Banana Day!

I’m so excited: I just ate a banana! I haven’t eaten a banana since I was 10 years old and this evil Sunday school leader forced me to eat one, threatening me with hellfire & damnation if I disobeyed him.

OK, it was Sunday school, but no one threatened me. We were running relay races. After you ran over the tire, under the limbo stick, around the snapping crocodiles and through the hula hoop, you had to eat a banana and run back so your teammate could go. I’m not kidding. Now that I see it written down, I really wonder what the hell they were thinking. It had nothing to do with god. I’m sure they thought it was perfect: fitness and nutrition in the same game. So very wrong.

I was already pathologically opposed to bananas for reasons I don’t recall because I developed the opposition when I was 2 or 3. I was a picky kid who would actually gag and make herself barf if you forced her to eat something she didn’t like. But I’ve always been a team player.

I ate the banana, shoved it down, feeling its slimy, mushy, fibreyness against my tongue and down my throat. Details are fuzzy after that, but I seem to recall throwing up. Of course, that might be a lie. Over the years I’ve had to embellish the story somewhat because people are generally unsympathetic to grown women who are scared of fruit. But if you tell people you threw up, they think it’s serious and stop trying to make you “just try it! You might like it now that you’re 22!”

The unembellished truth is that I have not eaten a banana since that day. That doesn’t include bananas in breads, cookies, daquiris and those little marshmallow banana flavoured candies (of course I prefer strawberry). But a banana, peeled and broken off into mushy chunks and gummed up and swallowed, with an “Ah! Potassium!”? This, I have not eaten.

The other day, in the fruit store, I re-thought bananas. They are so convenient, so nutritious, so easy to consume. You pretty much don’t have to chew them. There are no seeds to spit, no white stuff on your hands like that left by oranges and grapefruit, no tough skin to dig through, no core to eat around, no shiny, pesticide-laden skin to peel, only to find bruises and god knows what else. (I’ve had a few bad apples.) Yes, I know that bananas have pesticides in them too. But the idea of removing the outside of the fruit, so easily, then eating the delicious inside has always appealed to me. Plus, I’m almost 30. Fruit cannot continue to rule me. I’ve got stuff to do.

So I bought four bananas. I stared at them for a few days and this morning I peeled one. It was just as satisfying to peel as I had imagined. I sniffed it: it smelled like banana. I wasn’t quite ready to bite right in, so I blended it with some milk and made a banana milkshake. And I only felt a little nauseous afterwards.

Please, go eat a banana – or whatever fruit you fear. If I can do it, you can do it.