Sensational journalist Bud Buck has been looking for shocking stories in the grocery store. And when Bud looks hard enough, he always finds something.
The depth of the daily heartbreak faced by a typical grocery store banana is hard for an ordinary person to fathom. We, at least, maintain the pretense that all humans have equal value without regard to their condition. Of course we don’t treat each other this way, but at least we say the right words. Woe unto you, however, if you’re a banana. Because things are much worse. For you, the world is a much harsher, infinitely more judgmental place.
On a recent trip to my favorite nearby food outlet, this reporter was appalled to discover that virtually ALL the bananas on display in the produce section were clearly underage. These bunches were far too green to be taken home. Certainly any sensible person feeling compelled to peel a banana at that moment would look at these rookies and would find them unappetizing. And yet here they were, clearly marked for sale out in plain view. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not a prude. But timing is everything!
Across the store, meanwhile, the evidence was plentiful that a small, separate band of banana bunches had taken terrible casualties at their remote outpost at the head of the cereal aisle. These experienced bananish citizens had done everything in their power to hold on to the territory. Some fell off their hooks. Other bunches were brutally ripped in two! Many of their number had become extremely yellow there was nothing left for them to do but retreat to the bottom of the display, bruised and defeated, though still proud. It seemed unlikely that anyone would give them another shot.
My observation – non-banana-centric shoppers tended to bypass BOTH these versions of the valiant fruit, preferring only to lavish their attention on perfect, like well-formed, bright yellow, unblemished fruit. How long can we afford to be so picky?
For the bananas sake, I’m begging you, please! The widening disparity between “Not Yet” bananas and “Too Late “ bananas is growing. The “Not Yets” have to listen to dismissive and snide remarks that they are ‘too, too green.’ The “Too Late” bananas are laughed at and largely ignored. Meanwhile, we’re not creating enough “Right Now” bananas to satisfy the voracious need. The whole banana industry relies on them to further the “fresh” “yellow” brand that we’re still building. Its failure is a depressing example of what we call “Bunches of Shame.”
This is only an excerpt, of course. Bud goes on for quite a while. But his angle is clear – he’s trying to ignite a class war in the produce section.
How can you tell if fruits and vegetables are ‘ripe’?
Trail Baboon 
http://social-media-university-global.org/2010/07/we-dont-buy-any-green-bananas/
you’ve probably seen this duet already – from 2010 – but i just saw it the other day.
we buy under-ripe fruit – i guess we’re optimists.
hope your day is enjoyable and warm. the wind is a’blowing up here in Blackhoof.
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excellent
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Good morning, baboons! My TV is filled with people grumbling about this dark, muggy, mild weather. Just for the record, some of us are delighted. I saw enough snow last year to do me for the next several years.
I used to pretend to know when fruit is ripe. When Molly was quite young, I convinced her I had special powers. I would pinch, smell and examine a bunch of bananas, and then tell her that I expected them to become ripe sometime about 3:15 that afternoon . . . no later than 3:35. It’s all silliness. For pleasant eating, I used to like bananas that were strongly yellow with a few pronounced black flecks. For baking banana bread, the bananas can not be too ripe.
But bananas are in my past. They are the seductive sirens of the fruit world, being candy passing itself off as a healthy fruit. A big ripe banana tips the scales at 120 calories. Wowee, that’s about as sweet as sugar-coated breakfast cereal. If you are eating to satisfy your sweet tooth, have the courage to acknowledge that you are doing it for the sugar, with no health pretensions. A Hostess Twinkie is 150 calories (not THAT much more than a banana), so eat that!
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I allow myself the delusion that I am eating the banana for its potassium. Really, it’s all about the bright yellow peel and the sweet banana-y goodness inside.
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People who claim to eat bananas for potassium are like those folks who used to avidly read Playboy for all its social commentary.
