Banana trees are made up of giant leaves, not a trunk. So they’re more like a giant onion instead of a tree.
I just don’t respect botanical definitions any more. Who cares what they think berries, fruits, grain and nuts should be? They can’t even define a tree! If anyone gets to define these terms for every English speaker, it sure isn’t going to be them.
Culinary definitions all the way! Unfortunately, they have no satisfying category for rhubarb either.
And there are also small cute pink self-peeling bananas (Musa velutina)
How do they taste?
Don’t know. Last year I missed the opportunity to try it, hopefully I’ll have another one this year.
Aren’t they also mostly genetic clones? At least the ones we eat in America are, IIRC.
Bananas grow from seeds inside the fruit. Since we bred the seeds out, now it’s a clone-only plant.
No such thing as a tree really (genetically speaking), trees are just a bunch of plants that converged on a similar niche but they don’t all share a common ancestor (some trees are more closely related to brocoli than other trees), lots of different things evolved into what we now call trees seperately from eachother so a bannana tree is as much a tree as any other tree.
No such thing as a fish
The same goes for everything that lives then. There is no such thing as a mammal, they are just a form of prototheria! A lot of them just evolved into what we consider marsupials or eutheria. But a koala is just as much a mammal as a lemur!
Now this is a much smaller branch ofc, but you could slap it onto anything more vague. Reptiles, fish, crabs… and worse… fungi. Not to mention the archea.
So trees are the flora equivalent of crabs is what you’re saying.
That doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as trees though. It means a tree is a growth form, a life strategy, just like a succulent, a geofyte or an epifyte. It’s a group of plants that have a lot in common despite not being related, and they are well defined. And one of the important defining characteristics of a tree is true wood production, which is missing in bananas. The life form of a banana is much more similar to ginger than to any tree.
Bananas are all bite and no bark.
This is unreasonably genius even for your high standard
And as always I enjoyed learning something new from your. Some of these classifications are nuts.
Blueberry just chilling there in the corner the whole time, secure in their berry-ness
One of the few that people accidentally named accurately.
Are we just gonna forget about avocado too?
And eggplant
Are all eggplants?
they wouldnt accept it quite so easily. their pride would make them devolve into berry cultists, never accepting the truth.
Make berries berries again
want some can’tberry juice now
I’ve gone down the rabbit hole. Depending on culinary, scientific, or horticulture, nobody agrees on what things are classified as.
Exactly? Sorry, nerds ruined this one.
You know what a fruit and a vegetable are. It has nothing to do where the seeds are. Botanists don’t get to change the English language.
Like everything else in English, you’ll figure it out from context.
Vegetables don’t exist botanically and fruit has a very different meaning in a botanical context when compared to the culinary definition
You can still consider roots, stems, and leaves as vegetables.
Of course you have to be more stringent with fruits, and nuts/seeds imo are in a category of their own.
Intelligence is knowing tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
Salsa is a tomato based fruit salad. (I don’t take credit for this, I read it somewhere)
We’re not talking about whether something is a fruit or a vegetable lmao
This is about what kind of fruit something is, e.g. a berry vs a drupe
They are fast-growing plants, with a growth rate of up to 1.6 metres (5.2 ft) per day.[5]
holy shit
Fun fact: banana tree trunks grow horizontally underground. The above ground part is a leaf bunch that produces exactly one bunch in their lifetime. Which is why farmers cut it down after harvesting, to stimulate the tree to produce new shoots and more nanners.
TIL
Now check bamboo
I feel like they’d feel pretty warm to the touch if they are growing that fast.
I kinda feel like heat would be wasted energy that could be used to ｇｒｏｗ
I feel like bananas would be cold as hell if they were growing that fast.
Absorbing heat from hapless critters that happen to brush a banana leaf to g r o w
Fun fact! The farmers rely on this effect to supply supplemental meat in the growing season.
Well, they do feel warm to the touch, but bananas only grow in warm and humid climates, so everything feels that way.
So I’ve searched and searched and my wife and I watched a lot of YouTube timelapses and we couldn’t find one that grew that fast. Not saying it isn’t the max, but it’s probably very abnormal
Anecdotal, but I’ve seen banana plants push out leaves vertically nearly that fast at their peak growth. Each leaf can be close to 6ft long, maybe longer. They shoot straight up out of the top of the plant when they come out, so they do temporarily add that much height.
When the leave gets completely pushed out, it unfolds and leans to the side and in the end only adds a foot or less to the full height.
Not sure if that counts, but they are fun plants to have. I’m in Midwest America… so you don’t have to be in a tropical area to grow them, but we do have to cut it down every year and cover it in mulch and leaves to protect it.
Our biggest gets to 16-18ft tall every year. One of it’s children we’ve given away is a bit bigger.
wikipedia cites this book for reference
i chopped down a banana tree once, definitely not wood, was like cutting a large celery
Its not a tree.
What’s a tree?
Baby don’t cut me
What is anything, really?
I’m going to need a banana for scale.
I want to eat the ice cream bananas
Since when is an onion a herb?
What they mean is herbaceous, aka leafy and not woody
No, they are nasty mush wax that should only be used for smells. Ugh, I hate touching them so much. The last time I bit one, I couldn’t even chew it. Had to spit it right in the trash.
No one asked.
Not sure if trolling or not, but googling around and it sounds like Sensory Processing Disorders can cause this level of passionate hatred towards bananas…
Oh, definitely not trolling. I don’t have many other things I have problems with, it’s mostly bananas. And mushrooms. And one time I hit a lump in my mashed potatoes and threw up all over the table at a restaurant.
I can relate to the queasiness BoxOfFeet@lemmy.world
Genuinely made me laugh out loud. Thank you!! 😂
Hah, glad to help! It is pretty funny looking back on it, but my family was pretty mortified at the time.
