If you start asking the question whether all bananas are edible, you are also wondering if some species are perhaps inedible. But questioning the inedibility of bananas begs another question: why shouldn't bananas be eaten if they are inedible?
Some other fruits, like the
tomato, are poisonous if they are still green and unripe. Both ripe and unripe bananas are never poisonous, although you might have trouble digesting a truly unripe one.
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| [Image: fncw.nsw.gov.au] |
No, the real difference between edible and inedible bananas is seeds. Edible variants produce fruit without any seeds, whereas inedible bananas produce a myriad of hard pea-sized seeds. This simply means that eating a banana with loads of seeds is almost physically impossible. Added to that is the fact that these inedible bananas mostly have very little pulp in them, because that too is a mutation. A modern edible banana like the ‘Cavendish’ thus has undergone two different mutations that created a hybrid without seeds but with a lot of pulp. Inedible bananas are not just edible bananas with loads of seeds: inedible bananas are usually quite small, with very little pulp and lots of seeds.
I think it is probably better to define inedible bananas as non-edible bananas.
are the seeds poisonous to humans or certain livestock?
ReplyDeleteNo, the seeds are inedible, but are not poisonous.
ReplyDeleteBananas and their seeds are both safe to eat. The fact that the seeds are called inedible is that they are too hard to chew.
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