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that jimmy carter interview with lust in his heart was memorable. i hear lindsey lohan has some tasty morsels in the current issue
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Many years ago before kids were even a twinkle in our eyes, I subscribed to Playboy. When it came, I would read it almost cover to cover, then hand it to Jim so he could look at the pictures. The writing, the articles and the interviews really were excellent — decadent and highly sexual at times, but certainly refreshing.
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Let’s not forget, nutrition is not ALL about calories. I’ll take a banana over a Hostess Twinkie any day.
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Tim I missed the part where Jimmy Carter lusted after bananas
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no he was just happy to see them
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Steve, you weren’t fooling Molly. Daddies really DO have special powers when children are young. My Daddy certainly did!
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Nutrition is not all about calories, and not all calories are from sugar. The Twinkie’s calories are almost all from sugar, but the banana’s are not. A large banana has 2 grams of protein and 4 grams of fiber.
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Talking about sugar. I’ve just finished making truffles, about 300 of them: Chocolate, lemon, ginger & Kahlua; Chocolate, raspberry & Kahlua; Chocolate, bourbon & pecan; Double chocolate, raspberry. Death by chocolate seems a distinct possibility!
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PJ – Chocolate has antioxidants. It’s good for you. 🙂
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Mmmmmm… Baboons like truffles.
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good for you pj. that’s a worthwhile expenditure of calories
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the banana situation is one i had not paid attention to. thanks to bud for pointing out a potentially disastrous situation in our midst. i have great difficulty in telling when food is ready. avocados i can tell but i have to remember to check. they like bananas are on a clock of their own and the odds of their being ready and my paying enough attention to them to be able to enjoy them at their moment of peak lusciousness are small indeed. i need easy food, grapes lettuce radishes tomatoes apples are usually idiot proof enough i can eat without reservation but melons give me trouble everytime. nobody likes watermelon more than me and a good cantaloupe is a thing of beauty but to get a tasteless hard flesh in an otherwise passable melon is an occurrence that is about a 50/50 proposition for me. i avoid them like the pretty girls at the dance, the failure rate is demoralizing. now if someone could invent a food rotating device to keep the food in my refrigerator and in the storage bins moving up to front and center as it was going through he evolutionary process of becoming compost fodder they would have an appliance worth its weight in gold. often times its not that i cant tell i better eat it at its peak time, it is simply that old out of sight out of mind conundrum that plagues me in many areas of life. lettuce, cucumbers, celery, green beans, all take on a coating of slime inside that lightweight plastic produce bag that so prophylactically keeps one vegetable separate and soon they are on their way to primordial soup where the hair growing in the bag absorbs the liquid being produced at a rate of harmony seen in nature at its finest moments.
buck has a point about the food out there but i think he misses another. i heard last night on tv that 28% of our food gets thrown out because of inattention. the problem is not the food, it is me. i really meant to eat that bunch of carrots when i bought them, then they started t grow whiskers then get that old flabby limpness that takes away a large portion of their appeal but i wont throw them out yet maybe carrot cake or carrot soup is in their future but then as the slow evolution of time marches on in the crisper drawer the bag begins transposing into that green brown black puss and evolving into a new and different life form that begins whimpering and calling out from the recesses of the depths and softly passes without a whisper to the land of the defiled becoming the methane yeast for the starter of the friendship bread that exists in the dump beneath the mounds of coffee grounds and dirty paper towels. the empty canola oil containers and pizza boxes, the yogurt containers and potato chip bags.beneath the stuff with life cycle longer than the evolution of man.
i love these food days here on the blog. looking forward to it.
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“i avoid them like the pretty girls at the dance, the failure rate is demoralizing.” Love this (and feel much the same way about melons).
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What dangerous quality do watermelons and pretty girls in dances both have?
Both have seeds, and seeds can be more trouble than you’d believe!!
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thank heavens for little watermelons
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One of the favorite things from this year’s overabundance in the CSA was yellow watermelons. They were about the size of a large cantaloupe and had a green exterior like a standard red watermelon, but oh so sweet and so yummy. Hope I can find some next summer maybe at the farmers’ market (or maybe I’ll find a sunny spot and try to grow some).
