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Corey Mintz is the author of The Next Supper: The End of Restaurants as We Knew Them, and What Comes After.
My anxiety breeds in the produce aisle. The ever-escalating price tags transform foods, once staples in my kitchen, into luxury items. The bananas, a black and yellow beacon of hope, shine like the Bat signal. As I reach for a bunch, the $0.79/lb label reassuring me that something in the supermarket feels affordable, I give thanks that after 23 years of banana abstinence, I am no longer allergic to this fruit.
Without incident, I ate bananas all through my childhood. Until May 5, 2001. That morning I grabbed breakfast at the restaurant across the street. Shortly afterward, I began to feel warm and noticed that my skin looked red.
Observing myself in the bathroom mirror, my upper body, from my waist to forehead, was growing increasingly brick-red and puffy. My eyelids were so swollen that they protruded past my brows. Being in my 20s, it never occurred to me to visit a doctor. And by nightfall, the swelling had disappeared.
In the weeks that followed, I made an elimination test of everything I ate that morning: French toast, maple syrup, whipped cream, strawberry and banana. When I got to banana, I broke out in similar hives. And so, for two decades, I stopped eating bananas. And I never would have had another banana in my life if my in-laws hadn’t tried to foist a cat on me.
Just before our daughter Scarlett’s third birthday, my mother-in-law Olga called to ask how I’d feel if they got her a kitty as a gift. Before parenthood, my wife Victoria and I fostered kittens – five of them, at one point. It was joyful watching them learn to pounce, less so watching parasitic worms extrude from their butts onto our sofa. We concluded then that we would like to have a human child, and never again keep cats in our home. Also, I am allergic to them.
Scarlett loves cats and has a deep relationship with her grandparents. Before beginning kindergarten this year, she spent four full days a week at their house. And Olga promised that Scarlett’s cat would live with them. This is not how pet ownership works.
To prove that it would still be hazardous to me for Scarlett to spend all day around cat dander, I offered to get an allergy test. My doctor made a referral.
The allergist made 15 dots on my right arm with a Sharpie. Yes, allergists still start with a skin test, poking your forearm with little needles dabbed in allergens to observe the reaction. In addition to the usual suspects – trees, grass, mould, dust mites, cat, dog, etc. – they would test for my existing food allergies of bananas and Brazil nuts. Within a minute of contact, the skin around the dot of “BN” began to inflame. Indicating the speed of the reaction, the doctor made sure I owned an Epipen due to the severity of the Brazil nut allergy. A few minutes later, the area marked with a “C” began to turn red.
“My friend,” the allergist said, leaning toward me and sharing a conspiratorial smile, “I have good news for you. You are very allergic to cats.”
It was a last-minute call from the governor. A stay of execution. Scarlett’s fourth birthday was approaching. There would be no kitty.
The twist was that I tested negative for banana. The doctor drew blood. When that came back negative, we moved to the oral challenge.
Back in the allergist’s office, they fed me pieces of banana, from one-tenth of a gram, all the way up to three grams. A half-hour after my last dose, with no adverse effects, I was given a sticker for my bravery (most of the patients are children).
There was a wave of relief, knowing that our daughter doesn’t have to wash her hands after eating a banana, or worry about making daddy sick. At last, after so many Friday afternoon visits to the pizza parlour with Scarlett, I could finally try their banana pudding, no longer forbidden or deadly to me.
Reunited with bananas, I realized I was guilty of underestimating them. Perhaps, because I couldn’t eat them for so long, I bought into the reputation of bananas as a low-tier fruit or undesirable snack.
Bananas are the most consumed fresh fruit in Canada. And yet, unlike peaches or apples, the banana is often portrayed as comical, associated with children and monkeys, or else depicted as salacious and undignified. Bruised so easily, they require special little coffins for transportation in our lunch bags. Within a consumerist mindset that equates price and scarcity with value, perhaps the low price of bananas prevents us from taking them seriously.
But as food inflation pressures us all to re-evaluate what we can afford to eat, our judgment of bananas deserves an appeal.
By the end of last year, Canada’s skyrocketing food inflation stood at 5.9 per cent. That’s triple the 2 per cent target of economists. And we are expecting continued 5- to 7-per-cent increases this year in the cost of meat and produce. Food insecurity, which affected 18 per cent of Canadians as of 2022, rose 12.5 per cent from the year before. There are recipes that used to be standards in my home – roast poblano soup, anything with beef – that I just don’t make any more because the ingredients have grown too expensive. But bananas are still 79 cents a pound.
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Berries are so expensive that we don’t even price them by weight. A beneficiary of Canada’s confused, open relationship with both metric and empirical measurements in food retail, berries are packed in protective, plastic clamshells and sold by the pint or quart. Looking at today’s supermarket flyer, a 340-gram pint of blueberries is on sale for $6.99. If blueberries were sold by weight with a shelf price of $9.31/lb, the industry would collapse overnight.
Bananas, meanwhile, are less than a dollar per pound. They’re also a source of vitamin B6, vitamin C, fibre, magnesium and a motherlode of potassium, which helps offset the risk of high blood pressure caused by excess sodium.
You don’t need a knife or even long nails (I cannot peel a mandarin without a utensil) to remove the skin of a banana. And inside there’s a cylinder of completely edible matter. No pit. No additional layers of membrane. No need to stand over the sink to avoid juice spilling on the floor (looking at you, peaches, plums and nectarines).
They are, when you think about it, the perfect fruit.
At first, Victoria was cautiously watchful. For the first few days, each time I diced up a banana for my yogurt or cereal, she warned me to take it easy, as if the bananas were a wild animal that was behaving calmly but could be angered to strike at any moment. Soon I was snacking on bananas between meals, revisiting a childhood favourite sandwich of peanut butter and bananas, sampling smoothies (a respectable delivery mechanism for supplements, but a tad overrated as a meal replacement) and sliding bananas into pancakes to caramelize on the underside as they cook.
When cousins came over for dinner, I made banana pudding for dessert. It was unanimously rejected by four children, who are still at the stage where unfamiliar textures fill them with revulsion. The grownups devoured the entire tray while the kids played in the basement.
With the zeal of a convert, I am now bananas for bananas. These days, I buy two bunches at a time: one yellow and ready to eat, another bunch green so I can manage my inventory to ensure there is always a ripe one available. (Though I do not yet own a banana “tree,” a hanger device that allows oxygen flow between the fruit to better control ripening.)
There was one last thing to do.
Finally, on one of my Friday afternoon visits to the local pizza parlour with Scarlett, I was able to try their version. The first bite left me spellbound, the interplay of silky, intensely banana-flavoured pudding swirled with airy whipped cream with puffs of ladyfinger cookies that magically retain some crisp submerged in the semi-liquid. By the third bite I was jealous. My banana pudding was good. This was iconic. I needed this recipe.
The owner, admitting it is adapted from New York’s Magnolia Bakery, shared the recipe with me. It’s missing a key ingredient: bananas. It turned out to be made with artificial banana extract – not to save money, but to extend its shelf life. Banana slices would oxidize after a day. Made in multigallon batches, this lasts several days in the fridge. He even gave me a bottle of the Cool Runnings extract they use.
There were never any bananas in this pudding. I could have eaten it all along.