Trivia Today - Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Greetings Infomaniacs,

Apparently it was National Banana Lovers Day on August 27. Did you know that the banana is the most popular fruit in the United States?

Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, said in an article in Parade that we consume about 25 pounds of banana per person per year. That's a lot of bananas!

In honor of this celebration, here are some fun facts from Parade about bananas.

Enjoy!
Melissa

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Questions? Comments? Email Melissa


WHO SAID IT?
QUOTE: "Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food."

HINT: (460-370 BC), ancient Greek physician of the Age of Pericles (Classical Greece), and is considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine.


RANDOM TIDBITS
Bananas were never really heard of until 1880. However, by 1910, they were so popular that cities had a problem disposing of used banana peels. Back then, there was no urban sanitation and people were literally slipping on banana peels.

In 1910, the City of St. Louis had an ordinance specifically prohibiting people from throwing banana peels on the ground. And for much of the early 1900s, one of the suggested Boy Scout manual good deeds of the day was to pick up banana peels from the street.

Sanitation departments like the one in New York City were organized partly to combat the plague of banana peels littering the streets. Those sanitation departments were so successful that the idea of slipping on the banana peel actually became a gag. That's how it became a joke in the early movies.

Today, bananas are so popular due to the entrepreneurial drive of the early banana barons who founded a company in the 1880s called United Fruit (which is now Chiquita.) When they introduced the banana, Americans generally didn't know what a banana was and had to be taught how to peel and determine if they were ripe.

There are more than 1,000 varieties of amazing and delicious bananas-most of them are in Africa and Asia. But in the United States, we only eat one called the Cavendish. The Cavendish is a more bland banana compared to those in India where 600 banana varieties are grown.

Up through the 1950s, Chiquita released banana cookbooks full of interesting and sometimes odd recipes. Making a big push to get people to eat bananas with every meal, they tried to position the banana as both a sweet fruit and a vegetable, like a potato. You could find recipes for ham banana rolls with cheese sauce, bananas with mint jelly, and banana soup.


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WHO SAID IT?
QUOTE: "Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food."

ANSWER: Hippocrates.

***
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