I love banana's. I drink a banana flavored breakfast drink every day. I say that oranges are my favorite fruit but really, I eat a lot more banana's than oranges. So does the average american. The apple takes a distant second to banana's as the most popular fruit. The banana that we see in the supermarket may be going extinct:
Can This Fruit Be Saved? - Popular Science: > That sameness is the banana's paradox. After 15,000 years of human cultivation, the banana is too perfect, lacking the genetic diversity that is key to species health. What can ail one banana can ail all. A fungus or bacterial disease that infects one plantation could march around the globe and destroy millions of bunches, leaving supermarket shelves empty. A neat article. Definatly worth a read. Another clip:
Bananas have always been a technology incubator. Because they're a time-sensitive product—they need to be harvested green, then delivered to market just at ripening time—systems had to be developed to bring precision to the picking and shipping processes. Leonel Castillo, a banana-production consultant who grew up in Chiquita's corporate compound near the city of San Pedro Sula, on Honduras’s northern coast, explains that the old way was “to wait until you could see the ship coming over the horizon toward port.” Then banana workers would engage in frantic nonstop harvesting and rush the crop to the boats. Chiquita engineers developed the first radio networks in the tropics as a way to bypass this antiquated system. The fruit’s popularity also led to the development of ripening rooms whose controlled environment can slow or speed the way picked fruit ages; refrigerated steamships; and early precursors to bar-coding that allowed each bunch to be tracked by field, plantation, originating country and shipping container.
More from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana