by John Lloyd
As the definition says, after flowering, the part of the herb above the ground dies. With bananas, this gives rises to a strange effect. After the stem dies, another one grows, slightly further along the root. Over a few years, the banana plant will appear to have ‘walked’ a couple of yards.
Bananas are native to Malaya and have been cultivated for 10,000 years. Wild bananas, which can still be found in South-East Asia, contain large stony seeds and a small amount of flesh. They are pollinated by bats.
The banana in your local supermarket is a cultivated variety, chosen by farmers for its fleshy pulp and lack of seeds. Domestication has produced plants that are sweet and tasty but sterile: they cannot reproduce without human help.
Most banana plants have not had sex for 10,000 years. Almost every banana we eat has been propagated by hand, from a sucker of an existing plant, whose genetic material has not changed in 100 centuries.
As a result, bananas are extremely susceptible to disease. Many species have already succumbed to fungal infections like black Sigatoka and Panama disease, which are impervious to fungicides. Unless a genetically modified version can be developed soon, all bananas may become extinct.
This is a serious problem. Bananas are the most profitable export crop in the world. The industry is worth $12 billion a year and supports 400 million people, many of them living well below the poverty line.
Most bananas come from hot countries, but Europe’s largest producer is Iceland. The bananas are grown in large greenhouses heated by geothermal water, just two degrees below the Arctic Circle.
Fyffe’s, the banana multinational that buys the entire crop of Belize each year, is Irish.
SEAN They walk.
STEPHEN I’m sorry?
SEAN Banana ‘plants’, whatever you want to call them, walk.
STEPHEN Nurse! Nurse, he’s out of bed again.
SEAN They do, they walk. They move. I’ve been to Colombia. I travelled to Colombia and I went to a banana …
STEPHEN Yes, well, if you go to Colombia, you see, these things will happen!
What is coffee made from?
Coffee seeds, not beans.
Coffee is really a fruit. What we call coffee ‘beans’ are, botanically speaking, seeds. Coffee trees produce delicate white, jasmine-like blossom which lasts only a few days. The flowers give way to fruit called ‘coffee cherries’ which turn bright red when ripe. The skin of the cherry is bitter but the flesh is intensely sweet with a grape-like texture. Inside various further layers are two bluish-green seeds.
The word bean once meant only the seed of the broad bean. This later expanded to include members of the Phaseolus family such as the haricot bean and the runner bean, and the related genus Vigna which includes mung and adzuki beans and black-eyed peas. The term is now applied to other related plants such as soybeans, peas, lentils, vetches and lupins.
The coffee tree is an evergreen which grows 20 feet tall but is pruned to 8 to 10 feet. Coffee pickers can pick 100 to 200 lb of coffee cherries per day. Only 20 per cent of this weight is the actual seed. It takes about 2,000 Arabica cherries to produce a pound of roasted coffee. Since each cherry contains two beans, your one pound of coffee is derived from 4,000 coffee ‘beans’. In 5 to 10 per cent of any coffee crop, the cherry will contain only a single seed. This is called a ‘peaberry’ and it has a distinctly different, stronger flavour than normal.
In common English usage, the word ‘beans’ also refers to seeds or other organs of other plants. For example: castor beans (from which castor oil is made); cocoa beans (which resemble bean seeds), and vanilla beans (which resemble the pods). Botanically, none of these is a bean either.
Which of the following are berries?
a) Strawberry
b) Raspberry
c) Peach
d) Watermelon
A berry is defined as ‘a fleshy fruit containing several seeds’.
Strictly speaking, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries are not berries but ‘aggregated drupes’ – a drupe being a fleshy fruit containing a single stone or pit.
Peaches, plums, nectarines and olives are drupes. The world’s largest drupe is the coconut, which, because of its hard flesh, is called a ‘dry drupe’.
Strawberries, raspberries and blackberries are called ‘aggregated’ drupes because each individual fruit is actually a cluster of miniature drupes – the characteristic bumply bits which make up blackberries and raspberries.
