1. Meet the Banana

In my first blog I am going to give you an introduction of the banana tree and its fruit the banana. I will tell you more about the fruit and its history, and I will give you the background story of the banana tree.

Bananas come in all different sizes and colours. You have green ones and yellow ones big ones and small ones and even bananas that have an straight shape instead of an more bent shape. The most cultivated one has an yellow peel with an white starchy fruit on the inside and has this so common known bent shape. And do you know why they have this bent shape? Let me explain that for you. When the cluster of bananas grow they will also get heavier so the weight of the bananas pull them down. But the banana wants to grow upwards so against gravity and that is why the start bending up towards the sky and that is how you get that shape.

Now we will step in to more detail. The banana is from an botanic point of view actually an berry. The seedless bananas that we humans produce and consume come from two different species, the Musa Acuminata and the Musa Balbisiana.

The table below gives an good overview of the banana plant and its ‘family’ structure. It shows to which domain, kingdom and class it belongs

Domain	Eukarya
Kingdom	Plantea
Subkingdom	Tracheobionta
Division	Magnoliophyta
Class	Liliopsida
Subclass	Lilliidae
Order	Zingiberales
Family	Musaceae
Genus	Musa
Species	Musa Acuminata . Musa Balbisiana.
Generic group	Banana

The banana originates from South-Asia and it took a couple of hundreds of years before it end up in Brazil. It started when the trade between Asia and the

Middle-East started to come up. The banana was brought to the Middle-East and there discovered by the Europeans in the glory days of ancient Rome. Due to the collapse of the Roman kingdom trade got stuck, and it was hundreds of years later that the Spanish and Portuguese conquers took it on their travels to Southern-America.  The name ‘banana’ comes from the Congolese word finger or toe, probably because of its shape.

Nowadays the banana fruit is cultivated worldwide and is used mainly just as food for us humans. The tree is also used because of its bark and leaves which can be used to make paper and textilles. And although it is not yet popular an Australian company is now trying to make biofuels out of the banana waste.