The Banana

New Zealand Tablet, 16 July 1908, Page 33

The Banana

Professors of dietetics (says a writer in the c Pall Mall Gazette ') tell us that the banana is not, as so many fruits are, a flavor and nothing more, but a food and a source of real nutriment. It is at once useful and delicious. It not only gratifies the palate, but supplies material for combustion and the maintenance of animal heat, while it also builds up the muscles and repairs the worn and threadbare nerves.

The flour made from it in the dried state is equal in nutritive value to rice, and how invigorating and sustaining rice is has been demonstrated in the recent achievements of the Japanese. Dried and sprinkled with sugar, a form in which it has been recently introduced into England, the upstart banana is, weight for weight, as nutritious as the venerable fig.

But it is in the fresh state that the banana chiefly appeals to us. Its creamy succulence and delicate odor are inviting, and its pleasant savour is a prelude to good digestion. Dependent as that savour is on an ethereal body which the coal-tar investigators have not yet been able to imitate by any chemical essence, it is a subtle stimulus to all subsequent alimentary processes. And thus it is that the banana is an eminently digestible food. No sense of oppression or drowsiness follows on a meal of it.

I have seen a West Indian negro consume twenty stalwart bananas at a sitting, and thereafter display unwonted vivacity. It seems to be mainly absorbed by the stomach, and this fact, together with the small amount of waste matter it contains — 95 per cent, of its substance possessing nutritive properties — has led a number of American physicians to recommend it as a food in typhoid fever.