Each one of these drupelets contains a single tiny seed – these are the bits that get stuck in your teeth when you eat a blackberry.
Tomatoes, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, watermelons, kiwi fruit, cucumbers, grapes, passion fruit, papaya, peppers and bananas are all berries.
Blueberries are also berries. They are variously known as bleaberries, bilberries, whortleberries, huckleberries, hurtleberries, myrtleberries and trackleberries.
Which of the following are nuts?
a) Almond
b) Peanut
c) Brazil nut
d) Walnut
Nuts are defined as a simple, dry fruit with one seed (very occasionally two) in which the seed-case wall becomes very hard at maturity.
True nuts include walnuts, butternuts, hickory, pecan, chestnut (but not conkers), beech, oak acorns, tan oak, hazel, filbert, hornbeam, birch and alder.
Peanuts, almonds, pistachios, Brazils, cashews, coconuts, horse chestnuts and pine nuts are not nuts. So the legendary health warning on a packet of peanuts (‘may contain nuts’) is, strictly speaking, untrue.
Brazil nuts are not nuts but seeds. The wooden pods they come in (up to twenty-four to a pod) grow right at the top of the tree, 45 metres (150 feet) above the ground, and are lethal if they fall on you. In Brazil, the pods are called ouricos, ‘hedgehogs’.
Almonds are the stone of a once fleshy drupe.
Peanuts, also known as groundnuts, earthnuts, goobers, goober peas, pindas, pinders, Manila nuts and monkey nuts, are actually a type of pea which grows underground.
They are native to South America but now widely cultivated, notably in Georgia, USA. Some people are so severely allergic to peanuts that eating a tiny amount (or even inhaling peanut dust) can be fatal; these people may or may not also be allergic to true nuts.
Pistachios are deadly dangerous. They are classified under Class 4.2. of the International Maritime Dangerous Goods code: Flammable Solids (Substances Liable To Spontaneous Combustion). Fresh pistachios, if stacked under pressure, can burst into flames and cause a cargo fire.
Pistachios continue to absorb oxygen and excrete carbon dioxide even after harvesting. This can be a serious problem when transporting them by sea. If there is inadequate ventilation, seamen entering the hold of a cargo ship can die from carbon dioxide poisoning or from lack of oxygen.
Pistachios have been eaten by humans for at least 9,000 years. According to Muslim legend, the pistachio was one of the foods brought to Earth by Adam when he came down from Heaven.
PHILL Imagine if the acorn tasted as good as it looked. In its own little cup.
STEPHEN Ohh.
PHILL Little green fellow [mimes opening an acorn and licking gingerly at it].
BILL Ahh.
PHILL Sadly, they taste like shit.
Who goes gathering nuts in May?
No one. There are no nuts to gather in May. The children’s song is a corruption of the phrase ‘Here we go gathering knots of may’. It refers to the ancient custom of picking bunches (knots) of flowers on May Day to celebrate the end of winter, or ‘to go a-maying’.
May, the blossom of the hawthorn, is the only British flower to be named after the month in which it blooms. The may-tree is the origin of both the maypole and the phrase ‘Ne’er cast a clout before May is out’ – which refers not to the ending of the month, but to the opening of the flowers.
Though the may-tree is closely associated with May Day, it blossoms in the middle of the month not at the beginning of it. This is due to the c
hange to the Gregorian calendar in 1752. Before this, May Day would have occurred eleven days later, exactly the time when the may-tree breaks into flower.
It is considered extremely unlucky to bring hawthorn flowers inside the house, a superstition more widely believed for may than for any other species of plant in the British Isles.
There are many possible reasons for this but the most convincing is to do with its smell. Hawthorn flowers have a heavy, complicated scent, the distinctive element of which is triethylamine, which is also one of the first chemicals produced by a dead human body when it starts to decay.
