Food Archives - Page 2 of 8

Blue Java bananas come to fruition at last

Five years ago I swapped a sucker of my Ducasse bananas for a Blue Java sucker. I promptly put it in the ground and waited, and was disappointed, and waited, and was frustrated as detailed here.

I kept on waiting, however, and my patience has finally been rewarded – but only just. A trunk grew to a decent height, flowered and formed a fair-sized bunch which wasn’t taken by possums. Fortunately, it was close enough to maturity before the trunk collapsed a couple of weeks ago that the fruit ripened afterwards. Continue reading “Blue Java bananas come to fruition at last”

Ducasse banana seed – an exceptionally rare find

As most of us know, all of our cultivated bananas are sterile clones and those little black dots in the middle of the fruit are immature seeds which will never develop. Getting a real seed out of a cultivated banana is a really rare event, as we realise immediately when we think about how many bananas we have eaten and how few seeds we have found.

I have been growing Ducasse (sugar) bananas in my back yard for twenty-odd years, occasionally with other varieties, and I hadn’t come across a mature seed in all those years until six weeks ago when I found one seed in each of two bananas from the same bunch. One seed crunched between my teeth but I managed to save the other – roundish, blackish and about 4mm long. Continue reading “Ducasse banana seed – an exceptionally rare find”

Eating for the planet

Our dietary choices affect our lives on several levels. The question which arises most often is probably, “What is best for our health?” After that, many of us want to minimise the pain and suffering we cause, to follow the dictates of our religion and to minimise our negative impact on the environment. Are these goals compatible? If so, to what extent? And what is the optimum diet for ourselves, for other living creatures, and for the planet?

To answer these questions, we might begin by defining the four broad categories of diet which most of us recognise, and mentioning some of their variants.

1. Vegan

Veganism is often considered a lifestyle strongly anchored in animal rights, rather than just a diet. The Vegan Society defines it as, “A philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude – as far as is possible and practicable – all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose … In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.” Continue reading “Eating for the planet”

The Fruit that Changed the World

Five years ago I wrote a post celebrating our backyard bananas and lamenting the vulnerability of the commercial crop. Several more posts since then (especially Wild bananas) have touched on the dangerous lack of genetic diversity of the endlessly-cloned Cavendish and a book I picked up in our Balinese guesthouse recently refocused my attention on the issue.

Banana: the Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World by Dan Koeppel (2007) does for our favourite fruit what Longitude and Krakatoa do for navigation and our favourite volcano Continue reading “The Fruit that Changed the World”

Reptiles on your plate: snakefruit and dragonfruit

We have recently returned from two weeks in Bali. They were enjoyable and interesting in many ways and part of the fun was discovering new food. Our favourite ‘new’ fruit, by far, was the snakefruit – ‘salak’ in the local language Continue reading “Reptiles on your plate: snakefruit and dragonfruit”