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One of the reasons I have decided against a CSA share again next summer is that too much of the food becomes science experiments. I love the fresh produce (carefully selected by someone who knows what they’re doing usually), but most of it needs to be consumed in the first 2 or 3 days or it turns on you before you can say “maybe some soup…” I do better with veggies purchased the day I will consume them, and thankfully I can do that since the grocery store is only around the corner. Bananas are eaten like candy at our house – I used to wind up with a few bananas in the bunch that would go too far into the brown-spotty stage and could make banana muffins, but lately if they are in the house, they are consumed within a day or two.Pears on the other hand I wind up buying thinking “oh this will be a tasty treat in my lunch tomorrow,” only to have to wait another few days for the little bulbous beauty to become edible.
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Anna – this was exactly my experience w/ the CSA. With only two of us in the house, it was just beyond us to get all that produce consumed while it was in good shape. So now we content ourselves with supporting farmers by shopping at the farmers market more!
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Since the two of you live so close together, why not share a share? Unless, of course, you enjoy the trips to the market. That’s the main reason I don’t get a CSA, I’d miss those farmers’ market trips.
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The two years I have done a CSA, I have split my share with a friend. Even with only half of the share, there are weeks I don’t get through everything. When it’s the “greens” part of the season, there are only so many ways you can prepare/cook/consume salad greens, kale, beet greens, this greens that greens and only so many meals where you can eat them before you start to feel green yourself. Also there is always that chance that you’ll have a year like my first-year CSA that had beets every week for more than half the summer…great if you like beets (and there were several varieties), not so much if both families sharing the CSA aren’t huge beet fans.
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I should say, too, that I loved the serendipity of not knowing what I’d get from one week to the next, and there are things I tried that i never would have eaten otherwise – but that was outweighed by the wasted produce or stuff we just couldn’t eat (this year’s CSA farmers were fans of peppers and onions – we got lots, and my husband can’t eat either of them, so my pal got pretty much all of them and I think is still working her way through dried peppers and onions).
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The serendipity of not knowing was fun for the first half of the summer, but by the second half, it wasn’t such a joy. It was a great experiment for us and I’m not sorry I did it, but the farmers markets around here are a better fit for us.
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Good morning to all. I am currently responsible for most of the buying and picking of fruit and vegetables at our house. I don’t like to have too much waste and try to get stuff that is nearly ripe or ripe and that will not spoil before it is used. The selection of fruit and vegetables is somewhat limited at our closest large grocery store. I do not know why they have so many kinds of under ripe fruit that will start rotting before it gets ripe or that will never get ripe. Apparently some people buy this fruit that is too green and eat it. Don’t they know that it is too hard and has no flavor?
Usually I can buy bananas that are ripe or nearly ripe and I often buy some that are on the green side which will be ripe before I make my next trip to the store. If I’m lucky I can find some pears the are not too ripe and will ripen at home without rotting. When no one is looking I do a taste test on the grapes before buying them. I have trouble telling when the melons I grow are ripe and every year a few of them get picked too soon and can’t be used.
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Rise and Shine Baboons!
The sniff test is what tells me, and I am pretty picky about fruits and veggies. Here are a few of my selection criteria:
Melons: watermelon–hollow thumping is the best, canteloupe–the sniff test–should smell sweet
Bananas: yellow, not green and a bit soft
Peaches: never California peaches–forget ’em. Go for Colorado, Michigan, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri–California peaches are invariably mealy or hard.
Pineapple: bottom is yellow, smells sweet.
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Thanks for the tip on the peaches!
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We have good luck with Idaho and Washington peaches.
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im a georgia peach fan myself
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I can tell when a pear is ripe – you can feel a little give in the top of the fruit right by the stem when it is ready to eat. I’ve never been able to tell with melons, but then, I don’t usually want a whole melon anyway.