In some areas it is still referred to as ‘the smell of the Great Plague’ and people who know say it reminds them of the smell of gangrene. In the old days, bodies were laid out at home for up to a week before burial, and everybody would have been familiar with the smell of death. Hawthorn brought inside the house would have instantly triggered the association.
On the other hand, triethylamine is also the smell of sex: specifically of semen; hence its positive association with wild springtime rogering outside in the fields.
As well as ‘may’, hawthorn is also known as usual by scads of bizarre vernacular names including ‘bread-and-cheese’, ‘arzy-garzies’ and ‘aglets’. ‘Aglet’ is also the word for the little metal or plastic tip on the end of a shoelace.
What’s inside a coconut?
Not milk, but coconut water. Coconut milk has to be made by boiling the white coconut ‘meat’ with water and straining it. Boil this down further and you get coconut cream.
Coconut is the only plant to produce such a seed liquid. As the coconut grows, the seed inside changes into a sweet, spongy mass called the ‘coconut apple’. From this the young plant shoot emerges out of one of the three holes at the end.
Fresh coconut water is an excellent hangover cure. It is completely sterile, full of vitamins and minerals and has the same balance of salts as human blood (the technical term for this is isotonic).
Because of this it can be used in place of a saline drip and is being commercially exploited as a sports drink, particularly in Brazil, where it is now a $75-million industry. Coconut water also ferments quickly and can be made into wine or vinegar.
Coconut oil is used to treat AIDS. Far from being the world’s most dangerously fatty oil, it is now being marketed as the healthiest. It is rich in lauric acid, the saturated fat found in mother’s milk, and full of anti-viral and anti-bacterial properties. It’s also been shown to reduce cholesterol, as it doesn’t enter the bloodstream but travels straight to the liver.
Some less well known uses for the coconut palm: DaimlerChrysler now use the husk (or coir) to make biodegradable seats for their trucks (springier than plastic foam); the root is liquefied to make mouthwash and a flour made from the shell is used to clean jet engines. The first car body to be made of coconut is already on the drawing board.
The coconut palm has been heralded as the world’s most useful tree for more than 3,000 years. In early Sanskrit texts it was referred to as kalpa vriksha – the tree that fulfils all needs.
You could survive on a desert island by eating and drinking only coconut.
What did Captain Cook give his men to cure scurvy?
a) Limes
b) Lemons
c) Sauerkraut
d) Rum and blackcurrant
Cook never carried fresh limes or lemons on board. The closest he got to a remedy was barrels of sauerkraut and a concentrated fruit-juice mixture called ‘rob’. Both had been boiled to preserve them on the long voyage and so had lost most of their vitamin C.
Cook had been dead for twenty years before the supply of lemon juice to British sailors became standard practice.
Scurvy was a huge problem on long voyages. Magellan lost most of his crew to it crossing the Pacific. Now we know it is a combination of a lack of vitamins C and B, causing the body’s cells to break down, but in the eighteenth century it was treated with more superstition than knowledge. Many sailors believed that the touch of earth would cure it.
The breakthrough came with the publication of Edinburgh physician James Lind’s Treatise on Scurvy in 1754, which advocated the use of citrus fruit and fresh vegetables.
The legend is that Cook’s enlightened approach kept his ships free of the disease. The truth seems to be that Cook simply ignored it. The journals of his fellow officers indicate that it was widespread on all three voyages, although there were few deaths.
When, in 1795, the Admiralty finally ordered ships to be supplied with citrus fruit (on Lind’s recommendation), it was lemon, not lime, juice that was supplied. This had a dramatic effect on the disease.
By the 1850s, lemons were being replaced by limes for economic reasons (limes were grown by British businessmen in the colonies; lemons were grown by Johnny Foreigner in the Mediterranean). Scurvy returned with a vengeance as, ironically, limes contain very little vitamin C.
The first recorded use of the term lime-juicer (later limey) for a Brit was in 1859. Vitamin C wasn’t identified and named until the 1930s. Its chemical name is ascorbic acid. Ascorbic means ‘anti-scurvy’.
