An Ode to Bananas

Don’t rush it.

There’s something so very friendly and edible about a banana, from its helpfully tubular design to its yielding texture to its mild and alkaline flavor; something so easy, you just want to shove it into your face. It could be astronaut food, almost: a specially engineered, hygienically sealed nutrition cylinder in high-visibility yellow. Slurp it down, Major Tom. Reset your potassium levels and get back to your Martian rock samples. The peel will float off, anemone-like, in zero gravity.

But to slurp it down, to eat it heedlessly, is to waste the banana. It’s to waste, first of all, the duration of a banana. Are you, like me, a wistful nonsmoker? Do you envy the smokers their philosophical interludes, their moments of drifting peace? Then eating a banana, slowly and reflectively, is the closest thing you’re going to get to a cigarette break. Except better, because you can do it on public transportation.

There’s an orthodox, old-school surrealism to the banana: its cartoon yellowness, its absurd curvature, the fact that when we think about a banana, we think about it upside down. The banana grows upward, doesn’t it, jostling for sunlight with its fellows—but in our mind, we reverse it. We put its broken stem on top, like a nose or a little horn, and so we create a strangeness around the banana. We put it in banana quotes.

But the banana is not, or not just, a free-floating, self-signifying object. It is fragile and organic: There are processes at work inside the banana. If battered or neglected, it will flush an angry dark brown. It will become its shadow. It should be a tarot card, one of the big ones: the Fool, the Hanged Man, and the Black Banana. Pull that card and change your life.

And you don’t want to waste the taste, either—the cordial blandness of a banana. Me, I like a mottled one. The greener end of the spectrum is too fibrous and anxious for me. Green bananas squeak when you peel them. I like a deep, mature yellow, with sunspots. That’s a fulfilled banana, a mellow banana, a banana that’s been around the block. It’s loaded with the sugars of experience. It’s in the last blaze of its bananahood. Enjoy me now, it says with its banana grin. I was created for your pleasure.

This article appears in the May 2023 print edition.