I love the farmers’ market, but my pet peeve about it is that the merchants want to sell all their produce in such large amounts. When you are buying for one, you don’t necessarily want several pounds of something at a time. A merchant selling large heads of cabbage for a dollar will sometimes have some little tiny cabbages, but they want to put two of them together on a tray and still sell it for a dollar. Usually I try to go on a Sunday when things have slowed down a little and they are thinking about how much stuff they are going to have to pack up. Then you can ask someone if they will take fifty cents for one, and they usually will, if you have the exact change.
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Linda, I use the same test you use for judging if pears are ripe. There are some pears that are ripe when the top of the fruit is not very soft and others that need to have completely soft tops before they are ripe enough to eat. I sort of know which ones are ripe when the top just a little soft and those that should have softer top. I’m not ready to give out any information on what I have found because I still don’t always have good results when trying to determine if a pear is ripe. Some very green pears seem to take a very long time to get ripe or do not ripen at all.
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Also why I don’t get a Costco or Sam’s Club membership. Too large a quantity most of the time.
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We really love bananas at our house. it really is hard to know if a cantaloupe is ripe. I find the Woonsocket melons from SD are the most reliable. Our fruit selection is pretty lame most of the time, given how remote we are. I find that pears take forever to ripen, then go bad with lightening speed. I also noticed that the northwest cherries were not very good this year and quite expensive. Do any baboons have an explanation for this?
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the expense is because of the high cost
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What a brillaint analysis! Have you ever thought of working for BOA or the Fed?
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Woonsocket? Love the word!
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Woonsocket is a town in SD. I’ve never been there. All I know is that they grow great cantaloupe there. I think they are called Athena melons.
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Greetings! Who knew bananas were such a controversial fruit. We love them and eat them voraciously and I will buy them as rookies, peak age or over the hill. Sometimes you can find overripe ones in a bag for $.99 which is well worth it, as they’re usually not ~that~ ripe. When they do get overripe, they are frozen and used for my morning smoothies, or if I get the bug to bake I’ll make banana muffins.
Over the years, I’ve gotten good at spotting good produce, although melons can be tricky. Most fruit does need to sit for a few days to fully ripen. A fully ripened avocado, melon, mango or peach is definitely a thing of beauty and music in the mouth.
Although I’ve read that the ubiquitous banana that everybody loves is becoming the equivalent of the sweatshop clothes in tropical areas where it grows. They raze acres of natural flora and fauna to make banana plantations, workers are exploited, monoculture of ONE type of banana, environmental and social chaos, etc. It’s sad, but I also have a very difficult time giving up my bananas. Sort of like Uncle Dave’s Thanksgiving prayer — do we revert to living in a cave, naked and just eat grass, berries and seeds? It’s a complex world and it’s not always clear what is the best thing to do.
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if the cave were on the equator i would be willing to give it a shot, st paul. naked and eating grass sounds like a bummer. my co worker was with the peace corp in equador and his business 101 lesson was to sell bananas in the orange section and oranges in the banana section. they had hundres of stands for each with all the banana guys right next to the other banana guys and all the orange guys right next to the other orange guys. if the guy next to you sold for 100 you did too but why should they buy from you. if you ar ethe only orange within 1/2 a mile maybe its worth the ease to just buy it. he said they tried it to humor him then went back to the traditional way. there is a reason they are exploited, its the way its always been. lets go fix the world and break up the banana cartels. down with chaquita, down with chaquita
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I work with a gentleman who moved here from Jamaica – he has bemoaned the lack of a properly ripe mango in this state. He’s used to being able to get them ripe off the tree.
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PSA: How to Peel a Bannana. This is something I thought I knew until I was 66, when I heard on public radio that I was doing it wrong. Most of us try to start a peel by breaking the top end of the banana, where it attaches to the stem. Wrong! That end is tough (for obvious reasons). Try to start something up there and you either need a knife or you will moosh the top inch or so of good banana. Turn the banana upside down. With your thumb you can break the skin at that lower button and just peel it from there.
