Spring 2004 issue of "Judaism." Read it online here:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0411/is_/ai_n8967470

Where should I send the ranch dressing for your hat?

:)

- soulbarn

By: painquale

painquale — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:21:05 -0800

Aw, no way, a MeFite wrote that banana book? That's great! When that NPR interview came on a few weeks back, as soon as I heard the phrase "banana scientist" I was instantly engaged, and on arriving home I hung out in my parked car in my driveway so that I could listen to the whole thing. Great job, soulbarn! Since then I've told many a person about how the Cavendish has usurped the Gros Michel, and I am dying, dying, to try a Lakatan at some point.

I tend to dislike this new genre of popular books which try to make the case that the entire history of the world has hinged upon some totally insignificant thing, like salt, or cod, or the Irish, but man, everyone loves bananas.

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:30:22 -0800

It's certainly a topic with appeal.

By: cortex

cortex — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:56:40 -0800

Oof. You shouldn't have let that one slip.

By: Sys Rq

Sys Rq — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:15:56 -0800

This shit is bananas.

What's all this gobbledygook about selective breeding? Surely this beautiful fruit was intelligently designed by that most intelligent if designers to fit perfectly in the palm of the first man's hand, no? (This is, after all, the reason lowly apes won't touch the things.)

By: dizziest

dizziest — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:25:31 -0800

I hate, hate, hate bananas, but heard the NPR interview, and it was so good, I even briefly considered the possibility that I might like other breeds of bananas than those I've tried.

By: joseph_elmhurst

joseph_elmhurst — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:58:57 -0800

Heh. I heard the Fresh Air interview and immediately put the book on hold at my library. Got it early last week and enjoyed the read greatly. Nice work, sir.

By: trip and a half

trip and a half — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:57:47 -0800

HURF DURF BANANA HATERS

By: not_on_display

not_on_display — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:06:16 -0800

Keepin' it real, banana peel. HURF DURF GOONERS!

By: mosessis

mosessis — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 20:18:36 -0800

Cool! I read that online article a few weeks ago and really enjoyed it. Very engaging stuff.

By: dreamyshade

dreamyshade — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:03:59 -0800

I hope this book includes the fact that bananas were once called "long apples" and "apples of paradise" (according to this list)!

I really liked the original Popular Science article when I read it a while ago. That article, along with Oranges by John McPhee and The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan, featured in an essay I wrote - which won a little award and made me happy. I'd self-link it but I'm not that brazen.

By: soulbarn

soulbarn — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 06:24:28 -0800

go ahead and link it, I'd like to read it.

By: dreamyshade

dreamyshade — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 21:43:59 -0800

OK, here you go. Now that I re-read that, your banana article seems to be more "mentioned" than "featured", but it influenced the whole thing (as did the other works I read).

Bonus links: the political and economic symbolism of bananas in postwar Germany, banana juiceboxes, banana pants, and the geostationary banana. Yes, perhaps I am a fan of fruit.

By: Pater Aletheias

Pater Aletheias — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:00:57 -0800

Hey, soul barn. That article was written by a physician, not a Bible scholar, and the article didn't appear in a Biblical studies journal. If that's all you've got, I'm sticking with what I wrote.

By: Pater Aletheias

Pater Aletheias — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:28:27 -0800

Here's the "argument" made by the physician that the banana was the forbidden fruit.

A more attractive theory is that it was the banana, a (dangerous?) fruit foreign to the Middle East and growing originally in Africa and India.

If bananas are foreign to the Middle East, isn't it less likely, rather than more that they would be alluded to in an ancient Middle Eastern text?

Banana leaves are longer than small fig leaves for making a genital covering.

What the Bible says is "Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
(Gen 3:7) Notice--the fig leaves covering were not said to only cover their genitals--that's from later artwork, not the Bible. Also, they leaves weren't from the forbidden fruit, they were from a different tree--the fig tree. What the leaves came from has no bearing whatsoever on what the forbidden fruit was. Also, unless someone wants to make a case that fig is a bad translation and the word really means banana, the whole thing is a non-starter.

To this day in Israel bananas are sometimes called by the Hebrew [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], the fig of Eve. In botanical terms the banana is the Musa sapientum, the fruit of wisdom.

I have no idea whether it is true that bananas are called the "fig of Eve," but I rather doubt it, since googling banana and "fig of Eve" gets seven hits. All are either the article you mention or a reference to your book. Since the author of the article is not a Biblical scholar and hasn't even bothered to read the text closely enough to realize that more than one plant shows up in the story, I'm not going to give him the benefit of the doubt. And, at any rate, even if it is true, that's an awfully shaky foundation for an argument that a banana was the forbidden fruit.

If I might ask a question: you referred to Schneir Levin in your book as a "biblical archeologist." The article you quote says that he is "physician for children in Johannesburg, South Africa. He writes on medical and psychological aspects of biblical and religious issues." Did you misstate his occupation, or did he leave pediatrics to pursue a new doctorate in archeology that launched a career change for him?

I'm sure your book is interesting, but if you are this sloppy with your Biblical information, which is my field, how can I trust that you did appropriate fact checking elsewhere? Because building a chapter around one article from a pediatrician doesn't cut it, even if you do call him a Biblical archaeologist.

Did you actually think he was one, or did you just know that people would catch on if you said "pediatrician Schneir Levin"?

My apologies if Levin actually is a Biblical archaeologist. Strange that the article wouldn't mention that he was actually credentialed in the field, though, isn't it?