What’s So Great About Banana Plants?

Until I moved to Hawaii thirteen years ago, I did not know about a banana plant. Here are four reasons I think banana plants are great. First, before a banana plant has finished growing its fruit, a new banana plant is already growing out of that older plant. Second, a banana plant can produce a hundred bananas at one time. Third, the plant produces the banana fruit that is beneficial to the body. Fourth, when the banana plant is finished growing its fruit, the plant becomes soil.

A new plant is already growing

The stem of a banana plant is underground. That underground stem is thick and rounded, and everything you see above the ground grows up out of that stem.

The underground stem has buds on it. Those buds sprout and push up new shoots. A shoot is a new stem coming up out of the ground. In Hawaii, those new shoots are called keiki. Keiki is the Hawaiian word used for child or children.

A seedling is a plant that grows from a seed. The keiki are not seedlings. The keiki grow out of the same underground stem as the parent plant. Each keiki is the parent plant continuing itself.

A banana plant produces one bunch of fruit in its life. After that bunch is harvested, that plant is finished. But by then, the keiki are already up and growing beside it.

Each of those keiki will grow and produce fruit. This is how one banana plant becomes a banana patch. A banana patch spreads outward from where the first plant grew.

Wild bananas have large hard seeds filling the fruit. The bananas people eat have been grown for a very long time to have fruit without seeds, and those bananas cannot reproduce with seeds. The small dark specks inside a banana are seeds that never developed.

One banana bunch produces many bananas

One banana plant can produce a bunch that holds a hundred bananas or more.

The bananas in a bunch ripen around the same time. You can leave the bunch on the plant and take bananas off as they ripen. Or you can cut the whole bunch down with a machete and hang the bunch from a rope with the bananas dangling. The bananas keep ripening after the bunch is cut, and you take them off as you want them.

When I get an abundance of ripe bananas, I peel them and freeze them. I use the frozen bananas in smoothies, oatmeal, and in making cookies. Sometimes I give bananas away before they are too ripe.

People with larger banana patches sell their bunches to places that use a large quantity. There is a place near me that buys a lot of bananas from people because they make banana bread. The family who sells baked goods at the farmers market bakes out of their home and uses their own bananas in some of their products. Some people put bananas out at their fruit stand on the road, with a little box for the money. And it is common for people here to have a bunch of bananas in the bed of their truck. Often you do not know the bananas are back there until someone reaches in and hands you one.

What the banana fruit provides your body

A banana provides your body with carbohydrate, fiber, potassium, vitamin B6, vitamin C, and magnesium.

The potassium in a banana is a mineral your body uses in three ways.

Potassium helps manage the amount of fluid inside and outside your cells. Your cells need a certain amount of water inside and outside of them to work. Too much water and your cells swell. Too little water and your cells shrink.

Potassium helps your muscles contract. Every movement you make is your muscles contracting. Walking, breathing, and swallowing are examples of your muscles contracting.

Potassium helps your heart beat steadily. Your heart is a muscle, and potassium is part of what keeps that muscle beating at a regular rhythm.

What changes as a banana ripens is the carbohydrate.

A green banana is mostly starch. Starch is a kind of carbohydrate made of long chains of sugars linked together. Much of the starch in a green banana is a kind your body cannot break down at all. That starch travels through your small intestine unchanged and arrives in your large intestine, where the bacteria living there eat it. Those bacteria break the starch apart and produce compounds your body uses.

As a banana ripens, that starch turns into sugar. This is why a ripe banana tastes sweet. Your body absorbs that sugar and uses it for energy. So a ripe banana gives your body fuel, while a green banana mostly gives the bacteria in your gut something to eat. Both ripe and unripe bananas provide the same vitamins and minerals.

The banana plant becomes soil

When the fruit of a banana plant is harvested, the plant gets cut down.

A banana plant can be cut down with a knife or a machete because the plant is not a tree. Like the papaya, a banana plant is a large herb, and there is no wood in the plant. What looks like a trunk on a banana plant is called a pseudostem. The pseudostem is made of many leaf bases that wrap around each other. A leaf base is the wide bottom part of a banana plant leaf. Each leaf base extends from the bottom of the plant to the beginning of the leaf. Each leaf base wraps around the ones already there with the oldest leaf base on the outside and the youngest in the middle. They layer around each other, like a rolled-up newspaper.

The word pseudo means false. The column is called a pseudostem because the plant's real stem is underground.

Those leaf bases are soft tissue that are mostly water. Once the plant is cut, the cells along the cut break open and the water leaves the cells. This is significant because this is what starts the plant breaking down into soil. The more the leaf bases are cut, the more area is exposed and the process can quicken.

Bacteria and fungi in the soil eat the material of the cut down banana plant. Insects and worms eat the material too. What passes through them comes out as finer material that mixes into the soil. Over weeks and months, the plant is broken into pieces. The minerals the plant had once pulled out of the ground go back into the ground where keiki are growing.

The banana plant that feeds you fruit also feeds the soil that feeds the next plant.

You are welcome to eat bananas at any stage of ripeness.

Stacy 🌺

Information in this post comes from my learning and research.

https://youtube.com/shorts/gK8_98dd9rg

I share my experiences and my perspective. Eating and healing look different for everyone. If you are struggling with food or your relationship with your body, please find support. You don’t have to do this alone.