DARA Vitamin C tablets, obviously, are very effective!
STEPHEN Oh, there you go!
ALAN And MultiVits!
DARA If they’d just gone to Boots, really, at the start of the trip …
Who discovered Australia?
You still hear ‘Captain Cook’ trotted out at dinner parties (though very rarely at Australian ones).
Let’s take it from the top: he wasn’t a Captain, for a start, he was Lieutenant Cook on the Endeavour’s first voyage (1768–71). And he wasn’t the first European to see the continent – the Dutch beat him by 150 years – or even the first Englishman to land there. That was William Dampier who, in 1697, was also the first to record a ‘large hopping animal’.
Dampier (1652–1715) was a sea captain, navigator, explorer, cartographer, scientific observer, pirate and buccaneer. Alexander Selkirk – the model for Robinson Crusoe – was a member of his crew. He circumnavigated the world three times, invented the first wind map and is cited more than 1,000 times in the OED, introducing words like avocado, barbecue, breadfruit, cashew, chopsticks, settlement and tortilla into English.
In recent years, there has been a lot of lobbying in favour of the Chinese as the continent’s first foreign visitors. There is some archaeological evidence that the great Ming Dynasty admiral Zheng He (1371–1435) landed near Darwin in 1432.
Without having to swallow the whole ‘Zheng He discovered the entire world’ theory cooked up by Gavin Menzies in his best-selling 1421: The Year the Chinese Discovered America, there seems to be a good chance that this extraordinary fifteenth-century voyager (he was a Muslim and a eunuch) did reach the northern coast of Australia.
After all, Indonesian fishermen, crazed for the local sea cucumbers (which they traded with the Chinese), had managed it many years before the earliest recorded Europeans.
Some of the Northern Aboriginal peoples, like the c, even learnt to sail and fish from these visitors from overseas, picking up words, tools and the usual bad habits (alcohol and tobacco) along the way.
The real ‘discoverers’ are, of course, the Aboriginal peoples who reached Australia over 50,000 years ago. They have been present on the continent for 2,000 generations, in comparison to just eight generations of Europeans.
That is long enough for them to have witnessed dramatic changes in their environment. The landscape of the Australian interior 30,000 years ago would have been one of green vegetation, brimming lakes and snow-capped mountains.
ALAN It separated, which is why they have marsupials.
STEPHEN Yes.
ALAN And why they have all their own brands of lager.
What does ‘kangaroo’ mean in Aboriginal?
It doesn’t mean ‘I don’t know’, despite the endless websites and trivia books that tell you otherwise, citing it as a hilarious early example of cultural misunderstanding.
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The real story is much more interesting. In eighteenth-century Australia there were at least 700 Aboriginal tribes speaking as many as 250 different languages.
Kangaroo or gangaru comes from the Guugu Ymithirr language of Botany Bay, where it means the large grey or black kangaroo, Macropus robustus.
As the English settlers moved into the interior they used this word to refer to any old kangaroo or wallaby.
The Baagandji people lived 2,250 km (1,400 miles) from Botany Bay and didn’t speak Guugu Ymithirr. They heard the English settlers using this unfamiliar word and took it to mean ‘an animal that no one has ever heard of before’.
Since they had never seen them before, they (quite reasonably) used the word to describe the settlers’ horses.
What is ‘pom’ short for?
a) Port of Melbourne
b) Prisoners of Her Majesty
c) Prisoner of Old Mother England
d) Permit of Migration
e) Pomegranates
Most of these are easy to discount because they are acronyms. Folk etymologists seem to be drawn to acronymic explanations, which are almost never right.
Fondness for acronyms is a military habit, dating from the First World War (an early example is AWOL, or ‘Absent Without Leave’, though even this wasn’t consistently pronounced as a word at the time). Acronyms didn’t get into general circulation until the Second World War.