Ode to Bananas – The Atlantic

Don’t rush it.

There’s one thing so very pleasant and edible a couple of banana, from its helpfully tubular design to its yielding texture to its gentle and alkaline taste; one thing really easy, you simply need to shove it into your face. It may very well be astronaut meals, nearly: a specifically engineered, hygienically sealed diet cylinder in high-visibility yellow. Slurp it down, Main Tom. Reset your potassium ranges and get again to your Martian rock samples. The peel will float off, anemone-like, in zero gravity.

However to slurp it down, to eat it heedlessly, is to waste the banana. It’s to waste, to begin with, the length of a banana. Are you, like me, a wistful nonsmoker? Do you envy the people who smoke their philosophical interludes, their moments of drifting peace? Then consuming a banana, slowly and reflectively, is the closest factor you’re going to get to a cigarette break. Besides higher, as a result of you are able to do it on public transportation.

There’s an orthodox, old-school surrealism to the banana: its cartoon yellowness, its absurd curvature, the truth that once we take into consideration a banana, we give it some thought the wrong way up. The banana grows upward, doesn’t it, jostling for daylight with its fellows—however in our thoughts, we reverse it. We put its damaged stem on prime, like a nostril or somewhat horn, and so we create a strangeness across the banana. We put it in banana quotes.

However the banana will not be, or not simply, a free-floating, self-signifying object. It’s fragile and natural: There are processes at work contained in the banana. If battered or uncared for, it’ll flush an offended darkish brown. It should develop into its shadow. It ought to be a tarot card, one of many huge ones: the Idiot, the Hanged Man, and the Black Banana. Pull that card and alter your life.

And also you don’t need to waste the style, both—the cordial blandness of a banana. Me, I like a mottled one. The greener finish of the spectrum is simply too fibrous and anxious for me. Inexperienced bananas squeak once you peel them. I like a deep, mature yellow, with sunspots. That’s a fulfilled banana, a mellow banana, a banana that’s been across the block. It’s loaded with the sugars of expertise. It’s within the final blaze of its bananahood. Take pleasure in me now, it says with its banana grin. I used to be created to your pleasure.

This text seems within the Might 2023 print version.