BANANA

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Banana, Pisang.
Musa acuminata Colla, Musa balbisiana Colla, Musa x paradisiaca L.
Family of Musaceae.

Description & storage
Long thick-skinned edible fruit that is yellow when ripe.
Keep bananas on a fruit dish in the living room at room temperature. If you want the bananas to ripen faster place the bowl in the sun. Like other tropical fruit never store bananas in the refrigerator. Below 8 degrees celcius the fruit will decay from the inside. Bananas will not ripen but will turn black in the refrigerator.

Plant
Bananaplants can grow upto 15 m. but most plants vary from 3 to 9 m.
It has very big leafs that can grow to 4 x 1 m.

Short history
Wild forms of the banana plant come originally from the Indo-Malaysian area and are now cultivated allover the tropical and sub-tropical continents.

Use
Bananas are delicious eaten with one's fingers after peeling off the skin. Depending on the type of banana unripe bananas are also cooked, fried or deep-fried a lot. Bananas are the bascic food in a lot of tropical countries.

• Red bananas have a green/red peel and pink fruitflesh. They taste the same like yellow bananas. The redder a fruit, the more caroteen it contains, so maybe they are healthier than their yellow colleagues;
• Fruitbananas or desertbananas are the normal, yellow bananas, 15-30 cm.
• Applebananas are smaller, 8-10 cm., and ripen faster. They are also yellow;
• The baby-banana (pisang susa) is yellow as well and measures 6-8 cm. It is the sweetest of the banana family;
• Baking bananas are 30 to 40 cm. large and are green, yellow or red-like. They cannot be eaten raw. They fulfill the role of the potato in the tropical countries.

Other peculiar characteristics

• Nutritional values;
• Is the most well known and eaten (tropical) fruit;
• In Eastern Africa you can buy banana beer. This beer is brewed from bananas;
• Tropical fruit is usually picked unripe and has to ripen in the land of arrival. To make this process go faster bananas are treated with ethylene-gas. Normal bananas also ripen through ethylene -gas but exposing it to additional gas accelerates the process;
• Is the (only) fruit that for some people can work as a fatner because they contain a lot of starch (more starch than sugar). Those people shouldn't eat too many bananas a day;
• Eat at least one banana a day, they are said to contain everything a human needs to get out of nutrition and they contain all the 8 amino-acids our body cannot produce itself. For more see the energy in fruit.
• Bananas are a good source of fibre, potassium and vitamine C;
• Red bananas are often dried and converted to meal which is used in a lot of ways;
• Red bananas contain more vitamin C as yellow bananas (the redder a fruit, the more nutritious elements it contains);
• Ripe bananas stimulate the movement and do not cause constipation as people say so often. Maybe those people ate a banana that wasn't fully ripe yet. (If you replace your butter for olive oil you will never suffer from constipation by the way

        One of the earliest cultivated fruits, the bananas are known for their high nutritional value. The bananas are staple food of many tropical peoples. The ripe fruit contains many of the necessary elements that are essential for a balanced diet. Although it is 75 percent water, the banana also contains fat, natural sugars, protein, potassium, and vitamins A, B complex, and C. A ripe banana is easily digested and it imparts quick energy.

Bananas are prepared in many ways. Dried bananas have twice as many calories as the equivalent amount of meat. For that reason, they are an important element in the diet of many vegetarian communities.

Unripe bananas, which have a high starch content, are dried and ground to make a banana flour, which has long been used in the tropics. Bananas are also used in salads and baked goods.

The bananas were long since utillized for treatment of a ul