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Bananas are believed to have originated up to 10,000 years ago in South east Asia, India. Some scientists believe they may have been the world’s first fruit.
The first bananas are thought to have grown in the region that includes the Malaya Peninsula, Indonesia, the Philippines and New Guinea.
From here, traders and travelers took them to India, Africa and Polynesia. There were references to bananas from 600 BC when Buddhist scriptures, known as the Pali Canon, noted Indian traders travelling through the Malaysian region had tasted the fruit and brought plants back with them. In 327 BC, when Alexander The Great and his army invaded India, he discovered banana crop in the Indian Valleys. After tasting this unusual fruit for the first time, he introduced this new discovery to the Western world.
By 200 AD bananas had spread to China.
According to the Chinese historian Yang Fu, bananas only ever grew in the southern region of China. They were never really popular until the 20th Century as they were considered to be a strange and exotic alien fruit.
The bananas we enjoy today are far better than the original wild fruit which contained many large, hard seeds and not much tasty pulp.
Bananas as we know them began to be developed in Africa about 650 AD. There was a cross breeding of two varieties of wild bananas, the Musa Acuminata and the Musa Baalbisiana. From this process, some bananas became seedless and more like the bananas we eat today.
How they got their name
Most historians believe that the Arabian slave traders are the ones who gave the banana its popular name. The bananas that originated from Southeast Asia were not the size that we are familiar with today. They were small, about as long as an adult finger, hence the name “banan”, Arabic for finger. However, some believe the name may have come from a local language in West Africa.
Bananas are also known as plantains.
Spaniards, who saw a similarity to their native plane tree, gave the fruit the name platano.
This led to the name plantain – a word used to describe the banana genus as well as the banana variety, Plantain, which is typically used for cooking. The unripe Plantain, commonly steamed or boiled, resembles the taste of a potato. However, when ripe, they can be eaten raw like other banana varieties, and have a starchy but sweet flavour.
The first plantations
It is thought that traders from Arabia, Persia, India and Indonesia distributed banana suckers around coastal regions of the Indian Ocean (but not Australia) between the 5th and 15th centuries.
Portuguese sailors discovered bananas in West Africa and established banana plantations in the 15th century off the coast, in the Canary lslands.
Between the 16th and 19th centuries, suckers were traded in the Americas and plantations were established in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Banana plants first arrived in Australia in the 1800s.
The Cavendish banana
The variety of banana best known to us today is the Cavendish, named after Englishman William Spencer Cavendish, the 6th Duke of Devonshire.
It is thought the original Cavendish plants were brought from southern China in about 1826 and taken to Mauritius. From there some plants were taken to England and, several years later, derivatives from these plants were obtained by the Duke’s gardener, Joseph Paxton, in 1829. He propagated them in glasshouses.
A missionary named John Williams took suckers from these plants to Samoa in 1838 and, from there, bananas spread to Tonga and Fiji in the 1840s. It was believed plants were brought from the Pacific Islands to the east coast of Australia in the 1850s. One of the types of bananas in the Cavendish group was named Williams, after John Williams. In the 1900s, Cavendish became one of the world’s most popular banana varieties and remains so today. It is one of the most resilient banana varieties - the plant is resistant to some soil fungi which can harm or destroy other banana varieties. The fruit is also very tasty and can be transported over long distances.
A healthy fruit
As well as being a popular fruit worldwide, bananas are also one of the most nutritious of all foods. Bananas are a source of energy-producing carbohydrates, potassium, vitamin B6, vitamin C, folate, dietary fibre and antioxidants. Bananas have no fat, cholesterol or salt.
Because they provide sustaining energy, bananas are a favourite food for active children and adults, including athletes and sports players.
In many nations, a special variety of bananas are a major staple food crop. Known as Plantains or Cooking Bananas, they are a starchier variety of banana cooked green in ways similar to potatoes.
