22 Interesting Facts About Bananas

Here are 22 Banana facts.

1-5 Banana Facts

1. Evangelist Ray Comfort recorded a video arguing the banana displayed many user-friendly features that were evidence of intelligent design. Comfort retracted the video upon learning that the banana is a result of artificial selection by humans and that the wild banana is small and unpalatable. – Source

2. Bananas are considered bad luck on fishing boats if found aboard the boat will return to the dock and purge the offending fruit. – Source

3. Bananas are curved because they grow towards the sun. – Source

4. The coefficient of friction of a banana on hardwood flooring is 0.083, while ice has a coefficient of friction of 0.05, making a banana almost as slippery as ice. – Source

5. Separating bananas from the bunch slows down the ripening process. – Source

6-10 Banana Facts

6. The “Banana Equivalent Dose” uses the banana as a basic unit of radiation when calculating radiation exposure levels, and is the original “banana for scale”. – Source

7. China has banned seductive banana-eating while live-streaming to clamp down on inappropriate and erotic online content. – Source

8. In the Philippines, there’s banana ketchup. During WWII there was a shortage of tomatoes and had to use bananas as a replacement to replicate ketchup. It’s made from mashed banana, sugar, vinegar, and spices. – Source

9. Bananas have more trade regulations than AK-47s. – Source

10. Bananas are berries and that the banana tree is not a tree, but the world’s largest herb. – Source

11-15 Banana Facts

11. There is a banana plantation in Iceland, just 177 miles from the Arctic Circle. – Source

12. In 1967, a magazine published a fake story about extracting hallucinogenic chemicals from bananas to raise moral questions about banning drugs. People didn’t realize it was a hoax and began smoking banana peels to try to get high. – Source

13. An individual banana is called a finger. A bunch of bananas is called a hand. – Source

14. The “slipping on a banana peel” trope originated in the late 1800s when discarded banana peels were considered a serious public hazard. – Source

15. Humans share 50% of their DNA with bananas. – Source

16-20 Banana Facts

16. A sweeter, creamier strain of banana was more common in markets until a disease nearly wiped them all out. – Source

17. Wild bananas are full of seeds and the ones we eat have been specially bred over the years to be seedless. – Source

18. In 1986, an electronics store chain made good on its offer to sell stereos for “299 bananas” when customers turned up with the fruit as payment. – Source

19. As bananas ripen, the chlorophyll in them breaks down and causes them to fluoresce brightly (with a blue glow) under a black light. – Source

20. Bananas are grown throughout the year, which means that they don’t have a “season”. – Source