For a straight man, I have an awful lot to say about bananas.
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youre not just happy to see me?
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Morning–
Interesting topic. Just last week I purchased two bananas from Kwik Trip. They cost me $.22. And that just AMAZES me! These things were shipped half way around the world and they’re $.22?! What can you get for less than a quarter these days? Still can’t get over that…
I love oranges. But only ‘good’ oranges. And you can’t tell if it’s any good until you get into it so I buy them hesitantly. Tried one last week – not good. So will be off oranges again for a few months. But I have been eating apples daily for the last few months. Honeycrips lately, Sometimes Braeburn. I try to stick w/ organic apples. Don’t have to worry about them being ripe but there’s one spot in the fridge where they’ll freeze; gotta watch out for that.
Melons? Yeah… there’s a trick to that. I know about the thump and pressing on the end. It’s still a crap shoot.
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arent honeycrisp fantastic? there is a new one coming on that is supposed to be as good. oranges are a hit or miss. if they are good they are great if the are dry little pods they are ok with champaigne. trader joes has a wonderful italian sparkling wine for 5 bucks made for orange juice.
quick trip has that wonderful identity item in the bananas. they must smile at how well they have made it work subway buys more tomatoes than anyone else in the world and they cant guarantee you they will get good ones. if they cant do it what chance do we have?
i think ill go to work today see you all later.
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Are you thinking of the SweeTango apple, tim? I like honeycrisp a little better, but the SweeTango is also quite lovely.
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Yeah, bananas are Quick Trip’s loss leader – about the only place Husband will buy bananas unless they’re in one of those 99 cent bags Joanne was mentioning.
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Dale – did they wonder in the food store why this guy was photographing the bananas?
All my tricks have been mentioned above, but I’ll have to add that it’s amazing how much can be done with decaying fruit and veggies.
I do think someone could invent a food rotating device for the back of the refridge is something that should be explored, tim. All it would take is a large “lazy Susan” (I’ve always wondered if Susans abhored that term) built into at least two tiers. You push a button, and now here it comes: the pickled beets that were opened last spring; orange marmalade that has crystalized; tahini so thick on the bottom you need a chisel; half a jar of pickled herring from…2009?; a plastic bag with tiny shriveled dark little things that could have been radishes…
Or as George Carlin said “Could be meat, could be cake.” Oscar in The Odd Couple brings out something green that “is either very new cheese, or very meat.”
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I’d buy one. tim?
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“is either very new cheese, or very old meat.”
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Barbara, stop sneaking into my house and looking in the refrigerator.
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Isn’t it obvious that “Dale Connelly is a nom de plume shared by several other people–and a bear.
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BiR,
I was waiting for someone to approach me and call me out for being a camera-toting spy for the competition. If anyone noticed, nothing was said. But this is a grocery store I frequent, and they could be waiting to slap the cuffs on me on my return.
The other possibility is that grocery store spies get a free pass, like diplomats. If Cub started to expel Rainbow’s agents, Rainbow would do the same to Cub’s agents. Maybe they could have a prisoner exchange at Lund’s?
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It’s true — when I worked at Coborns, managers were very sensitive to folks coming in and taking pictures of shelves or displays. Grocery competition is fierce.
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Wait a minute! I thought it was Bud Buck who was doing this article?
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OT: My good friend Barbara McAfee, author of Full Voice: The Art and Practice of Vocal Presence wrote this week on her blog (http://fullvoicebook.wordpress.com/author/fullvoice2011/ )
about her December birthday and offers this to the tune of White Christmas:
“I’m dreaming of a June birthday
One free from holiday excess
For friends don’t remember us poor Decembers
Or if they do, it’s under stress
I’m dreaming of a June birthday
One where of Christmas there’s no sign
There’ll be no self-pitying whine
When my birthday is once again all mine.”
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Brilliant! Love it.
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god bless us everyone
tiny clyde
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