I must admit, I had never thought about adding cocoa to my banana bread before, but this was a total treat. Sweet, but not cavity-inducing, this bread was a yummy way to start my Monday. The recipe is top secret so I won't share, but I encourage you to experiment with cocoa powder and share your results. I know I'll be doing the same in a later posting!
This led me to an interesting epiphany though. A few days ago I had a conversation with a coworker about what makes a fruit, a fruit. "Seeds," was my simple answer. Fruits grow off of the tissue of a flowering plant and allow the plant to disseminate its seeds. As I was gushing over my morning banana bread, I realized that I've never had a banana with seeds. I know it's a fruit though. That's what I've always been told. So what's the story there?
"Cultivated bananas are parthenocarpic,
which makes them sterile and unable to
produce viable seeds. Lacking
seeds, propagation typically involves farmers removing
and transplanting
part of the underground stem (called a corm)."
The bananas we eat today are called Cavendish bananas and are a cultivar created specifically to not have seeds. There's the key phrase. These bananas were created. They cannot occur in nature since we've taken away the only way it can reproduce naturally. So even when you spend the extra 30 cents for organic bananas, you're still getting an organism manipulated by man.
Gosh, even when you think you're making a good choice by eating fruit, you have someone else's hands in your mouth. Blarg.
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